Quick Facts
Biography
Francisco Quisumbing is a Filipino botanist claimed to be the inventor of Quink ink used by The Parker Pen Company.
He studied in the Philippines and the US, gaining a BSc from the University of the Philippines 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 in 1923, under the American pensionado program.
He went back to the Philippines after World War II 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.