Francisco Quisumbing is said to be a Filipino

botanist Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek wo ...

claimed to be the inventor of

Quink 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 P ...

ink used by The Parker Pen Company. He studied in the Philippines and the US, gaining a BSc from the

University of the Philippines The University of the Philippines (UP; fil, Pamantasan ng Pilipinas Unibersidad ng Pilipinas) is a state university system in the Philippines. It is the country's national university, as mandated by Republic Act No. 9500 (UP Charter of 200 ...

School of Agriculture, Los Baños in 1918 and an MSc in 1921. He travelled to the US and gained a PhD in Plant Taxonomy, Systematics and Morphology from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

in 1923, under the

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'' pensionado'' program. He went back to the Philippines after

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

but was unable to organize the Philippine Ink Corporation under the Japanese Reparations Program because of too much government intervention. Quink, which was sold in the US from 1931, is claimed to stand for 'Quisumbing Ink', but there is no reliable evidence to support this. Parker state instead that the name is an amalgam of "quick and ink". However Parker did license the manufacture of Quink in the Philippines, for that market, and the bottles were labelled as such. This, together with the name coincidence, may have been the source of the rumour. In reality 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

. He was a Fellow of the University of the Philippines at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in New York from 1918 to 1921, receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1921. He returned to the Philippines to teach as Professor of Industrial Chemistry at the University of the Philippines from 1922 to 1934. In 1923, he started the Quisumbing Ink Products company, and in 1934, founded the Quisumbing School of Technology. According to a book published in 1960, Quisumbing inks then enjoyed an exclusive contract to supply all branches of the Philippine government.Paul R. Versoza. "Forensic Chemistry of Ink in Documentary Investigation". 1960, p.22

References

Filipino inventors 20th-century Filipino scientists University of Chicago alumni Year of birth missing Year of death missing {{Philippines-scientist-stub