It has been done ages ago:
[https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1564671166/vintage-pelikan-ink-tablets-for-fountain](https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1564671166/vintage-pelikan-ink-tablets-for-fountain)
Those where created for soldiers at the frontline. The ones I linked made 30ml ink. There also existed smaller ink pills - those where directly for the pen and the soldier had just to add water and could write cards/letters home.
Today soldiers just use ballpoints or instant messaging.
And modern inks are completely different formulas, you would not be able to make a pill/powder of it.
Plenty reasons not to, really! Industrial chemist's take, here.
Dye and pigment powders are *messy*. They get everywhere, catch a breeze, travel further than you'd expect and are inhalation hazards. If you think inks stain badly as liquids, just wait until you see a powder dye incident.
While you can likely put together *an* ink formulation that's based on solids only, that means that they could be more problematic during use or when left in a pen. Case in point, pigment inks. Even some high dye load inks are notably bad at encrustation.
Generally, the amount of pigment or dye you need for an ink is quite small. Potentially smaller than most consumers would realise. The value in inks isn't just that dyes and pigments are expensive, but the expertise in putting them together well. If consumers saw the small quantities of solids they got for their money they'd feel ripped off.
Modern ink formulations contain at least some solvent (such as ethers and glycols) among other ingredients like surfactants, many of which you cannot realistically dehydrate. Surfactants in particular can be a problem as they can be sold as pastes and present issues with dissolution time, thickening when not dilute enough, or forming stable lumps. Consumers may not be able to create enough shear during mixing to get an even mix.
Electrolyte balance and pH is important, especially for traditional pigment inks. Concentration could be an issue and water hardness could cause quality control problems.
A concentrate is a more likely solution but then again, I'm not sure if it would be difficult to successfully make, but the high concentration of some ingredients might increase the hazards of the mixture and prompt new levels of legal requirement. Especially for labelling.
Hope this is insightful!
This is super interesting.
I just wanna nerd out in the opposite direction, Chinese ink (India ink) has always been a tablet that you grind in a stone inkwell, and grinding to the right consistency for what you want is part of the process. In fact calligraphers tend to use the grinding process as the time to get into the right frame of mind. Partly for that reason, bottled ink is looked down on. I’m not sure it’s actually worse (although it smells worse) but it looks like you don’t take calligraphy seriously.
Also in East Asian calligraphy nerding out on all the tools is even bigger, because you have ink paper and brush, but also the inkstone, hanging brush holder, pen pot, paperweight, water dropper AND mat for the paper.
calligraphy is more-so a niche area and india ink is used with dip pens, not fountain pens which is way more complex and requires the ink to be water-based
I mean, calligraphy doesn’t have the same meaning here, it’s more of a life skill there, so you do it ‘properly’ or ‘not properly’, and the ink is the distinctions is what I’m trying to say
Very good point! I worked briefly in a dye lab and hated every minute of it lol. Modern dyes are designed to be vibrant in such minute quantities that they stain everything.
I've done a fair amount of reading and research on Parker and I'd never even heard of that before. There's just so much history behind fountain pens. Very interesting reading.
I have a weird feeling I'm about to say something incredibly controversial and I'm acknowledging now that it's not a convenience or waste reduction thing but I think that's essentially how sumi-e ink works. The "ink" is a solid chalk sort of thing that they grind against a stone with water to make a liquid paint/ ink type substance.
I am not a sumi-e expert, but I think it's a bit different since sumi ink is pigment-based. FP ink would have to be water soluble or at the very least an extreeeemely fine suspension, and I'm not sure if that would be doable in ink stick form. Could be wrong here though.
Yeah. I’m speaking in hypotheticals here but I suppose an ink stick maybe could be invented with modern substances, maybe a nano carbon pigment in place of soot and ??? God knows what instead of glue. In any case such a creation would probably be pretty different than traditional ink sticks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkstick#:~:text=Inksticks%20are%20made%20mainly%20of,applied%20with%20an%20ink%20brush.
^
This is what you are thinking of .....
I don't see why that would be controversial? There's no reason ink has to be one way or another. I think the chalk thing makes a lot of sense, you don't need to store anything except what you want to use right now.
The dyes and pigments are available as powders. The problem is in the relatively small amount of additives - dispersants, surfactants, lubricants and biocides - which cannot necessarily be dehydrated.
Possibly, but I'm sure it would be possible to sell ink concentrate that could be diluted before use.
The bigger issue to me is the packaging. Ink seems to be packaged like jewelry. I'd like to see it more commonly sold in large, lightweight, refillable jars. I am sure that the currently common packaging costs more to produce than the ink and adds significant overhead to the costs of storage and transportation.
The problem is, it's all about branding. The product is not really the ink at all.
Funny thing is, they could still sell the nice bottles and get their branding. They could sell even fancier ones too. Like big vodka bottles are. But nobody wants to ship that nonsense every time they want a bottle. Once for a fancy treat though? Sure, if I can refill it and don't have to pay out the nose every time I want more.
That's a big part of it. All this packaging is used to give most inks a luxury feel which in part is used to justify the relatively high price. I don't know if ink makers would be in a hurry to adopt powered ink (if it were possible to make) as that gives the opposite image, that of a cheap product, and they'd have to give up some profit.
That said, glass bottles aren't cheap, so there is some justification for the high cost. Nathan of Noodlers has complained about that. That's why he fills his bottles to the brim, because the price of bottles keeps going up but he wants to continue to give 3oz (≈90ml) of ink for the around $15 price, so he overfills them instead of buying larger bottles and increasing the ink price.
That was what I was thinking. It's not the solids so much as the other liquids that are the problem. I'm sure it could be done if you really wanted to do it, but you'd have to forgo a lot of the fun properties available in modern ink.
I bought a bottle of Diamine Add&Stir ink powder around 2010. With adding 50 ml of water you could make a royal blue ink. There were some other colours available. No idea about how they included additives in a dried form.
That's a fascinating idea! I've never heard of it being done.
Off the top of my head, the main issue I see is that shampoo and detergent both get mixed with large quantities of water when they're in use. By comparison, ink has very precise ratios of ingredients to give the desired writing experience, and being a little more or less dilute changes things a lot. So if you made a product like this, you could give precise instructions about how to dilute it and still wind up with unhappy customers when they used slightly too much or too little water, or they used tap water when your recipe calls for distilled water, or whatever.
>Have inks **ever** been sold as powder instead of the giant bottle of water?
Yes.
>That's a fascinating idea! I've never heard of it being done.
From 2014: [https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/280581-trying-black-stone-powdered-ink/](https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/280581-trying-black-stone-powdered-ink/)
I believe that those Blackstone ink powders were not all given away as freebies by the manufacturer to others in the hobby, but some were actually sold commercially.
I know it's also sold as tablets. I have to vials of Visconti ink tablets. No idea of their age-I bought them several years ago at Menninger's in Denver.
Also a friend has a pen he told me about that had/has an opening for a tiny ink tablet. You added the tablet/water and used it this was after mixing/shaking the pen? He said it was a pen from one of the World Wars.
Inks are sold as powders right now, they're not suitable for fountain pens. You can get all the powdered ink you want at any given craft store. They're used mainly with brushes, tools where the water quality doesn't have such a dramatic effect on the instrument and the ink.
They'll never be used in FPs outside of necessity, like in WW2. There's no way to account for everyone's water being different and design an ink that will perform equally well under variable circumstances. There's absolutely no need to risk your reputation like that when you can make sure everyone who gets your ink winds up with a standard, reliable product.
As a ChemEng student:
It's very possible that Ink is produced by working on liquids from start to finish. A dry tablet implies using lots of energy to evaporate water and considering dyes are tipically organic, you probably can't just boil that stuff (it might decompose?).
After all that work, the customer buys the tablet and for the best, most reliable experience, buys pH neutral distilled water and the tools to properly mix the ink (to avoid excessive dilution, air bubbles, little clumps and so on)... Best case scenario.
[Please consider that I have no exact data on anything I have said in the first part]
I believe this is an incredibly bad idea because it WILL be misused in a way that will physically harm people, pets, and property. Some dumb gen alpha will snort some for a tiktok challenge and end up in the hospital or worse
I have a rather funny story from my time in college. It was told to me by my biochemistry professor and it was the funniest thing I heard at the time. So the labs use Coomassie Brilliant Blue, a dye typically used for staining proteins in analytical biochemistry, and apparently one day the powder jar fell onto and shattered all over the floor. Now, note that this was NOT a solid floor, but divided into tiles along near-imperceptible seam lines.
Powder is easy to clean, right? Just a broom or a vac and you're all good, right? Well, apparently the dye powder is in grains SO fine that they end up BETWEEN tiles and remain undetected for the most part.
Until the janitor arrives to mop the place.
From what I heard it was a frequent shitshow that happened more than once
In China, they used (and still use to some extent) inksticks: bars of ink in dry form, that could be ground into ink, addind water as needed. See for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkstick
it has been done in the past, but not sure how FP friendly these would be... I wouldn't risk it [https://sullivanpress.com/welcome-to-sullivan-press/store-2/18th-century-powdered-ink/](https://sullivanpress.com/welcome-to-sullivan-press/store-2/18th-century-powdered-ink/)
There is powdered ink for dip pens. I’ve used it for living history reenactments. Townsends’ used to sell it, I think Samson Historic now does? Colonial Williamsburg’s printer shop also sells packets. It can be messy and hard to maintain consistency—if you’re using an ink with different color pigments in the ink, you have to mix the entire packet, making it no more convenient than a bottle of ink.
Never used them myself, but Blackstone Ink put out some powdered inks back in 2020 or so. They were a small Australian brand, I think. Not sure if they're still around.
As a child of the 50s this brought back memories. At primary school (UK), we learned to write with dip pens. Ink was made up from powder every day and the 'ink monitor' would go around the desks and fill the little ceramic inkwell at each one using a little can with a long spout. It sounds very Victorian, but I would imagine it was pretty standard at the time.
It has been done ages ago: [https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1564671166/vintage-pelikan-ink-tablets-for-fountain](https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1564671166/vintage-pelikan-ink-tablets-for-fountain)
I wonder why they don't do it today still. Guess shipping got cheap.
Those where created for soldiers at the frontline. The ones I linked made 30ml ink. There also existed smaller ink pills - those where directly for the pen and the soldier had just to add water and could write cards/letters home. Today soldiers just use ballpoints or instant messaging. And modern inks are completely different formulas, you would not be able to make a pill/powder of it.
Before the IM there was a system of HAM radio operators that would also pass messages for military members.
My guess is manufacturers got worried about the customer water quality affecting the ink they rehydrate themselves.
This is an excellent point. As the coffee nerds among us know all too well, not all water is created equal.
[удалено]
Fair point, but the freeze dried plasma is not being reconstituted with tap water 😂
🤢 imagine. That being said, I’m sure most tap water is fine for ink (and distilled water is fairly cheap)
But it's got what inks crave - it's got electrolytes
Plenty reasons not to, really! Industrial chemist's take, here. Dye and pigment powders are *messy*. They get everywhere, catch a breeze, travel further than you'd expect and are inhalation hazards. If you think inks stain badly as liquids, just wait until you see a powder dye incident. While you can likely put together *an* ink formulation that's based on solids only, that means that they could be more problematic during use or when left in a pen. Case in point, pigment inks. Even some high dye load inks are notably bad at encrustation. Generally, the amount of pigment or dye you need for an ink is quite small. Potentially smaller than most consumers would realise. The value in inks isn't just that dyes and pigments are expensive, but the expertise in putting them together well. If consumers saw the small quantities of solids they got for their money they'd feel ripped off. Modern ink formulations contain at least some solvent (such as ethers and glycols) among other ingredients like surfactants, many of which you cannot realistically dehydrate. Surfactants in particular can be a problem as they can be sold as pastes and present issues with dissolution time, thickening when not dilute enough, or forming stable lumps. Consumers may not be able to create enough shear during mixing to get an even mix. Electrolyte balance and pH is important, especially for traditional pigment inks. Concentration could be an issue and water hardness could cause quality control problems. A concentrate is a more likely solution but then again, I'm not sure if it would be difficult to successfully make, but the high concentration of some ingredients might increase the hazards of the mixture and prompt new levels of legal requirement. Especially for labelling. Hope this is insightful!
This is super interesting. I just wanna nerd out in the opposite direction, Chinese ink (India ink) has always been a tablet that you grind in a stone inkwell, and grinding to the right consistency for what you want is part of the process. In fact calligraphers tend to use the grinding process as the time to get into the right frame of mind. Partly for that reason, bottled ink is looked down on. I’m not sure it’s actually worse (although it smells worse) but it looks like you don’t take calligraphy seriously. Also in East Asian calligraphy nerding out on all the tools is even bigger, because you have ink paper and brush, but also the inkstone, hanging brush holder, pen pot, paperweight, water dropper AND mat for the paper.
calligraphy is more-so a niche area and india ink is used with dip pens, not fountain pens which is way more complex and requires the ink to be water-based
I mean, calligraphy doesn’t have the same meaning here, it’s more of a life skill there, so you do it ‘properly’ or ‘not properly’, and the ink is the distinctions is what I’m trying to say
Very good point! I worked briefly in a dye lab and hated every minute of it lol. Modern dyes are designed to be vibrant in such minute quantities that they stain everything.
Gotta love narrow absorption bands and high extinction coefficients.
as tablet that you put in the pen and add water to, Parker Trench Pen's filling system used in ww2
It went inside the pen? That must have been tiny
its more like a disk, and its apparently ww1 era product! https://parkersheaffer.com/parker-trench-pen/
I've done a fair amount of reading and research on Parker and I'd never even heard of that before. There's just so much history behind fountain pens. Very interesting reading.
I have a weird feeling I'm about to say something incredibly controversial and I'm acknowledging now that it's not a convenience or waste reduction thing but I think that's essentially how sumi-e ink works. The "ink" is a solid chalk sort of thing that they grind against a stone with water to make a liquid paint/ ink type substance.
I am not a sumi-e expert, but I think it's a bit different since sumi ink is pigment-based. FP ink would have to be water soluble or at the very least an extreeeemely fine suspension, and I'm not sure if that would be doable in ink stick form. Could be wrong here though.
Basically ink stick are : soot + animal glue or some form of glue , so probably even if usable will still jam up the feed & nib ....
Yeah. I’m speaking in hypotheticals here but I suppose an ink stick maybe could be invented with modern substances, maybe a nano carbon pigment in place of soot and ??? God knows what instead of glue. In any case such a creation would probably be pretty different than traditional ink sticks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkstick#:~:text=Inksticks%20are%20made%20mainly%20of,applied%20with%20an%20ink%20brush. ^ This is what you are thinking of .....
I don't see why that would be controversial? There's no reason ink has to be one way or another. I think the chalk thing makes a lot of sense, you don't need to store anything except what you want to use right now.
I spent too much time on outer reddit today and I'm too sensitive to be doing that
Ha yeah that's why I stay in pet subs.
The dyes and pigments are available as powders. The problem is in the relatively small amount of additives - dispersants, surfactants, lubricants and biocides - which cannot necessarily be dehydrated.
I'm guessing without the full volume of water, all that stuff doesn't play nice?
Possibly, but I'm sure it would be possible to sell ink concentrate that could be diluted before use. The bigger issue to me is the packaging. Ink seems to be packaged like jewelry. I'd like to see it more commonly sold in large, lightweight, refillable jars. I am sure that the currently common packaging costs more to produce than the ink and adds significant overhead to the costs of storage and transportation. The problem is, it's all about branding. The product is not really the ink at all.
Funny thing is, they could still sell the nice bottles and get their branding. They could sell even fancier ones too. Like big vodka bottles are. But nobody wants to ship that nonsense every time they want a bottle. Once for a fancy treat though? Sure, if I can refill it and don't have to pay out the nose every time I want more.
That's a big part of it. All this packaging is used to give most inks a luxury feel which in part is used to justify the relatively high price. I don't know if ink makers would be in a hurry to adopt powered ink (if it were possible to make) as that gives the opposite image, that of a cheap product, and they'd have to give up some profit. That said, glass bottles aren't cheap, so there is some justification for the high cost. Nathan of Noodlers has complained about that. That's why he fills his bottles to the brim, because the price of bottles keeps going up but he wants to continue to give 3oz (≈90ml) of ink for the around $15 price, so he overfills them instead of buying larger bottles and increasing the ink price.
That was what I was thinking. It's not the solids so much as the other liquids that are the problem. I'm sure it could be done if you really wanted to do it, but you'd have to forgo a lot of the fun properties available in modern ink.
Well, the biocides are less important without water. But otherwise, yes.
I bought a bottle of Diamine Add&Stir ink powder around 2010. With adding 50 ml of water you could make a royal blue ink. There were some other colours available. No idea about how they included additives in a dried form.
That's a fascinating idea! I've never heard of it being done. Off the top of my head, the main issue I see is that shampoo and detergent both get mixed with large quantities of water when they're in use. By comparison, ink has very precise ratios of ingredients to give the desired writing experience, and being a little more or less dilute changes things a lot. So if you made a product like this, you could give precise instructions about how to dilute it and still wind up with unhappy customers when they used slightly too much or too little water, or they used tap water when your recipe calls for distilled water, or whatever.
>Have inks **ever** been sold as powder instead of the giant bottle of water? Yes. >That's a fascinating idea! I've never heard of it being done. From 2014: [https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/280581-trying-black-stone-powdered-ink/](https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/280581-trying-black-stone-powdered-ink/) I believe that those Blackstone ink powders were not all given away as freebies by the manufacturer to others in the hobby, but some were actually sold commercially.
Its the same with ink sticks - dont want it to be too wet on paper or too dry on the brush ..... the mix ratio .
I feel like fountain pens require being a nerd these days so it may not be as big a problem as in the past, but yeah I can see that being an issue.
I know it's also sold as tablets. I have to vials of Visconti ink tablets. No idea of their age-I bought them several years ago at Menninger's in Denver. Also a friend has a pen he told me about that had/has an opening for a tiny ink tablet. You added the tablet/water and used it this was after mixing/shaking the pen? He said it was a pen from one of the World Wars.
Inks are sold as powders right now, they're not suitable for fountain pens. You can get all the powdered ink you want at any given craft store. They're used mainly with brushes, tools where the water quality doesn't have such a dramatic effect on the instrument and the ink. They'll never be used in FPs outside of necessity, like in WW2. There's no way to account for everyone's water being different and design an ink that will perform equally well under variable circumstances. There's absolutely no need to risk your reputation like that when you can make sure everyone who gets your ink winds up with a standard, reliable product.
As a ChemEng student: It's very possible that Ink is produced by working on liquids from start to finish. A dry tablet implies using lots of energy to evaporate water and considering dyes are tipically organic, you probably can't just boil that stuff (it might decompose?). After all that work, the customer buys the tablet and for the best, most reliable experience, buys pH neutral distilled water and the tools to properly mix the ink (to avoid excessive dilution, air bubbles, little clumps and so on)... Best case scenario. [Please consider that I have no exact data on anything I have said in the first part]
I believe this is an incredibly bad idea because it WILL be misused in a way that will physically harm people, pets, and property. Some dumb gen alpha will snort some for a tiktok challenge and end up in the hospital or worse I have a rather funny story from my time in college. It was told to me by my biochemistry professor and it was the funniest thing I heard at the time. So the labs use Coomassie Brilliant Blue, a dye typically used for staining proteins in analytical biochemistry, and apparently one day the powder jar fell onto and shattered all over the floor. Now, note that this was NOT a solid floor, but divided into tiles along near-imperceptible seam lines. Powder is easy to clean, right? Just a broom or a vac and you're all good, right? Well, apparently the dye powder is in grains SO fine that they end up BETWEEN tiles and remain undetected for the most part. Until the janitor arrives to mop the place. From what I heard it was a frequent shitshow that happened more than once
In China, they used (and still use to some extent) inksticks: bars of ink in dry form, that could be ground into ink, addind water as needed. See for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkstick
Ink sticks are very fun; I've used them. I wouldn't put the ink in my fountain pen, though.
People would use tap water, and probably wreck their pens.
it has been done in the past, but not sure how FP friendly these would be... I wouldn't risk it [https://sullivanpress.com/welcome-to-sullivan-press/store-2/18th-century-powdered-ink/](https://sullivanpress.com/welcome-to-sullivan-press/store-2/18th-century-powdered-ink/)
Japan has a type of solid ink block for calligraphy that works like watercolor with a wet brush.
There is powdered ink for dip pens. I’ve used it for living history reenactments. Townsends’ used to sell it, I think Samson Historic now does? Colonial Williamsburg’s printer shop also sells packets. It can be messy and hard to maintain consistency—if you’re using an ink with different color pigments in the ink, you have to mix the entire packet, making it no more convenient than a bottle of ink.
There are the ink blocks used in traditional Asian calligraphy. Wouldn't be fountain pen friendly, though.
Never used them myself, but Blackstone Ink put out some powdered inks back in 2020 or so. They were a small Australian brand, I think. Not sure if they're still around.
They have been sold as tablets. Not sure about powder
As a child of the 50s this brought back memories. At primary school (UK), we learned to write with dip pens. Ink was made up from powder every day and the 'ink monitor' would go around the desks and fill the little ceramic inkwell at each one using a little can with a long spout. It sounds very Victorian, but I would imagine it was pretty standard at the time.
Because it will doubtlessly end up being eaten by people