Science Friday - How Do They Actually Store The Declaration Of Independence?

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

These days, the 4th of July is known for its fireworks and cookouts. But the holiday commemorates the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most important founding documents of the United States.The Declaration of Independence, alongside the Emancipation Proclamation, the Constitution, and countless other documents, is housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Like any other museum, the National Archives doesn’t just house these items, it preserves them, protecting them from the degradation that happens over time. In March, at SciFri Live in Washington D.C., Ira spoke to two restoration experts about what goes on behind the scenes of the National Archives: Conservator Saira Haqqi and physicist Mark Ormsby. They discuss the history of papermaking in the US, changes in restoration science, and what “National Treasure” really got right.Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

How do scientists keep America's founding documents preserved for the next hundreds of years? We remove the oxygen, remove the air, and put argon in place. It helps to prevent chemical reactions that might affect the parchment surface, possibly also the ink. It's Tuesday, July 9th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm Cy-Fry producer Kathleen Davis. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and countless other documents, are stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. There's a lot of science that goes into all these items preservation.

This past March in D.C., Ira Flato spoke with two scientists who do this behind-the-scenes work. Let's take a listen. Sarah Hawke, senior conservator at the National Archives and Mark Ornsby, Heritage Scientist at the National Archives. Welcome to Science Friday, both of you. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Thank you. Now, the National Archives has 13.5 million pieces of paper. That's right. In its archives, that's billions with a B? With a B. Well, we kind of think of big flashy things like the Declaration of Independence, but what other kinds of items are there in these billions in the archives? Well, we have pension records, which are an important source of information for genealogists.

We have a huge collection of photographs, motion pictures, maps. We have one of the largest collection of maps in the world. Maps? Yes. And what about the speeches that all our politicians make and things? We preserve those as well. We have a big audiovisual collection. We have one of the largest motion picture collections, at least in the U.S.

I'm not sure if that's in the world. You know, I remember seeing the end of Raiders of the Lost Dark. Mm-hmm. They put the arc away and the archive. Is it something like that? It's right next to Rosebud. Yeah. That's very good.

Glad that reference made it through. Well, I mean, if you're taking care of something as delicate and valuable as the Declaration of Independence, does your hand sort of shake when you're realizing what you're working on? Well, that's, I'm a scientist. I'm not a conservator like Cyra. So the conservators are the ones who've been trained. They go through most of the master's degrees. You don't just walk in and start, I'm sorry, I'm quoting the movie already. You don't just conserve it, the Declaration of Independence. You know, you have to go to school for that. Oh. I kind of thought you did. Yeah. Well, in Hollywood. But yeah, it's a long, very careful. process. Do you conserve other copies of this? I mean, because, what, a half a dozen other copies were made or more of the Declaration? Did they come to you, whatever, and say, help us conserve this,

or help us store it? Well, we're a federal agency, so, you know, people consult us all the time with questions. We get a lot of questions. Someone finds a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and they've heard that, hey, somebody found this in their attic and sold it for $500,000. as well. Unfortunately, when there's typewritten text at the bottom, that's a pretty good sign. It's not the original. They'd give away all the time. Sarah, a lot of the documents you conserve are hundreds of years old. Right. And you're, you're always working with the same kinds of paper, or are there different kinds of paper that, that you work with? So that's a really good question. There's a big range. So, you know, some of our documents are actually on parchment.

So that's not paper at all. That's animal skin. And then most of what I end up dealing with is probably like 18th or 19th century paper. And that's right when there was a change in the quality of paper and in paper manufacturing. Basically, you started to, traditionally, paper was made out of cotton rag, which was real nice. You know, it's beautiful paper. If you look at like a good medieval book, like that paper will last forever, provided you don't dunk it in water. But you only had so many cotton rags. Like it was literally like rags of what people wore. Yeah.

There's a shortage of rag at one way. And there was a shortage. So in the Revolutionary War. Yes, absolutely. And so people were trying to figure out different ways of making paper. And they made paper out of like around 1800. There was a guy who printed a book on a paper made of straw, Matthias Koops, who was one of favorite because like what I guess why not and then during the Civil War or no yeah I think it was

during the Civil War there was somebody who started making paper out of um mummy wrappings because I guess mummies were cheap at the time wow to get hold off and and again why not human ingenuity is just you know um always inspirational hmm mark when you go to the national archives you always see these documents in big glass cases. What is the case, the glass, what's inside, what's the gas inside, what's going on behind that glass and in the case? Right. So the charters, as we call them, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which are on permanent display, they're in special cases where we've removed the oxygen, remove the air, and put Argonne in place with the idea that argon being an inert gas,

it helps to prevent chemical reactions that might affect the parchment surface, possibly also the ink. And that's a complicated issue because these inks, you didn't just go and buy the standard formulation. You know, people came up with their own, they threw rusty nails in,

they threw all sorts of things. So there's a big variety. So some of them turned out to be acidic and ate the papers. Some are in beautiful condition. So there's a wide range and a lot to study. Now, if this is your turn to ask questions, we have the mics down here. If you'd like to come and ask questions about conservation that's going on and how it's done is a mic in this aisle and there's a mic in this aisle. Do you have a, let me start to see who's ready. We have a questioner ready to go right here? Go ahead. How do you decide what to

conserve, what to protect, what to keep in there, and how do you coordinate with the other, like the Library of Congress, et cetera? And secondarily, what's the gender breakdown? What's the gender breakdown of what you've preserved? Because women's records were not as retained over many decades, over many centuries. So how do you focus on that as well? So that's a really good question. And it's, a question that honestly I am not the person who decides what ends up in the lab so this is a little bit

above my pay grade to be entirely honest but I think there's a lot of different aspects to consider and the National Archives is it's a federal agency it's also a research institution we're guided to some extent by

user interest I would imagine to some extent And just to get back to the second part of your question. So, yes, in some ways, like the U.S. government, most governments were not really tracking women in the same way as they tracked men's work. So that does bias archives in a certain way, and it archives a lot of collections around the globe in a certain way. But you do see, like for instance, the pension records that we were talking about, they're technically relating to the service of a soldier, but they're usually also involved the soldier's widow filing to get his pension after he passes.

And so a lot of times you'll have the signature of the women their names, or what I find it always hits me a little is you'll have a cross, you'll just have an X because whoever the person was couldn't sign her name. Or another project I've been working on a lot is the 1960s census.

And, you know, like, that's the census. So you get... You can get certain types of information from records even if maybe what they were looking to preserve at the time, because we are limited by what people in the past thought was important. And that's just always kind of going to be the problem. Like we're never going to know what's going to be important in the future.

Question from the audience, yes. Okay, Science Friday, I have a question. What is the security like in the archives? If somebody were trying to break in, what would the defense be? Well, you know, we do have these guns that come up out of the floor. No, go ahead. Mark, I think you might be better for this one. Considering my boss isn't in the audience, I'm going to say no comment. I will say we renovated the building about 20 years ago, and you can go online, you can see a YouTube video of the old vault.

And it would raise up out of the floor every morning, go back down at night. and I can just say that that was designed to show the documents they were supposed to go in it was really difficult to get them out and extremely nerve-wracking as far as the new system I'm not going to comment about that just to say that it's not nearly as terrifying as the old one there used to be talked back in the day that during a nuclear attack, the documents would automatically go into their vault. Is that correct? I've tried to track down where that came from. It's pretty impressive that a direct, you know, it went from being fireproof to being bomb proof to being nuclear proof, that being a direct hit at ground zero proof.

So I'll just leave it at that. Okay. Okay. Yes, over this side, yes, you can go ahead. What was like the most expensive or rare document that has ever been like destroyed in the restoration process? Ooh. Next question, Plains. Yeah. What was the most expensive? I'm going to give her time to think about by repeating the question. Yeah, I don't know.

I haven't heard of a document being destroyed. I think because most of the time, So I can tell you what we do to kind of make sure we don't do that. Because this is a thing. Like as a person who works with cultural heritage, you work with cultural heritage all the time. And that means that the odds of your destroying something are higher than if you did not do that. So one of the things that we do is we photograph usually if we're doing the kind of conservation treatment that will significantly change an object or has the potential to significantly

change an object, including destroying it. We photograph it usually beforehand. It is very well documented so that if it is lost, then the information that it contains is still preserved in some form. In addition to that, I didn't just take that document and dunk it into water. I tested each of the solvents that I was going to use on that document on each of the inks and media and the paper before I did anything, like as drastic as immersing it in water. This isn't foolproof

because obviously putting something into water as a whole document for a certain amount of time it's going to be significantly different from spot testing it, but it does kind of give you a sense of what might happen. Yeah, yeah, no, because you put something in my head about what you do and what you're looking at that other people have done before you 100 years from now. Do you think of 100 years before, do you think 100 years from now, they're going to look at your work and say,

what were they thinking of about preserving it? Absolutely. This is like one of the fears of the conservator that you just have to live with. Like you have to live with the knowledge that you might be truly ruining something at any given point. And one of the ways that the profession has developed to deal with this is to apply a principle of reversibility, which is to say that a lot of the adhesives we use, or most of the adhesives we use, we try to make sure that they are going to be reversible at some point that you can

take off what you just stuck on. There's the whole literature of debate around how successful this is in the field. But that is a principle that a lot of us were trained in coming up. And, you know, like, it's there. But, like, at the same time, if I clean a document, that grime ain't going back. Right. You do the best with what you have at the time. Exactly.

You do the best that you can with what you have, and you hope that you're dead before. Anyone figures out that's not. That's how I figure about my job also is, you know, do the best we can. and hope. Yes, question over here. What part about the documents that do you find the most interesting? Well, I can say just a few weeks ago we had, we were doing a multispectral imaging project, and we had the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and the Emancipation Proclamation right next to each other on the table.

and the preliminary was written in September, 1861, I believe, and then the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Abraham Lincoln a hundred days later on January 1st, 1963. I think I have the dates right. And, you know, I've been reading about them, and the focus tends to be on Lincoln's political strategy and how that fit into the war and everything, and, of course, how that affected enslaved people,

or the whole debate around slavery, but to see them on the table next to each other, which they probably haven't been next to each other like that in a long time, and I was really struck by those 100 days, that must have been a lifetime for enslaved people. Here's the promise made in the preliminary, and is it really going to happen? So that was one of the highlights.

I can't think of a better time to end this discussion with that story. Thank you very much for taking time to be with today. Mark Ormsby, Heritage Scientist at the National Archives, and Cyra Hockey, senior conservator at the National Archives. Thank you both for taking time to be with us. Thank you. And that's all the time that we have for today. A lot of folks help make the show happen this week, including...

Beth Rami. Santiago Flores. Diana Plasker. John Dancosky. Robin Kassmer. And many more. Tomorrow, we'll talk about the future of sustainable agriculture in America's heartland. But for now, I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis.

We'll catch you then.