Nicholson Baker - Double Fold - Libraries and the Assault on Paper

But this didn’t seem to cramp Shahani’s style, and presently we came to the subject of mass deacidification — another consuming interest at the Library of Congress over the past three decades. Before 1850 or so, papermakers passed their freshly made webs of paper through tubs of animal gelatin, which added the necessary ink-resisting layer to the page. But the gelatin smelled bad, and, more important, its application was a separate, costly step. Then they learned that they could pour some new liquids and powders into the pulp vat, before the material was squeeze-dried into paper, that would leave it with ink-fixing properties similar to those of gelatin sizing. They mixed in rosin, distilled (as is turpentine) from pine sap, and aluminum sulphate (alum), which helped the rosin migrate to the outside surface of the newly formed paper and stay there. This technique was called “vat sizing” or “engine sizing,” because it happened right up front in the rag engine. The alum-rosin additive worked very well, but rosin contains abeitic acid, and alum creates sulphuric acid; and those various acidities, through branching sequences of chemical reactions (with air, with water, with lignin, with bleaches, with starches, clays, and other additives) — reactions that nobody, not even Dr. Shahani, understands very well — weaken the fibrous mat of civilization-sustaining cellulose.

So, the thinking went, if you could find a way to tame the acids in books en masse, using some magical process of dipping or gassing, you would help library collections stay healthy longer — and you would get to use a great deal of very expensive machinery, besides. Beginning in the late fifties at Verner Clapp’s Council on Library Resources, and then later at the Library of Congress, there evolved a two-roads-diverged book-treatment plan: inoculate, through some sort of chemical treatment, the books that were still relatively healthy, and microfilm and destroy those beyond redemption.

The father of modern mass-deacidification was a former clothes-factory foreman named William James Barrow, whom we will meet a few chapters on. For now, we need to know only two words: diethyl zinc. Diethyl zinc (or DEZ, as it’s jauntily acronymed) was the active ingredient in a patented technique developed at the Library of Congress in the early seventies. You arrange your acid-beset books in milk crates, spine down, up to five thousand of them at a time, and stack the crates in a ten-foot-high retrofitted space-simulation chamber that bears some resemblance to a railroad tank car; then you shut the round door at the end, suck out the air, and let the miracle DEZ fog creep in. “The beauty of this process,” Chandru Shahani told me, “was that diethyl zinc, being so reactive with water, would go seek out water, wherever it is. It would just go, shoosh, just like that. It would penetrate a closed book.” If all went well, the diethyl zinc would bind with oxygen in the water and turn into zinc oxide. Zinc oxide is a mundane, mildly alkaline substance; it is used in cosmetics and as a vitamin supplement; it would remain fixed in the paper’s fibers as an “alkaline buffer,” ready to obliterate any acidity that might ripen in time.

Early on, the library hoped their ingenious invention would lead to “licensing arrangements 01to the private sector”—that deacidification would perhaps subsidize itself — but things didn’t quite work out; and as Dr. Shahani began recounting what happened at the Goddard Space Flight Center, where there were “mishaps” in 1985 and 1986, I thought I sensed Diane Kresh and Helen Dalrymple beginning to fidget. Diethyl zinc is a colorless liquid, but it is not exactly odorless — for one thing, your nose would promptly burst into flame if you opened a test tube of it and took a sniff. It is not at home in our world: it ignites instantaneously and fiercely on contact with air, and it explodes on contact with more than trace amounts of water.

During the conflagration, it releases a terrible smell. “Oh, the odor 02when it burns!” said Scott Eidt, a retired chemist who worked with diethyl zinc at Texas Alkyls in the eighties. Ahti Koski, 03who did his graduate work on the pyrolysis of diethyl zinc, reports a smell “best described as similar to burning chicken feathers in a rubber boot,” but he cautions that this might be a by-product of other reactions occuring along with the burning of DEZ. Heavily diluted (so that it will fume but not inflame), diethyl zinc functions as a polymerization catalyst — meaning that very small amounts, mixed with other chemicals, will cause some species of rubber or plastic to form out of their molecular constituents. That has been its primary civilian use.

The technical term for things that burst into flame on contact with air is “pyrophoric,” and pyrophoric substances are, naturally, of interest to the military. Richard Smith, inventor of a rival (and unpyrophoric) deacidification method called the Wei T’o process — named in honor of an ancient Chinese god who protects books from harmful forces such as bookworms, thieves, and fire — suspects that diethyl zinc was employed in the early days of the space program. “In the late fifties 04and early sixties,” Smith told me, “most of America’s rockets didn’t get off the launching pad, or they got just a few feet up in the air and they fell over. Do you remember seeing pictures of those? One after the other. I’ve always thought that the reason that they had so much trouble is that they were using diethyl zinc as their ignition material. I think that this stuff was definitely involved in our early failures in space.”

I haven’t been able to verify Smith’s launch-failure theory, but there is no question that both German and American propulsionists have experimented on and off with diethyl zinc since the thirties, putting a slug of it near the outgoing nozzle to kindle a blastoff, or squirting a little into a ramjet engine to give their payload a high-altitude boost and increase its range. Ballistic-missile engineers 05at places like Rocketdyne, Aerojet, and the University of Texas tested diethyl zinc and other hypergolic 06fuels — that is, fuels that light themselves. According to Robert McComb, one of the scientists who worked on the deacidification process at the Library of Congress, “Diethyl zinc had been used back in the sixties in some rockets for air augmentation and things like that, but it — um, I’m getting into confidential information — but anyway it was not publicized per se.” Before moving to the library, McComb was employed by the Allegheny Ballistics Laboratory, a Navy-owned missile- and ordnance-testing center operated by Hercules, Inc. (manufacturer of TNT, missiles, bombs, tanks, black powder, and what-have-you); Hercules and Stauffer Chemical were co-owners of Texas Alkyls, the chemical factory that made the library’s diethyl zinc.

Hawley’s Condensed Chemical Dictionary says that diethyl zinc is a “high-energy aircraft and missile fuel” 07—but missiles were just the beginning. U.S. troops have used DEZ to create firewalls, according to an Army scientist at Fort Belvoir, Maryland, by the name of Divyakant Patel. “During the war,” 08Patel told me (he didn’t make clear which war) “when they want to separate out one section from another section, they can throw this vapor in the air, just like creating a screen, a big screen of fire.” Patel has himself recently experimented with diethyl zinc: using a hypodermic syringe, he filled bullets with the chemical and shot them at land mines. A few drops of DEZ, diluted in toluene, is more than enough to set TNT on fire, and the bullet hole releases the combustion pressure so that the mine doesn’t explode — or at least not quite so violently.

Dr. Allen Tulis, current chairman of the International Pyrotechnics Seminar (where investigators in the fields of combustion, explosion, and flame propagation gather every year to share their research), has worked with diethyl zinc on and off for decades and knows its behavior as well as anyone. In the sixties, as a researcher at the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, a not-for-profit contractor that does weapons testing and development for the Department of Defense, Tulis found diethyl zinc’s properties useful in his “encapsulated flamethrower,” which was later weaponized, to use the military’s verb, for the U.S. Army. Previous to Tulis’s work, soldiers operating flamethrowers didn’t survive very long in battle, because the plumes of fire revealed their whereabouts and they were quickly shot. An encapsulated flamethrower, 09so I gather, launched frangible capsules containing diethyl zinc. When they hit their target and broke, the capsules created the sort of deflagrational mayhem that was produced by a standard flamethrower, but without betraying the thrower’s location.