In the section directed at women, Ovid taught wives bent upon deceiving their husbands to communicate in secret. The Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, kept under luxurious house arrest for eighteen years by her Protestant cousin Elizabeth I, used invisible ink and cipher to communicate with Catholic supporters on the outside. Mary advised correspondents to write to her employing two commonly used substances: alum hydrated potassium aluminum sulfate or nutgall the tannic acid secreted in swellings generated by parasitic wasps colonizing oak trees.
Letters written in alum required the recipient to soak the paper in water, while nutgall needed a solution of ferrous sulphate as a developer. Mary was executed on February 8, Another Catholic prisoner in England used invisible ink with far happier results in The Jesuit priest John Gerard came to England in to carry out a secret mission for the Catholic underground.
Caught and detained in the Tower of London, Gerard was tortured for information. The priest befriended his prison guard and began to ask for oranges, whose juice he saved to write to confederates to on the outside. With the help of this guard, Gerard even communicated with a fellow Catholic prisoner whose cell he could see from his own, miming directions for developing the orange-juice letters over flame.
During the eighteenth century, the new vogue for popular science in France and England made invisible ink into entertainment, enacted in public in front of wondering eyes. Invisible ink has been used for thousands of years since the Roman empire. They used things like milk that would not be activated until it was held near the heat of a candle flame.
Did you know that they even wrote secret messages on the inside of eggs by using a special compound that transferred through the egg shell but did not show up on the shell itself.
The message was clearly written on the hard boiled egg and could be deciphered after it was peeled. I just thought it was something interesting and relevant to share here, and thank you for providing us some history on it as well. Like Like. Hello There. I found your blog using msn. This is an extremely well written article. Thanks for the post. I will certainly return. I really had no idea this was still something people talked about.
I remember using this method as a kid with just lemon juice! Ah, the memories! I, too, remember writing notes to my best friend with invisible ink to pass in class. Thanks for the comments! I loved his ideas of imprinting tree leaves into designs. Look forward to learning more. Oh what fun! This brings me back to my elementary school days, and we would write with lemon juice, and watch it disappear. It also brings to mind, the current usage of invisible ink, in crime prevention.
Thanks for the opportuinity to spread the word about the importance of invisible ink. Ah those were the days most boys are the same,I recall the two main things were invisable ink and —now this is going to date me,getting the correct proportions of S, S and Willow Charcoal.
I remember getting it right, scaring myself and friends and never doing it again. Some denied any wrongdoing. In , Bayle found that a traveling salesman, a Joseph Philipponet, had produced a fraudulent document to deceive his landlord and obtain money. As Bayle walked up the steps to his laboratory, Philipponet shot him in the back three times. Bayle swayed, rolled down the stairs, and lay sprawling at the bottom.
One last gasp and a mouthful of blood on the floor and he was dead. What I have done was worth the death of a father of five children! Solving the mystery was such a coup that the Postal Censorship department suggested that the king and queen write a secret letter with the substance when they visited the department to thank them for their good work. When the royal couple wrote their names with the celebrated ink, the signatures became brown when developed and chemists fixed the paper with a solution of sodium thiosulfate so the writing would not fade.
The framed paper now hangs on a wall in the British counterespionage department. The king approved the commuted sentence. Meanwhile, in the New York court, Wunnenberg and Sander were each sentenced to two years of penal servitude in March because of the British tips. Although they initially protested their innocence, they changed their pleas when Assistant District Attorney John C.
Knox produced an unexpected piece of evidence. Knox began to experiment with the German secret ink in front of the jury. When he dipped the blank sheets of paper in the developing solution, letters began to appear.
In a few minutes he had a complete report of Sander communicating with the German master spy in Holland. Already a subscriber?
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Get smart. During the s, the threat of war forced intelligence agencies to come up with new ways to use invisible ink, with the CIA managing to embed chemicals in credit cards, pen lids, glasses frames, toothpicks and key fobs in order to create writing objects with invisible ink. The CIA employed 36 secret writing specialists working in the USA and abroad, it was that essential an espionage tool. Renaissance Invisible ink continued to be used throughout the Renaissance, with many politicians and powerful lords using it to send correspondence- Ovid mentions the use of it in his work, Art of Love.
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