Children's Museum of Houston

Chromatography

---

In this week’s O Wow Moments episode from the Children’s Museum of Houston, I take on the role of Back Jower, a special investigator looking for a cookie thief.  Fortunately for me, I have help from two assistants who discover a note!  We then use chromatography to separate out the colors in the black ink in the note.

That’s right!  Black ink isn’t really black!  It is actually several different colors of ink mixed together to create black.  And different markers use different combinations of colors. Chromatography is a process for separating out the colors and comparing them to determine what marker wrote a note.  So, we apply a little forensic science to this case and we’ll have it all solved!