Duplicating the writing on The One Ring

Factual Questions
1

On another webpage I saw a picture of The One Ring, as in the LOTR trilogy. The picture showed it as a gold ring with the writing on it, but we all know that the writing was first revealed when Gandalf threw the ring in a fire.

Now, I know there are duplicates of the Ring available, but is it possible to make one with an inscription that is only visable when the ring is hot? Something that becomes visable with heat from being worn but disappears when the ring is removed and cools down?

I suppose if this was possible, the someone would have made rings like this already, but I have never heard of one.

Maybe an inscription that darkens or changes color when warm, like the old “Mood Rings” from the 70’s did?

:: Oh, man. I never thought I would ever compare The One Ring to a Mood Ring, no matter how long I lived ::

2

You want some dye that reacts on gold to heat the way certain invisible inks act on paper.

There are several inks that turn visible with heat and then invisible when they cool back off. Here is the first one I googled up.
http://www.thelibraryshop.org/inkinvisible.html

The mood ring itself was a heat sensitive plastic or crystal and not metal, so I don’t think it is quite what you were hoping.

Hopefully an expert in metals and metal dyes will wander in help.

Jim

3

One solution that isn’t heat sensitive: inlay a small led that lights up a fiberoptic cable that is placed just under the surface of the gold.

One solution that is heat sensitive: inlay a strand of metal that has a lower melting point than the gold (is there? Aside from mercury?) Heat only til light production.

Best solution: Make it out of plastic.

4

There are many such metals. However, the melting point does not affect the temperature at which the metal starts to glow - that is basically the same across all metals. All materials, in fact.

5

Any dyes that stay on gold that might be heat sensitive? I remember using a cheap marking blue dye on sheet metal, that would change color when heated, but it would stay that color.

6

Google “Thermochromic metals”. I didn’t read through the whole thing, but something like this might work. Thermochromic metal-hydride bilayer devices. Or it may be totally unsuitable for use on a ring. Googling Thermochromic coatings and Thermochromic dyes also resulted in a number of possible solutions.

7

In Soviet Middle Earth, One Ring moods you.

8

Well, you get thermal mugs where, for instance, Dr.Who’s Tardis appears, or Kirk & Spock appear as if transported down from the Enterprise when hot water is poured in, so I guess in theory you could get a ceramic ring that the text appeared on when it got hot…

9

I’ve seen replicas for sale where the inscription does appear on exposure to flame. I think the one I saw was based on soot, though, not temperature: The ring was coated in such a way that most of the surface would get sooty, but the inscription would stay clean. To clear the writing, polish the ring.

10

I’m not sure if you are planning on having one of these made, or if this is a purely academic discussion, but if you’re going to make it, you can find the font you want pretty easily. It seems the name of the font is “Tengwar”, and can be found here:

http://www.acondia.com/fonts/tengwar/index.html

I didn’t realize you could download this type of font until I was trying to design a custom deacal for my Charger. It seems pretty much every font has been made into a file, from the Diablo font to Battlestar Galactica. You can pretty much find any font you want with a little googling. The only problem is for things like Dodge’s “SRT8” logo, which is actually a graphic, and not a font.

http://www.famousfonts.com is also a good one.

11

My bad. Consider ignorance fought.