Composition
Because fountain pens operate on the principle of capillary action, ink for them is almost exclusively dye-based. Pigment-based inks (which contain solid pigment particles in a liquid suspension) tend to clog the narrow passages of the pens. Some pigmented inks do exist for fountain pens, but these are uncommon. India ink, a carbon pigment-based ink, also contains a binder (such as shellac), which can quickly clog such pens. The ideal fountain pen ink is free-flowing, free of sediment, and non-corrosive. These qualities may be compromised in the interests of permanence, manufacturability, and in order to use some widely available dyes.
Read more about this topic: Fountain Pen Ink
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“The proposed Constitution ... is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal constitution; but a composition of both.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)