A case of exploding inkwells

From this week’s Newsletter.

Every age has a pet theory—or even pet theories—about education. In the mid–18th century, for example, the great sage Dr. Samuel Johnson formulated a theory of education that survived for the best part of two centuries.

According to Dr. Johnson, boys absorbed knowledge at precisely the same rate at which energy was applied to their backsides. It was not so much a case of “spare the rod and spoil the child” as “spare the rod and boys will wallow in a state of ignorance and barbarism.”

Doubtless, today’s educators would almost certainly condemn the practice as savage and sadistic. But, actually, in practice, it was not as bad as it sounds.

Indeed, most of the boys of my acquaintance would have infinitely preferred six of the best to transcribing 500 words in Latin from Caesar’s Gallic Wars or, even worse, an interminable hour or two of enforced inactivity.

Today high technology is deemed essential to learning. Computers and calculators are omnipresent in even first grade classrooms. But the highest tech in the classroom when I was a boy was the slate and scriber (a sort of pencil that writes on slate and is easily erased).

Slates were issued to British school children as an economy measure until way after World War II because paper was in short supply. But slate was a great medium for printing out one’s first hesitating letters and figures—and, for school children, no less desirable because mindless doodles could easily be erased before the teacher saw them.

We weren’t given exercise books until we graduated to cursive writing. Initially, pencils were used, but after a short time we graduated to pen and ink. But, here again, advanced technology was shunned. Fountain pens were strictly forbidden and ball points, when they finally appeared on the scene, were utterly taboo.

Instead, we were issued with pens and inkwells. The pens had nibs—a pointy thing that enabled one to write—that had to be treated very gently. Sadly, the attrition rate among boys’ pen nibs was high. It didn’t take long, you see, for us to discover that, with the addition of stabilizing fins, pens made the most satisfactory darts.

A main drawback to a pen/dart conversion was that it was quite difficult to write neatly with a pen nib that had been thrown at a tree or the classroom wall a dozen times. A nib’s survival rate on human targets was far higher—although it was essential to choose a human target one could easily outrun.

The most fascinating aspect of this writing system, however, was the ink well. Every morning, fresh ink was mixed from ink powder and poured into the ink wells. Girls shunned the task of mixing the ink because it was necessarily dirty. But for boys it was a much sought after assignment because it offered a golden opportunity for mischief.

It is essential to know a little science to get the most out of ink mixing. Carbide—a compound available at most hardware stores—when combined with water gives off acetylene gas. Highly inflammable, acetylene was used by grown ups in lamps, camping stoves and soldering torches. School boys, on the other hand, used it to blow up inkwells.

Drop a small chunk of carbide in an ink well, plug the hole with chewed up blotting paper and soon the the gas will build up sufficient pressure to explode with a deafening bang.

Practiced hands could drop carbide and insert a blotting paper plug in most of the inkwells in the classroom before the first of the ear shattering explosion occurred. Custom required the girls to gleefully respond to the machine gun–like reports with feigned shrieks of terror, adding to the mayhem. Ah, bliss!

Thrashing fell out of favor at about the same time that the pens and inkwells were banished from the classroom. Could this, one might ask, have been entirely coincidental? GPH✠