the ink is called an iron gall ink, some brands still make them! iron gall ink benefits: - the ink oxidizes and binds to the paper so it's super duper waterproof and permanent - it's got a range of colors but it's not every color, it's exclusively these dark, muted, rustic greyish/sepia tones which i think are very pretty (e.g. red iron gall ink is a stunning deep brownish-red color, blue iron gall ink is a unique grayish blue that reminds me of like some military uniform or polo shirt or something) the downsides of iron gall ink: - it oxidizes when exposed to air, so when you open the ink bottle, you've introduced oxygen, it now has a limited shelf life - it's heavily corrosive and will slowly eat through the paper over the course of several years - it's very permanent, if you spill it on your carpet, it is never coming out. to get it out you need a reducing agent that won't damage or remove the dye from your carpet, having looked for this before, from the bottom of my heart: best of luck to you, it's probably easier to just patch it. also if you ever spill any kind of ink on your carpet, the best thing you can do is see if you can lift it off with your clothing before it even penetrates, then as soon as you've lifted as much as you can, pour water on it immediately, and then grab multiple towels and lift as much liquid as possible, as quickly as possible. repeatedly pour clean water onto it and lift it off, you want to dilute the pigment/dye before it sets. for dye based inks, water, ammonia or vinegar might help once it's set. for pigment based inks, water, then once it's set try hydrogen peroxide. for dry-erase and "permanent" dye-based inks, you usually want to try alcohol, 90%+ isopropyl is fine, if not then try another solvent like acetone, nail polish remover, or naphthalene (assuming your carpet is cotton) for iron gall ink, water before it sets. once it's set, hopes and prayers.
Fun fact! irongall ink is mildly corrosive. In the short term, it's not enough to effect paper, but some very old letters written in irongall ink have disintegrated everywhere the ink touched, and thus had to be carefully reconstructed/copied to be legible through various methods. This is a big reason why really old letters look the way they do.
@TeaBurn It takes many many years for that to happen. Probably what occurred was there was a search for ink that didn't oxidize on contact with the air. Also, the acidity of the ink became a big problem with the advent of steep dip pens, because the ink corroded them. People wanted their pens to last longer.
I'm Canadian, and I use fountain pens and dip pens. Canadians who know their phonics, pronounce "gall" to rhyme with "ball", "fall", "tall", and "wall".
Galls would get crushed into the mud, which happened to be iron rich in places, and the mud would turn a blue-black color radiating out from it. You can use the same galls or even bark with distilled/low mineral water and put blueing on any iron object. When I was a kid we used to blue our case knives (back when they were carbon steel) and also steel traps before trapping season using logwood dye - basically the same thing.
the important reaction here is between tannin and the the iron compounds. Tannins occur in so much organic material that these reactions could easily be discovered accidently. Galls are just extra rich and so were one of the best sources.
@@mcRydes Yep. I haven't seen galls like those in the United States. Here they commonly use the ground inner bark of red oak, or other hardwoods to the same end. We also have saw palmetto in the Southeast and I have seen the soil blueing around where the roots are cut, which would indicate high tannins there as well.
Also a great way to dye fibers black or grey. I'm slowly collecting enough to dye some wool black, because I'm too cheap to buy them lol. Just a note, wasps aren't injecting trees with chemicals... they're laying their eggs in the tree, and the tree forms a gall around the developing larvae.
I'm not familiar with this phenomenom on oak trees, but all parasitic wasps will use venom, polydnaviruses and/or other compounds to alter the host immune system to ensure eggs survival. So even if they don't in fact use venom on the tree doesn't mean there are no chemicals involved in the process. Pretty sure that's why every species form different gall shapes and form.
@@Roast5 fun fact/correction, they aren't parasites, their parasitoids, a parasitoid uses as part of its life cycle and usually kills the host, normal parasites simply leech of a host as a means of sustenance and also usually don't kill the host. There are also such things as hyper-parasitoids which attack and use other parasitoids as a part of their life cycle and also usually kill the host parasitoid, parasitoid wasps are also some of the most diverse group of species estimating anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 unique species.
I'm really upset that I missed the entire video because a demon was peeling my cock like a banana, thank God you were here to recap its entire content in the unfunniest way possible.
I tried making ink like this once for a project. Pretty fun to see the colour change and trying to use these naturally occurring objects to make something that we associate so much with advanced society.
You’d be surprised at what we can do when we put our phones down and actually work on real life issues. Internet and technology have sped up everything but at the same time has made the overall majority of people lazy and useless.
I'm a calligraphy and graffiti nerd, so I'm really into pigments, dyes, and inks. When you first said oak galls I planned to come into the comment section and nerd out about gall ink, but you ended up talking about it lol. So then I was going to talk about gold nibs, but the top comment was about that. Oh well, I got out nerded! Awesome video, though!
i remember being in college and in an art class my professor did a watercolor and pigment demo, an oak gall was one of the materials she used to crush up and grind into watercolors!!! it was so interesting and delicate
@@RazorCake I was thinking that after I said it. I actually have some gum arabic for gum bichromate prints. I'm thinking the black stuff by itself would be good for bichromate prints, too. Thanks for the tip!
How in the world did anybody find this out? Like, there’s no way someone does this unintentionally. First they had to find the oak gall, then they needed to crush it, then they needed to make the correct solution in order for it to become ink-like, and THEN they needed to put it on paper to see how it would work.
This reaction also appears with regular oak wood. So it's essential for carpenters to keep iron dust from tool shapening away from the workbench. I guess it's a reaction with some substance called "Gerbsäure " in german or tannig acid. The Reaktion is also used to darken Oak surfaces by letting steel wool rust in water and applying the solution to the board. May have something to do with the deep dark appearance of bog oak.
Iron reacts with the gallotanic acid forming a black iron pigment. The gallotanic acid is a poison the tree produces to attack the wasp and generally used to prevent bacterial/fungal break down of the wood. So it’s in all do the tannin containing wood species (oaks being rather concentrated) the galls are just way more concentrated.
I don't know about solving steel wool in water... A bit sketchy. Although I did that with vinegar - acid dissolves metal nicely. I stained a hazel cane I made and it came out amazing, especially after applying some bees wax over it. It will stain any tanin rich wood. The only problem with the solution is that it doesn't last too long - oxygen reacts with metal and after 6 months of keeping it in a jar and trying to stain another cain, I got a beautiful rust powder surface on the cane 😁
Those are specifically Aleppo galls (also called Blue Galls), the preferred variety for making Iron Gall Ink since the Middle Ages. Various recipes were used, a lot of them using wine or vinegar in an iron pot. Jane Austen's personal recipe used small beer (low alcohol). Initially, iron would leach out of the pot into a solution, and a tannic acid solution made from soaking the crushed galls was added, producing a permanent light-fast ink. Later, green copperas (Iron II Sulfate) became the preferred source of iron. Allowing the galls to mold in the solution creates gallic acid, which helps produce a deeper black. The ink is acidic because most preparations cannot neutralize all of the gallic or tannic acid. Some people add egg shells to their recipes, as the calcium reacts and reduces the acidity (this is a more modern technique). Over time, the acidity of the ink chews away at the paper (why many old scrolls and manuscripts are degraded), and if a metal dip pen is used, the metal is corroded as well.
As someone who uses fountain pens, iron-gall inks are still very much a thing. My favorite is probably the blue-black color Salix from Rohrer & Klingner
I know absolutely nothing about fountain pens (in fact, I just learned the word today since I'm not English), so this is probably a dumb question: is the gall ink used as it is (like Nile showed in the video), like a diluted solution of water, or there are additives mixed in to make it more viscous?
@@RussellTeapot Traditionally it was made with ferrous sulphate, a source of iron, and gum arabic, a thinkening agent. Galls don't produce colours on their own - they need to react with ferrous sulphate to produce a black pigment. This ink has its drawback. While the black pigment itself is very durable, the mixture of iron and tannic acid is corrosive and acidic which means this ink damaged many historical manuscripts. Modern iron-gall inks are mostly dye and contain only a small amount of iron-gall. This way, the inks still retain the benefits of traditional iron-gall inks, that is, lovely rusty colours and waterproofness, but they can also come in many different colours (traditional iron-gall ink is blue-black) and is not as corrosive to fountain pens and paper as its historical counterpart. I also imagine that modern iron gall inks have preservatives added in.
@Evan D That's a peculiar name for an ink made from *Oak Galls...* *Salix* means *Willow Tree* (it's how we get _Salicylic Acid,_ the main ingredient of _Asprin,_ which was once sourced from _Willow Bark)._ If they wanted to reference *Oak Trees,* they should have called it *Quercus...*
Fun fact: We use a bacterium called Agrobacterium tumefaciens (that if unclear by its very literal name makes plant tumors happen) as an easy way to genetically engineer plants
This is interesting! I work for a sawmill and if you handle oak thats still green it makes black stains on your hands. Ive always wondered why. But this makes me think it must be reacting with iron secreted from your skin.
As an arborist I see these all the time. I can usually break them off the tree with a smack from my palm. I like to let them sit on the dash of a truck and dry out til the bark can be easily removed then sand them down to see the awesome burl like twists in the grain. Usually I end up giving them away but one of these days I'm going to find a cool use for them.
Beads! For keychains, car mirrors and bracelets/necklaces. Make it into a pendant. As soon as I saw them I wanted to know what they looked like sanded and polished/laquered.
Anything you could make with them or invite kids to make with you would be a great gift and educational opportunity for kids about trees, nature, and global warming, among other topics. Whether you shape them into beads or simply remove approximately half to see the grain (and have a half sphere with a flat side that shows that grain) and make some keychain or little doohickey out of it, kids would really be a great target for that kind of interest. You could even tell them that it makes ink and talk about all the cool things we use trees for, and ask them to trace or make a shape using the little whorls in the wood!
@@wooy1701 Don't you mean add water to NaOH? I'm assuming you're trying to suicide bait, but adding NaOH to water gives you a relatively harmless solution.
His background you see is just paper from a roll. He removes the used paper, possibly wipes down the surface underneath, and then just unrolls a new sheet and puts that in. Voila, brand new.
You killed the larva of the wasp, or had it already hatched? Last fall there were so many round little things on the oak leaves. They fell off and there were thousands lying around. They looked like flat lentils. They are galls from the Oak-Lentil-Gallwasp. Galls were also used as medicine when still green. The trees seem to have no problem with these wasps.
Too many can kill the tree. But it isn't super common. But stay away from three, of you probubly get stunk. Learned that the hard way when collecting acorns for an art project.
@@oakenshadow6763 They were likely looking for food in the form of sugars. Aphids, scale insects, and other "true bugs" such as plant hoppers all secrete honeydew which is excess sugars they don't need. This usually is enough to call in yellowjackets and similar insects. A large scale infestation on one of the trees easily could easily attract them to that area. A large spotted lanternfly population could also be the reason they were there. Keep asking questions as it is a excellent way to learn something new!
If you see a little hole in the gallnut, the wasp has already hatched and escaped and you can just harvest it without killing the wasp. That's how professionals generally harvest them I think.
"If i crush one its just like smashing a ball of wood..." Me: Well well well bold claims lets see shall we _crushes balls to make wood chips_ Me: _INTERESTING_
This chemical process is actually just a normal thing for the wood itself. Acorns and even birch bark are able to do this as well. Just soak them in water for a day or two, and you now have a dark pigment to boil with a mordant for dyes! The Iron solution you used is just one type of mordant!
Fungal and antifungal at the same time. I make a tincture that cures acne and will remove scars and many skin lesions. Great plant fertilizer too. I use a different oak gall, also i use many stages of them in its development.
Let me tell you in India this used to make black Henna. To be applied to hair. Tea leaves contain tannins so you make a highly concentrated decoction of tea (by just adding lots of generic drinking tea and boiling it). Take an iron pan "unseasoned". Add powdered Henna and tea water in that iron pan mix well and leave overnight. Tannin in tea reacts with layer of iron and gives a blackish tone to Henna, wich is usually has a reddish brown colour but this process makes it dark brown to black.
I wasn't reading the captions, and at first, I thought that you said, "...and if I crush one, it's just like smashing a ball of blood". When you hit it with the hammer, I expected blood splatter everywhere, lol.
This is also why earlier fountain pens used gold nibs: Gold won't react with the iron in the ink while a steel nib would rust incredibly fast.
Oh thx for this info
this ink also eats through paper over time.
thanks man
Also why some old inks turn from black to a rusty color over time, the iron in the ink is rusting.
By fast do you mean faster than a gpu going out of stock or in about an hour or two
the ink is called an iron gall ink, some brands still make them!
iron gall ink benefits:
- the ink oxidizes and binds to the paper so it's super duper waterproof and permanent
- it's got a range of colors but it's not every color, it's exclusively these dark, muted, rustic greyish/sepia tones which i think are very pretty (e.g. red iron gall ink is a stunning deep brownish-red color, blue iron gall ink is a unique grayish blue that reminds me of like some military uniform or polo shirt or something)
the downsides of iron gall ink:
- it oxidizes when exposed to air, so when you open the ink bottle, you've introduced oxygen, it now has a limited shelf life
- it's heavily corrosive and will slowly eat through the paper over the course of several years
- it's very permanent, if you spill it on your carpet, it is never coming out. to get it out you need a reducing agent that won't damage or remove the dye from your carpet, having looked for this before, from the bottom of my heart: best of luck to you, it's probably easier to just patch it.
also if you ever spill any kind of ink on your carpet, the best thing you can do is see if you can lift it off with your clothing before it even penetrates, then as soon as you've lifted as much as you can, pour water on it immediately, and then grab multiple towels and lift as much liquid as possible, as quickly as possible. repeatedly pour clean water onto it and lift it off, you want to dilute the pigment/dye before it sets.
for dye based inks, water, ammonia or vinegar might help once it's set.
for pigment based inks, water, then once it's set try hydrogen peroxide.
for dry-erase and "permanent" dye-based inks, you usually want to try alcohol, 90%+ isopropyl is fine, if not then try another solvent like acetone, nail polish remover, or naphthalene (assuming your carpet is cotton)
for iron gall ink, water before it sets. once it's set, hopes and prayers.
Damn what an essay. I only read a few sentences before I gave up sorry
Good info! Thanks
This reads like a PTSD episode
good comment, i enjoyed reading it
@@bluntslt8023goes to show how incredibly small your attention span is 😂 I pray for our youth; they’re gonna need it 🙏🙏
i was waiting for the slap in the end, and i was very satisfied
Yes xD
lord that was mfking orgasmic
That was the best part...!!
@@__jazzysrv__ yesssss
@@applestrudelgirl 😳
Fun fact! irongall ink is mildly corrosive. In the short term, it's not enough to effect paper, but some very old letters written in irongall ink have disintegrated everywhere the ink touched, and thus had to be carefully reconstructed/copied to be legible through various methods. This is a big reason why really old letters look the way they do.
I suppose that's one reason why they stopped using it, if it literally ate through the paper.
@TeaBurn
It takes many many years for that to happen. Probably what occurred was there was a search for ink that didn't oxidize on contact with the air. Also, the acidity of the ink became a big problem with the advent of steep dip pens, because the ink corroded them. People wanted their pens to last longer.
During research I did for my D&D group I found oak galls were one of the ingredients used in burn salves in the middle ages.
❤
That's cool how they used that
@sanrek8877you read the comment wrong
I legitimately read this as oak galls being used to burn slaves
Edit: autocorrect
What's a burn salve?
The gall of this man to call them "oak gals 💅"
He's Canadian. As are different up there.
@@erin9868 Yes we say Gail's!
@@erin9868 I didn't know he was a Canukian. Now I like him even more!
I'm Canadian, and I use fountain pens and dip pens. Canadians who know their phonics, pronounce "gall" to rhyme with "ball", "fall", "tall", and "wall".
@@marleneclough3173 Only if we don't know basic phonics.
Nigel: *pours ink on the table
Me: wait for it-
Nigel: *Slaps
Who is Nigel
@@TitaniumRailgun it's NileRed's real name
Much _CHAOS ENERGY_
Am I stupid to think that nile was his real name 🤣
That hit the spot.
So in conclusion, trees can provide us with both paper and ink. Noted.
who thought “im gonna crush up this tree ball and mix it with an iron solution in hopes of making a dye”
They didn't have cable or internet back then , it was either watch paint dry or jerk off the cow again every... single...night...
Axes were made of iron and you'd notice if your axe suddenly went black due to contact with galls.
Galls would get crushed into the mud, which happened to be iron rich in places, and the mud would turn a blue-black color radiating out from it. You can use the same galls or even bark with distilled/low mineral water and put blueing on any iron object. When I was a kid we used to blue our case knives (back when they were carbon steel) and also steel traps before trapping season using logwood dye - basically the same thing.
the important reaction here is between tannin and the the iron compounds. Tannins occur in so much organic material that these reactions could easily be discovered accidently. Galls are just extra rich and so were one of the best sources.
@@mcRydes Yep. I haven't seen galls like those in the United States. Here they commonly use the ground inner bark of red oak, or other hardwoods to the same end. We also have saw palmetto in the Southeast and I have seen the soil blueing around where the roots are cut, which would indicate high tannins there as well.
Also a great way to dye fibers black or grey. I'm slowly collecting enough to dye some wool black, because I'm too cheap to buy them lol. Just a note, wasps aren't injecting trees with chemicals... they're laying their eggs in the tree, and the tree forms a gall around the developing larvae.
😮 Very Interesting ! 😊
I'm not familiar with this phenomenom on oak trees, but all parasitic wasps will use venom, polydnaviruses and/or other compounds to alter the host immune system to ensure eggs survival.
So even if they don't in fact use venom on the tree doesn't mean there are no chemicals involved in the process.
Pretty sure that's why every species form different gall shapes and form.
@@Roast5 fun fact/correction, they aren't parasites, their parasitoids, a parasitoid uses as part of its life cycle and usually kills the host, normal parasites simply leech of a host as a means of sustenance and also usually don't kill the host. There are also such things as hyper-parasitoids which attack and use other parasitoids as a part of their life cycle and also usually kill the host parasitoid, parasitoid wasps are also some of the most diverse group of species estimating anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 unique species.
Too sheep to baahh them?
Wow so the ink is dead babies
"Mom we are out of ink"
"Oh just make some from the tree in the backyard"
Underrated meme
“But we don’t have the yellow liquid iron!”
@@NTVE404 then get some urine
@@Graphics_Card💀💀💀
@@Saturn8172 😆
That smack on the table at the end was definitely the invasive thoughts winning💯😂
invasive ☠️
Nile: creates ink using oak galls
Me: oh nice
Also Nile: proceeds to slap it
Me: oh that's class
@I care a random link OH LETS GO THAT'S CLASS!!! AHAHa--...
What Are oak galls-
balls ?
Art 🎨
That went from tree balls to smacking ink on a flat surface real quick
I'm really upset that I missed the entire video because a demon was peeling my cock like a banana, thank God you were here to recap its entire content in the unfunniest way possible.
I'm wondering why the quick cut scene after smashing the bag with the hammer and the replaced bag that appears looks a bit brighter?
NileRed: This are tree balls.
Tree: Omg put them back..
TPOT tree isn't Happy ...
Most underrated bro
@@strongcatflipaclipandroblo3806bro 💀
BFDI HELL YEAH
@@strongcatflipaclipandroblo3806YES I LOVE BFDI MARRY ME
I tried making ink like this once for a project. Pretty fun to see the colour change and trying to use these naturally occurring objects to make something that we associate so much with advanced society.
nile has officially become howtobasic : chemist edition
NileBasic
BasicNilered
alkanile red
Dont say that or he wont do this stuff no more
Could someone please explain me what that so called basic thing? I really didn't get that
it's amazing how people even figure it out in the first place!
Well a lot of people were playing with chemicals because they wanted to chemically conjure up some gold and be rich
That's what I was wondering about.
could be experiments or accidental, like finding the wood tumors partially crushed and mixed with iron-rich puddles
You’d be surprised at what we can do when we put our phones down and actually work on real life issues. Internet and technology have sped up everything but at the same time has made the overall majority of people lazy and useless.
@@CptFuzzAldrinwooooaaaaahhh that’s so deep bro wooooaaahh phone bad no way!! 😱😱 upload this to r/showerthoughts asap bro !!!
Ahh yes a double meaning to having wood
Yes.
@@wilovo2855 mhm
@@wilovo2855 you are replying to yourself?
Lol somebody had called me crazy. Guess it looks like I am now 😂
@@wilovo2855 nah you just built different
Oh dang secret of kells taught me these make ink as a kid
I'm a calligraphy and graffiti nerd, so I'm really into pigments, dyes, and inks. When you first said oak galls I planned to come into the comment section and nerd out about gall ink, but you ended up talking about it lol. So then I was going to talk about gold nibs, but the top comment was about that. Oh well, I got out nerded! Awesome video, though!
Ha
actually funny
I love being outnerded in comment sections!
You could’ve mentioned he pronounced gal instead of gall…oh! Oops, sorry. 😉
should talk about gall wasp
i remember being in college and in an art class my professor did a watercolor and pigment demo, an oak gall was one of the materials she used to crush up and grind into watercolors!!! it was so interesting and delicate
Cool to see Nile Red branching out.
This one is really cool. My favorite short so far. Going to buy some of these oak galls for my art. Thanks, NR.
FYI if you make the ink you should also thicken the ink with some gum arabic, otherwise the mixture will be very watery like watercolour paint
@@RazorCake I was thinking that after I said it. I actually have some gum arabic for gum bichromate prints. I'm thinking the black stuff by itself would be good for bichromate prints, too. Thanks for the tip!
How in the world did anybody find this out? Like, there’s no way someone does this unintentionally. First they had to find the oak gall, then they needed to crush it, then they needed to make the correct solution in order for it to become ink-like, and THEN they needed to put it on paper to see how it would work.
I thought he was gonna write with his fingers when he spilled the "ink"
I got surprised by the slap lmao
You must be new here then. Welcome!
It's usually something like:
This is (chemical name), a very dangerous chemical that destroys organic matter. *Yeets at wall*
Well this sounds interesting and I look forward to my journey
Welcome to NileRed
Your comment got liked 355 times.
whoever first discovered this was probably flabbergasted as hell lol
This reaction also appears with regular oak wood. So it's essential for carpenters to keep iron dust from tool shapening away from the workbench. I guess it's a reaction with some substance called "Gerbsäure " in german or tannig acid. The Reaktion is also used to darken Oak surfaces by letting steel wool rust in water and applying the solution to the board. May have something to do with the deep dark appearance of bog oak.
Iron reacts with the gallotanic acid forming a black iron pigment. The gallotanic acid is a poison the tree produces to attack the wasp and generally used to prevent bacterial/fungal break down of the wood. So it’s in all do the tannin containing wood species (oaks being rather concentrated) the galls are just way more concentrated.
I don't know about solving steel wool in water... A bit sketchy. Although I did that with vinegar - acid dissolves metal nicely. I stained a hazel cane I made and it came out amazing, especially after applying some bees wax over it. It will stain any tanin rich wood. The only problem with the solution is that it doesn't last too long - oxygen reacts with metal and after 6 months of keeping it in a jar and trying to stain another cain, I got a beautiful rust powder surface on the cane 😁
Als Referenz heißt es auf Englisch, "Tannic Acid".
I dont believe in science can you explain this in layman terms?
@MoDangle-g1i Wasp lays egg in tree. Tree grows protection around egg. Human uses weird tree ball to make ink.
Those are specifically Aleppo galls (also called Blue Galls), the preferred variety for making Iron Gall Ink since the Middle Ages. Various recipes were used, a lot of them using wine or vinegar in an iron pot. Jane Austen's personal recipe used small beer (low alcohol). Initially, iron would leach out of the pot into a solution, and a tannic acid solution made from soaking the crushed galls was added, producing a permanent light-fast ink. Later, green copperas (Iron II Sulfate) became the preferred source of iron. Allowing the galls to mold in the solution creates gallic acid, which helps produce a deeper black. The ink is acidic because most preparations cannot neutralize all of the gallic or tannic acid. Some people add egg shells to their recipes, as the calcium reacts and reduces the acidity (this is a more modern technique). Over time, the acidity of the ink chews away at the paper (why many old scrolls and manuscripts are degraded), and if a metal dip pen is used, the metal is corroded as well.
As someone who uses fountain pens, iron-gall inks are still very much a thing.
My favorite is probably the blue-black color Salix from Rohrer & Klingner
As someone else who uses fountain pens, I have to ask, what pen do you like to use it in?
I love Scabiosa from the same company. The dusty purple colour is very unique and can't be found elsewhere.
I know absolutely nothing about fountain pens (in fact, I just learned the word today since I'm not English), so this is probably a dumb question: is the gall ink used as it is (like Nile showed in the video), like a diluted solution of water, or there are additives mixed in to make it more viscous?
@@RussellTeapot Traditionally it was made with ferrous sulphate, a source of iron, and gum arabic, a thinkening agent. Galls don't produce colours on their own - they need to react with ferrous sulphate to produce a black pigment. This ink has its drawback. While the black pigment itself is very durable, the mixture of iron and tannic acid is corrosive and acidic which means this ink damaged many historical manuscripts.
Modern iron-gall inks are mostly dye and contain only a small amount of iron-gall. This way, the inks still retain the benefits of traditional iron-gall inks, that is, lovely rusty colours and waterproofness, but they can also come in many different colours (traditional iron-gall ink is blue-black) and is not as corrosive to fountain pens and paper as its historical counterpart.
I also imagine that modern iron gall inks have preservatives added in.
@Evan D That's a peculiar name for an ink made from *Oak Galls...*
*Salix* means *Willow Tree* (it's how we get _Salicylic Acid,_ the main ingredient of _Asprin,_ which was once sourced from _Willow Bark)._
If they wanted to reference *Oak Trees,* they should have called it *Quercus...*
Your titles are getting weirder.
“These are my tree balls”
“I got sent pills from russia.”
Fun fact: We use a bacterium called Agrobacterium tumefaciens (that if unclear by its very literal name makes plant tumors happen) as an easy way to genetically engineer plants
This is interesting! I work for a sawmill and if you handle oak thats still green it makes black stains on your hands. Ive always wondered why. But this makes me think it must be reacting with iron secreted from your skin.
Yeah! The smash random things video is back.
It's pronounced like "gawl". Also, these are fun too peel open, they're hollow and full of stringy tendons and a single wasp larvae.
^Came here for this.
Bawls out for Bantu?
Gaul is the ancient name for central Europe, where the trees and wasps have been locked in the never ending battle for countless millennia.
You're correcting his pronunciation but spelled to as "too"?
@@secondarycontainment4727 big difference between making an informative video and a typo
Nile:*slaps ink*
Me:what a masterpiece
Imagine writing with an ink made from tree tumor 💀
Nile: “These are my tree balls”
Me: No, that’s cannabis that you got there.
I've heard it in your lie in april.....
I have no idea other then it is a sweet
No officer they’re “tree balls” I was just using them to make ink, I swear!
Sorry, what? Which part of cannabis is supposed to look like that?
@@StefanReich they look almost exactly like temple balls, a middle eastern form of kief
@cloverleafsippa713 no tf they don’t boy what are u smokin LMAO
I was thinking he'd clean up the ink puddle with a sponge or something. I was not prepared
thats how he cleans lol
You must be new here
As an arborist I see these all the time. I can usually break them off the tree with a smack from my palm. I like to let them sit on the dash of a truck and dry out til the bark can be easily removed then sand them down to see the awesome burl like twists in the grain. Usually I end up giving them away but one of these days I'm going to find a cool use for them.
Beads! For keychains, car mirrors and bracelets/necklaces. Make it into a pendant. As soon as I saw them I wanted to know what they looked like sanded and polished/laquered.
Anything you could make with them or invite kids to make with you would be a great gift and educational opportunity for kids about trees, nature, and global warming, among other topics.
Whether you shape them into beads or simply remove approximately half to see the grain (and have a half sphere with a flat side that shows that grain) and make some keychain or little doohickey out of it, kids would really be a great target for that kind of interest. You could even tell them that it makes ink and talk about all the cool things we use trees for, and ask them to trace or make a shape using the little whorls in the wood!
As a carpenter, I can confirm that my balls do indeed look like that.
Thanks for confirming the memory of reading that in the spots where an iron nail penetrates oak wood, ink can be found
NileRed is HowToBasic, confirmed.
aah yes, compare every destruction in the world to howtobasic
@@octo190 salty boi
add NaOH to water
@@octo190 edgy?
@@wooy1701 Don't you mean add water to NaOH? I'm assuming you're trying to suicide bait, but adding NaOH to water gives you a relatively harmless solution.
Idk how nile cleans up the mess from the slaps.
His background you see is just paper from a roll. He removes the used paper, possibly wipes down the surface underneath, and then just unrolls a new sheet and puts that in. Voila, brand new.
I think he just removes the bristol board and aluminium tape he uses for his background and wipes the stuff that splashed out.
It's in a fume hood, it's like the easiest thing you could clean up 🤦
I can't believe you had the gall to make a video like this!
I was waiting not for a slap, but for Nile to hit the ink with the hammer for some reason
Forget about cat girls, get yourself an oak gal
In my day we called those entwives. These days the kids are callin' 'em Affini.
this man is the definition of chaotic neutral
*chemical exists anywhere in the world*
nile : let's see how dangerous this chemical is
The way he smashes the hammer makes me think he has experience in destroying
𝗧𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗕𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘀
Nile: **makes really cool old ink**
Also Nile: **hippity hoppity it’s slap the ink o’clockity**
Idk why but the slap made me giggle.
I love your videos !!!
Nice Cage’s character in National Treasure references the iron gall ink when they find the clue in the beginning on the Charlotte
That’s where my mind goes every time iron gall ink is brought up! XD
I was expecting NileRed to throw whole beaker at wall
This channel always makes me say audibly, "WOWWW!!"
31:29 that transition was CLEAN
You killed the larva of the wasp, or had it already hatched? Last fall there were so many round little things on the oak leaves. They fell off and there were thousands lying around. They looked like flat lentils. They are galls from the Oak-Lentil-Gallwasp. Galls were also used as medicine when still green. The trees seem to have no problem with these wasps.
Too many can kill the tree. But it isn't super common. But stay away from three, of you probubly get stunk. Learned that the hard way when collecting acorns for an art project.
@@oakenshadow6763 The gall making wasps are not capable of stinging a human. You were probably stung by a yellowjacket or something similar.
@@KyleLoughlin85 Odd. Thank you for letting me know! Wonder why they were around the trees?
@@oakenshadow6763 They were likely looking for food in the form of sugars. Aphids, scale insects, and other "true bugs" such as plant hoppers all secrete honeydew which is excess sugars they don't need. This usually is enough to call in yellowjackets and similar insects. A large scale infestation on one of the trees easily could easily attract them to that area. A large spotted lanternfly population could also be the reason they were there.
Keep asking questions as it is a excellent way to learn something new!
If you see a little hole in the gallnut, the wasp has already hatched and escaped and you can just harvest it without killing the wasp. That's how professionals generally harvest them I think.
Crushing that bag really brought back some memories 😢😂
Hidetaka Miyazaki would turn one of these into lore for one of his games
What is this? Looks awesome!
"you got this, nigel"
puts ink
"make em wait for it"
slaps ink
"boom"
Least horrifying result a wasp injecting something.
He just made this video as an excuse to smash something.
Beautiful artwork 56📸🥹
I almost had a heart attack when he just slapped it.
Now we can say: That tree has got some balls
"If i crush one its just like smashing a ball of wood..."
Me: Well well well bold claims lets see shall we
_crushes balls to make wood chips_
Me: _INTERESTING_
Thanks for the added excitement in the end.
Me: “This is how dementors were created.”
Harry Potter: *shakes head* “FML”
it's always the ending i wait for to laugh everytime
Smh Gael was looking to the Dark Soul for pigment when he could've just gotten it from the Curse-Rotted Greatwood
he is a dark magic wizard, the only way to survive is to fly away with me on my broomstick...
Oh wow didn’t notice how early I was
Nile why is every video of yours getting more and more chaotic
NileRed : It's just like smashing a wooden ball
Me : Afterall it's wood only... So it'll be like a wooden ball only
he said that because they have a different property being injected by venom
This chemical process is actually just a normal thing for the wood itself. Acorns and even birch bark are able to do this as well. Just soak them in water for a day or two, and you now have a dark pigment to boil with a mordant for dyes! The Iron solution you used is just one type of mordant!
Fungal and antifungal at the same time.
I make a tincture that cures acne and will remove scars and many skin lesions.
Great plant fertilizer too.
I use a different oak gall, also i use many stages of them in its development.
Science can never dissapoint me
Let me tell you in India this used to make black Henna. To be applied to hair. Tea leaves contain tannins so you make a highly concentrated decoction of tea (by just adding lots of generic drinking tea and boiling it). Take an iron pan "unseasoned". Add powdered Henna and tea water in that iron pan mix well and leave overnight. Tannin in tea reacts with layer of iron and gives a blackish tone to Henna, wich is usually has a reddish brown colour but this process makes it dark brown to black.
That's Minecraft ink now that I think about it 🤔
Me and over here thinking that’s chocolate 🍫
And that's why printer ink is so damn expensive
Wouldn't tree balls contain treemen?
I wasn't reading the captions, and at first, I thought that you said, "...and if I crush one, it's just like smashing a ball of blood". When you hit it with the hammer, I expected blood splatter everywhere, lol.
Fascinating. I thought all ink came from octopus and we harvested that
It’s no wonder chemists of old were considered wizards and performed magic. This channel never ceases to amaze me.
Minecraft says these are edible
I fully expected him to smack the ink after he poured it out and was not disappointed.
Fascinating matey whoever thought of using it to make ink
You learn something new every day
And now I know why Iron gall ink is called that. Thanks.
The ending was so satisfying TY 😂🙏🙏
Every day he gets closer to being HowToBasic
So cool! Learn something new everyday! 😊
I feels like my boy lets his intrusive thoughts take control often. I’m here for it.
Id love to see you actually making the ink
People who lived before modern technology really did figure out the wildest stuff while not spending all day on their phones.
pov my intrusive thoughts win
My hungry asss thought it was food
realizing this was iron gall ink gave me flashbacks to National Treasure