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

Diethyl zinc is one of a class of tricky organometallic compounds called metal alkyls; it grabs any available oxygen atoms, including those in cellulose and in human tissue, and uses them to create fire. Tulis recalls one time when some droplets of diethyl zinc blew out of a prototype flamethrower capsule and splattered onto his lab notebook, scorching the pages. “It’s very dangerous,” Dr. Tulis says, “because if you spill a few drops on your body somewhere, it will eat right into the flesh, and you can’t really stop it. It continues to react with moisture and your flesh as it eats into your body.” Chemists have on occasion been badly burned — as have enemy troops, presumably.

In the seventies, bomb designers also saw possibilities in DEZ, as they searched for a suitable “initiator” to employ in a fancy new kind of fuel-air weapon. The old fashioned fuel-air bombs, used in Vietnam and much later in Iraq, blew out a cloud of fuel into the air above a target and then, using a second, delayed charge (or a cluster of charges), lit the cloud. The result was a doughnut-shaped firestorm accompanied by a high-pressure shockwave that could be substantially more destructive than that created by a conventional bomb — an “overpressure” closer, in fact, to that produced by a small nuclear detonation. Fuel-air bombs were used to clear landing zones for helicopters (they could blow a stand of trees flat), to clear minefields by triggering all the mines, and simply to kill or stun people in quantity. Even for those who escaped the worst effects of the blast, the shock wave’s implosive undertow could rupture eardums, 10collapse lungs, and cause a bubbling in the blood similar to a deep-sea diver’s case of the bends.

The military wasn’t completely satisfied with these fuel-air bombs, however. In 1979, the Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research funded a workshop at McGill University in Montreal in which scientists from Atlantic Research Corporation and elsewhere discussed possible ingredients for a “FAE III” (that is, a third-generation Fuel-Air Explosive bomb) — a weapon whose fuel cloud would be lit as it expanded not by small secondary explosives, but by its own voraciously combustive chemistry. 11Dr. John Lee, 13a scientist at McGill, experimented with a number of compounds, including triethyl aluminum and diethyl zinc, as potential initiators and shock-wave amplifiers for this new bomb. Lee recalls an unsettling incident in his laboratory. A holding tank was supposedly empty, but in fact it still contained a tiny amount of diethyl zinc. “We thought it was completely, completely gone,” Lee told me; but when air was allowed to enter the test chamber where the tank sat, there was a “small explosion.” Diethyl zinc is, Lee said, “really wicked stuff.” If he heard that someone was playing around with hundreds of pounds of it, “it would scare the hell out of me.”

The Library of Congress was playing around with hundreds of pounds of it. Their aim was to build a processing facility that would deacidify a million books per year: to do that, they would need about forty-five thousand pounds of their fractious agent — three percent of the weight of the books, assuming that an average book weighs a pound and a half. Every five-thousand-book run would require between two and three hundred pounds of vaporized diethyl zinc: the word “sobering” comes to mind. (Compare this to the manufacture of plastic or rubber, where to make, say, twenty tons of your final product you might need a single pound of diethyl zinc intermingled with other catalysts and a non-pyrophoric solvent such as hexane.) The scientists’ task was made more complicated by the fact that DEZ, as it reacts with water, produces quantities of ethane, which is flammable. I described the deacidification process to Allen Tulis. “Ethane is a very good fuel,” Tulis said. “Now the problem I see there is: How do you discharge this material [the diethyl zinc and ethane] and properly neutralize it? Because you’ve got the makings of a fuel-air in there. If the vacuum would be breached and air would blow into the system, you’d have a humongous explosion.” The library had in effect designed a large fuel-air bomb that happened to contain books.

The strangeness of the idea seems not to have troubled the scientists’ sleep, however. There were two principal developers of the DEZ process: Dr. John Williams, the library’s head of the Research and Testing Department, who had designed water filters and had made an improved inflatable rubber bag during the war (a bag used for gluing helmet liners into Army helmets); and a quiet, deliberate man named George Kelly, Jr., whom Williams hired in 1971, with the help of a grant from the Council 01on Library Resources.

Kelly had a B.A. in chemistry from the University of Maryland; during World War II, he taught recruits at the Army’s Chemical Corps School how to fire 4.2-inch chemical mortars. He did some research on floor tiles and had an unhappy time at a pesticide company, 02and then moved to Westvaco, where he tested the methods of refining trona to make bicarbonate of soda (trona is a kind of rock mined deep below Wyoming) and was part of a team that made a couple of hundred thousand pounds of a rocket fuel called hydrazine. In the sixties, Kelly moved to Union Carbide, where he experimented with water-soluble polymers as paper coatings. “I’m pretty much a problem solver,” Kelly said. After Union Carbide canceled his project, Kelly wrote John Williams and asked if there was a job for him at the Library of Congress.

Williams liked Kelly’s work on paper coatings, and assigned him the job of testing potential agents for deacidification. Kelly was willing — in fact, he did so much work with a pungent group of compounds called amines that his sense of smell was destroyed. After a few years, he and Williams together narrowed their search down to diethyl zinc, which they ordered in quart bottles from Texas Alkyls. With a hypodermic syringe, Kelly sucked some DEZ from the bottle and quickly plunged the needle of the syringe into a cork; to start a test run, he stabbed the needle through a rubber gasket in the crypto-pressure-cooker that held five or six test books and gave them a shot. The library’s safety officer was not happy with these experiments, according to Kelly. “You’re going to burn our library down!” the officer would say. “No, I’m not,” Kelly would answer. Recalling an early visit from Kelly, Scott Eidt, the chemist from Texas Alkyls, told me: “We made a joke of it, because of what he was going to do. We’d call it ‘book burning.’ ”

Williams and Kelly, both intelligent applied scientists with no practical knowledge of traditional book conservation, got their first diethyl-zinc patent in 1976. Kelly convinced a somewhat doubtful manager at General Electric’s aerospace unit to let them use a vacuum chamber in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for some early tests. Each test, performed on lots of four hundred books, consumed between thirty and seventy pounds of liquid DEZ. 03The testing proceeded without any scares, except once when Texas Alkyls shipped the wrong colorless liquid: scientists unknowingly filled the vacuum chamber with it, leaving the books “thoroughly acidified.” 04

There were problems with the process, though — book covers decorated with rainbow-colored auras of zinc-oxide residues, binding adhesives weakened, papers darkened, scorched, or bad smelling — and the penetration of the acid-neutralizing vapor was incomplete in many cases. Treated books also proved to be more sensitive to light damage than untreated papers. General Electric was lukewarm 05about the project, and it and the library parted ways in the late seventies — which was just as well, since the GE chamber had “small air leaks” 06anyway. But by 1980, an optimistic Kelly announced that the process was “now ready for commercial use.” He warned, however, that diethyl zinc was “extremely hazardous” and must be used only in an industrial setting by trained personnel. But, he said, “we have demonstrated 07it can be used successfully and safely to treat books.” Neither Kelly nor anyone else at the library alluded to the missile-propulsive and incendiary incarnations of their chosen chemical: it was described as a polymer catalyst, tout court. “We deliberately stayed away from so-called military uses,” one former Library of Congress scientist told me.