Quink (a portmanteau from 'quick' and 'ink') is a fountain pen ink developed by the Parker Pen Company. It was introduced in 1931 and has remained in production ever since. Background In 1928, under the direction of Kenneth Parker, the Parker Pen Company set out to develop a new and improved fountain pen ink. Inferior inks had long been the main cause of clogged fountain pens, yet popular ink formulations had remained unchanged in decades. Research for the project was initially outsourced to Miner Laboratories of Chicago. In August 1930 one of the lead chemists, Galen Sayler, was hired directly and put to work in a small laboratory at company headquarters in Janesville, Wisconsin. History Quink was heavily advertised, and an immediate success. According to Kenneth Parker's personal journal, Quink production began on March 17, 1931, and $89,000 worth had been shipped by October 22—more than twice the company's expectations and an excellent return on the $68,000 spent on its development. Quink was introduced as a general-purpose ink, safe for use in all fountain pens. It remains in production, with minor changes in formulation. Francisco Quisumbing A popular misconception is that the ink was invented by a Filipino, Francisco Quisumbing, and takes its name from 'Quisumbing Ink'. Although this apocryphal tale appears on numerous websites, no reliable source is ever cited. The accounts uniformly identify the supposed inventor as Francisco Quisumbing, a Filipino botanist who studied in both the Philippines and the US, gaining a PhD in Plant Taxonomy, Systematics and Morphology from the University of Chicago in 1923. What biographical information that can be found is incomplete and unreliable. There is no indication that such a person ever worked for Parker. There was a company called Quisumbing Ink Products in the Philippines, unconnected to Parker, founded by a chemical engineer named Francisco A. Quisumbing. The milestones of Quisumbing's documented career are close enough to those recounted in the apocryphal accounts that it is probable that they refer, with differing degrees of accuracy, to the same man. The real Francisco A. Quisumbing was born in 1893 and received his B. Agr. in 1914 and his M. S. in 1918, both from the University of the Philippines. He was a Fellow of the University of the Philippines at Columbia University in New York from 1918 to 1921, receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1921. He returned to the Philippines to teach