Try This at Home: Invisible Ink

Last year, the US Central Intelligence Agency released documents detailing recipes for invisible ink from 1917 and 1918. Among the recipes was a favorite ink recipe of German soliders during World War I -- crushed aspirin mixed with water. Though the ink is easily available, uncovering it required a complicated chemical developer.

Other recipes in the CIA documents used solutions of iron, silver or copper salts as ink and developed the writing by heating the paper. This bit of history inspired my inner scientist and spy. Without access to chemicals in a lab, I experimented with invisible ink recipes using things I found around my house.

1. Lemon juice and heat
Dip a cotton swab or thin paintbrush in lemon juice. Write your message on white paper and let it dry. Hold the paper over a lamp, radiator or candle (but don’t let it catch fire!). The heat breaks down the acid into light-brown compounds, revealing your message forever.

This is how my experiment turned out. The top part of the picture is the paper before I held it over a candle.

2. Laundry detergent and black light
White shirts glow under black lights at a haunted house because the whitening agent in laundry detergent glows under ultraviolet light. Try writing your message using liquid laundry detergent. Holding the paper to a black light reveals a glowing message without damaging the paper.

But if spies intercept a message written with one of these inks, it’s likely they could decode it. We all can find something to heat paper. And black lights, though less common than candles, are still widely available.

To solve this problem, I borrowed a trick from George Washington: using two different chemicals to write and decode the message. Washington wrote with an watery ink containing iron salts. The receiver decoded the message by painting the paper with sodium carbonate, a chemical cousin of baking soda.

Maintaining ink supplies was crucial during Washington's day. Now a trip to the grocery store will keep you well supplied.

3. Baking soda and grape juice
Make a paste of baking soda in water. Write your message with this paste on a piece of paper and let it dry. To decode the message, paint the paper with thawed grape juice concentrate. The acidic juice reacts with the basic baking soda and the purple grape juice turns gray. This worked best when I used plenty of baking soda paste and undiluted grape juice concentrate:

In the pictures above, you can tell that the paper has been altered because the paper buckles as the watery lemon juice or baking soda paste dries. Traditionally, writers would re-steam the paper to remove the bumps after scribbling a message with wet ink.

During the Cold War, invisible ink technology improved enough to remove the time-consuming steaming step. Soviet and East German spy agencies developed chemical-coated paper similar to carbon paper we use today. Agents sandwiched this coated paper between two blank pieces of paper. Writing on the top sheet transferred the chemicals from the middle sheet to the bottom paper.

Perhaps hacking an ink-jet printer to print lemon juice invisible ink would transfer your message without damaging the paper as well. I’d love to hear from someone who has tried this.

Have fun sending secret messages!