home · Installation · Experience invisible ink. How to make invisible ink? Invisible ink according to an ancient Chinese recipe

Experience invisible ink. How to make invisible ink? Invisible ink according to an ancient Chinese recipe

Recipes for making invisible ink. Ways of their manifestation.

Secret writing appeared in the first century BC. These were the secret records of the pharaohs. Since then, a lot has changed in secret writing. They began to use not only plant juice and milk for this, but also specially developed chemical inks. Basically, this type of secret letter is aimed at diplomatic negotiations or secret correspondence.

Sympathetic ink is a special composition that, when applied to paper under normal conditions, becomes invisible. Under certain conditions, entries appear. This can be either treatment with reagents or a change in temperature. Often such ink will appear when heated. Initially, this method was used for secret correspondence. Now this is a kind of shorthand method.

Such ink is quite easy to make at home. Such experiments will be interesting for children. First of all, you need to find out what you are going to make the ink from. There are many components and options.

Ink options:

  • Milk
  • Cobalt
  • Washing powder
  • Lemon juice
  • Aspirin

This ink is developed by salts that contain iron. It could be Berthollet salt or inkstone. The recipe for making ink is simple.

Instructions:

  • Dissolve an aspirin tablet in 20 ml of infusion. It's better to turn it into powder first
  • After this, soak a brush or toothpick in the liquid and write a letter
  • Let it dry completely, you can put it in an envelope


Surprisingly, invisible ink can be prepared from lemon juice.

Instructions:

  • Squeeze a little lemon juice into a bowl and add 5 drops of water
  • After this, dip a cotton swab in the juice and write a letter
  • Let the juice dry completely. Keep away from sunlight
  • To develop the ink you need to heat it up a little. This can be done using an iron or a light bulb.


Lettering produced in this way can be viewed using UV light. Will do Fluorescent Lamp or a flashlight.

Instructions:

  • Dissolve 10 g of washing powder in 100 ml of water. Mix the ingredients very thoroughly
  • It is necessary for the powder grains to dissolve
  • Dip the brush in the solution and write on the paper
  • Dry without using the sun


This ink was used by the ancient Chinese to write inscriptions.

Instructions:

  • Boil the rice in water. You can make porridge from it
  • After this, moisten the brush in a viscous broth and apply the inscription
  • Let the letter dry in the shade
  • Use iodine to develop ink
  • It will turn blue in the places where the inscriptions are written, as rice contains starch.


This is the most good recipe, since the inscriptions after development become bright and saturated.

Instructions:

  • Dissolve a pinch of cobalt chloride in 20 ml of water
  • Mix the solution thoroughly and wet the brush in it.
  • Apply your lettering to the sheet and let it dry completely.
  • In order to develop the inscription, you need to heat the letter with an iron or light bulb


A simple method from a product that is found in almost every refrigerator.

Instructions:

  • Pour some milk into a glass and dip the brush into it
  • Write on paper and let dry
  • Do not dry in direct sunlight
  • To develop the letter you need to heat it up

To apply beeches, a concentrated solution is used.

Instructions:

  • Boil water and dissolve 10 g of sodium bicarbonate in 100 ml of boiling water
  • It is necessary to achieve complete dissolution of the crystals
  • Dip a stick into the cooled solution and write secret information
  • Dry the paper in the shade. To develop, heat the letter


This is a special ink because it is visible at first, but after 1-2 days it completely disappears.

Instructions:

  • Add 30 ml of iodine solution in alcohol to half a teaspoon of dextrin and pour through gauze folded several times
  • Filtered "ink" of blue color now we are writing information
  • In a day, thanks to the volatility of iodine, the text will completely and irrevocably disappear
  • To make the writing visible again, go over the paper with a swab soaked in iodine solution


This method was used in the Middle Ages. The method was also popular among inquisitors.

Instructions:

  • Add a pinch of salt copper sulfate in 30 ml water
  • Achieve complete dissolution of crystals
  • Dip a brush in the mixture and apply the inscription
  • Allow the solution to dry in a shady area
  • To reveal the inscription, hold the piece of paper over ammonia
  • Due to the formation of ammonia salt, the inscription will turn blue


Milk, cobalt chloride and lemon juice react to heating.

Instructions:

  • Place the letter on a blank sheet of paper and cover with another white sheet
  • Use an iron to heat the sheet
  • You can develop a letter using a light bulb
  • Simply hold a piece of paper over a lamp or table lamp


How to make a pen with invisible ink? How to refill a pen with invisible ink?

To do this, you can use a ballpoint pen or a fountain pen. With a feather pen everything is simple. You need to pour one of the secret solutions into the ink compartment and feel free to start writing.

Instructions for making a pen with invisible ink:

  • Take a ballpoint pen that has run out of ink.
  • Rinse thoroughly with alcohol, first removing the metal rod
  • It is necessary to ensure complete evaporation of alcohol and cleanliness of the metal nozzle
  • Place the nozzle in place, and use a syringe to pour invisible ink into the tube.
  • You can start writing your letter


How to make a pen with invisible ink? How to refill a pen with invisible ink

As you can see, with the help of simple manipulations you can make invisible ink. This will amuse your children.

VIDEO: Invisible ink

How many times in childhood did we read adventure books about Tom Sawyer, Electronics, Timur and his team. How they loved these cheerful and mischievous boys. Well, who hasn’t imagined themselves as a book hero, a pirate or a spy? They played war games, hide and seek, catch up, Cossack robbers. As we grew up, we began to forget how great it is to retain that genuine and radiant joy of a child. In this article we would like to invite you to plunge into your barefoot childhood and make invisible ink at home. You must definitely involve your children, brothers, and sisters in this fun process. The more people, the more fun the process.

Invisible ink

So, we will make ink, but not simple, but invisible! Interesting? Then we prepare everything we need.

We will need:

  • half a large lemon;
  • water;
  • tea spoon;
  • soup plate;
  • cotton buds;
  • paper;
  • desk lamp.

After we have prepared everything, let’s start our “chemistry”. Squeeze lemon juice and add one teaspoon of water to a deep plate. Mix the water and lemon juice thoroughly and dip a cotton swab into the mixture. Now write your message on white paper, wait until the message is completely dry and completely transparent. Now comes the fun part. To read this message, you need to heat a piece of paper under a table lamp, and it will reveal the message.

How did it work? Because juice is a "consequence" organic chemistry, then one of its properties is to produce a brown tint when the temperature rises. Then diluted with water so that our message instantly dries and disappears from sight.

Second way

This time we will do without lemon, but we promise that the effect will pleasantly surprise you.

So, we will need:

  • gauze;
  • grater;
  • young onion, one small head;
  • paper;
  • water;
  • soup plate;
  • teaspoon;
  • desk lamp.

Recipe

Grate one head of young onion onto a fine grater. Now take a gauze and put grated onion in it, squeeze out the juice. Mix the resulting juice with water, the proportion is one to one, stir in a deep plate. Write the text with a brush and let it dry for about twenty minutes. Now bring it to table lamp, wait a minute and read what you have in mind. The onion juice in this experiment can be replaced with orange juice, as well as milk. Milk always makes good ink.

Option with soda

In our home “chemical laboratory” we will consider several more options. So, the soda option.

For this we need:

  • baking soda;
  • toothpick or cotton swab;
  • water;
  • White paper.

Mix in equal proportions compound baking soda and water. Using a cotton swab or toothpick, write text on paper using the mixed solution as ink. Let the lettering dry for ten minutes. Now you can view it, as in the previous methods, under a lamp. And you can make the experience much more interesting. Take black grapes and squeeze the juice out of them. Paint all the white paper with this juice and wait five minutes. And, lo and behold, you will see a bright contrasting inscription that appears before your eyes.

For those seriously interested in invisible ink and adventure games, you'll love the ways you can use the huge range of different chemical substances as the basis for mysterious data transmission. Many substances are suitable for such games, but advanced spies simply need to be aware of the effects of acid.

You can read almost all invisible texts if you apply acid to them (for example, lemon juice). Well, as you concluded from the options discussed, most letters open when heated. So before you get ready for a hike, a secret mission or reconnaissance, be sure to take a source of light, heat and acid with you. Also, before an important task, don’t be lazy to run into the laboratory, because the agents have already prepared magic drugs for you.

List of magical developers:

  • a pile of washing powder;
  • phenolphthalein (reacts with soda, due to which it manifests itself beautifully);
  • apple cider vinegar or acid (reacts with red cabbage juice and develops colorless ink);
  • table salt (silver nitrate is enough to read messages);
  • copper sulfate (you will need sodium iodide or ammonium hydroxide);
  • ferrous sulfate (reacts only with soda);
  • corn starch (you need iodine solution to read).

So we have looked at the simplest and most entertaining ways to make invisible ink. We hope you found a lot useful information and now the impressions from the experiments will remain in the memory for a long time.

Video on the topic of the article

Thematic selection of videos:

Making invisible ink today is not difficult at home. And if the revolutionaries were forced to write with them for the purpose of conspiracy, and the agents of Ivan the Terrible - out of fear for their lives, today they are needed, at best, to stage an innocent joke designed to entertain a despondent company, or to conduct an entertaining chemistry experiment for children. Moreover, there are many ways to make this amazing writing aid, and the ingredients for it can be found in every home.

Making invisible ink at home: five ways to make it

You can try to make five versions of sympathetic ink, test them and decide which of them have the greatest “spy” qualities.

So, we need:

  • Shallow bowl;
  • Onion or apple;
  • Lemon;
  • Milk;
  • Sweet or salty water;
  • Brushes or fountain pens;
  • Iron or candle.

Excellent ink is made from milk: simply pour some milk diluted with water into a bowl, take a fountain pen and write something on paper. Gently heating the sheet with an iron will reveal the characters you have written. By the way, Vladimir Lenin, fleeing the persecution of the gendarmes, wrote his messages to the party with milk.

Can be grated on a fine grater onion to a pulp state. Then squeeze the resulting juice through a piece of gauze into a bowl. The acid contained in onions is the ink. By the way, a fresh apple can be a complete substitute for an onion.

Lemon makes perhaps the most effective ink. You just need to cut the fruit and squeeze the juice from several slices into a bowl. By the way, you can write with such invisible ink even with cotton swabs.

However, you can do without lemon: 100-150 ml. Dissolve sugar or salt in warm water. The effect of writing with such ink is less pronounced, but this is perhaps the easiest way to surprise guests with secret letters:

Homemade invisible ink is worth trying. To do this, write something on a piece of paper, preferably white, thick and good quality. You can write with a pointed stick, a match, a thin brush or a fountain pen, just a few characters are enough. Next you need to let the writing dry. Gently iron the design with an iron or hold it over an open fire, such as a candle, and the writing will appear.

The secret of sympathetic ink is easy to discover: its composition includes some substances (acids) that, under the influence of heat, disintegrate faster than the process of burning the paper begins. We see traces of this decay on a sheet of paper.

Let's look at several popular chemical ink recipes

Preparing invisible ink from “inedible” things is a little more difficult and slightly longer, but the scope of such ink and the effect of writing with it are much wider.

So, to make ink we will need:

  • Potato
  • 100-150 gr. ethyl alcohol
  • Small amount of nigrosine
  • Sodium tetraborate
  • Tincture of iodine
  • Washing powder
  • Copper sulfate solution

Let's start with the simplest ways to make ink

We dissolve baking soda with water in a ratio of 1 to 1. Letters made from soda appear on paper literally 10-12 minutes after writing by heating the sheet.

It is not difficult to make spy ink from ordinary washing powder. Dilute a little powder in water and cotton swab We write something on a piece of paper. The inscription becomes readable if it is placed under an ultraviolet radiation source.

The next recipe is more complicated, but the effect is worth trying: glass containers put rosin and nigrosin in proportions of 50 g. Pour 350 ml of the substances. ethyl alcohol, mix well. The container must be tightly closed to prevent ethanol from evaporating.

Another option: 100 gr. Combine borax with half a liter of water and mix thoroughly.

By combining the third and fourth recipes, we get the original fifth. For the best effect of using this ink, the solutions must be thoroughly mixed after mixing.

An interesting effect is produced by ink that disappears over time. You need to pour 25-30 grams. dextrin into a small glass container and pour 60-70 grams there. solution of iodine and alcohol. At the end of the process, mix the resulting solution thoroughly and separate the precipitate. If a letter is written in such ink, it will “disappear” within 24 hours.

Video on the topic of the article

You can make homemade invisible ink yourself in literally 5-6 minutes if you carefully study the proposed selection of videos. If you are planning to make cute ink with your child, be sure to watch the episode of the animated series “The Fixies” dedicated to this chemical trick: it will be useful and educational for him!

Since ancient times, humanity has tried to invent invisible or, as they are also called, sympathetic ink, which is not visible to the eye under normal conditions, but begins to appear after exposure to any chemical elements, heating, ultraviolet rays. They were used to send secret messages, store important information, secret correspondence.

In ancient times, these were publicly available substances that could be found in every home. For example, secret writing using milk, lemon juice, rice water, wax, apple and onion juice, and rutabaga juice was very successful. Later, options appeared for making sympathetic ink using aspirin tablets, copper sulfate, iodine, and washing powder.

Modern UV ink

Science does not stand still, so in our time you will no longer surprise anyone with invisible ink produced industrially. Compositions that glow under ultraviolet lamps. There are even pens with ultraviolet ink available for sale, which can be found in spy stores.

An alternative to such a pen can be invisible anti-counterfeiting paints and pigments. They are powdery substances that can be used to mark banknotes, securities, and clothing. At daylight the powder is completely indistinguishable, but in ultraviolet light every grain or powder becomes visible.

How to make invisible fluorescent ink at home

As a good fluorescent ink, you can use regular washing powder, which contains optical brighteners. After diluting the powder with a small amount of water, you can begin to write. secret message. The dried solution will not leave imprints on the paper, but will be perfectly visible in the light of an ultraviolet lamp.

Can also be purchased separately. As a rule, they are used to impart whiteness with a bluish tint to clothing, fabrics, and paper intended for printing. The powder can also be used to create sympathetic ink. This ink appears on all types of paper.

Another way to make invisible ink is by using aspirin tablets and alcohol. 2-3 aspirin tablets should be dissolved in a small amount of alcohol. If any sediment remains during dissolution, the liquid should be filtered. After this, you can begin secret writing. Such ink does not glow on all types of paper; this method is not applicable if you write on printer paper.

You can also use the following preparations to prepare ink, which you can try to purchase at the pharmacy:

  • curcumin;
  • quinine sulfate;
  • trypoflamin.

Sodium fluorescein can also be used, but its native color may stand out on white paper after application, so this ink is not invisible.

Using invisible ink, you can write any words and draw different pictures. But then they will disappear! Surprise your friends at a party or birthday, write a secret note to a friend or spend interesting experience with kids. There are many ways to make invisible ink.

Making invisible ink from lemon juice

Squeeze the juice from the cut lemon into a bowl. Add a little water and stir. Let's test our ink:

  • take a sharp small stick or thin brush. It’s good if you have a pen with a feather;
  • dip a stick in ink and write something on a white sheet of paper;
  • let the inscription dry - the message will become invisible;
  • Iron the invisible inscription on the sheet with an iron, the ink will begin to appear.

You can hold a sheet of paper over a lit candle at a distance of 10 cm - a similar result will come out. The inscription will be brown. The same dark inscription from invisible ink after heating will be obtained when using apple, onion and other juices with high content acids.

Making invisible ink from milk

Pour a little milk into a cup. Dip the stick in milk and write something on paper. Let the milk dry well on the sheet. To read the inscription, heat the piece of paper on a light bulb, over a candle, or iron it with an iron.


Making invisible ink from starch

The ink preparation process is as follows:

  • combine 2 parts starch with one part plain water;
  • heat the resulting paste over low heat, stirring all the time;
  • let the paste cool;
  • Use a cotton swab or a sharp wooden stick to write words on paper with cooled ink.

To manifest words, lubricate the piece of paper with an aqueous solution of iodine. The paper will turn light purple. And the words that appear from the ink will turn dark purple.


Making invisible ink according to an ancient Chinese recipe

Ancient Chinese emperors used rice water to secret messages. Cook thick rice porridge. Make sure that the rice does not absorb all the liquid. Use this water as invisible ink. Write a message on paper. To develop the inscription, lubricate the paper with an aqueous solution of iodine.


Making invisible ink from baking soda

Prepare:

  • water;
  • grape juice;
  • baking soda.

Combine water and soda in a one to one ratio. Mix them well in a bowl and you have a soda-based ink. Put them on paper, but heating will not help to reveal the secret message. Use grape juice. Dip the brush into the juice and paint the paper until the inscription appears.


You can use an oven instead of an iron, candle or light bulb to heat the sheet. Place the secret message in a hot oven and wait a few minutes for the message to appear. Invisible writing appears on a sheet of paper when heated because the ink substance chars faster than the paper.

Don't forget about safety precautions if you show your message over an open fire! Prepare a saucepan in advance cold water. In it you will extinguish the leaf if it accidentally catches fire.


Choose any ink recipe and surprise your friends or play spy. Even the secret agents of Ivan the Terrible wrote their messages to the Tsar with onion juice, and no outsider could read the message.