08. “During the war”: In 1944, the Army was considering the use of pyrophorics, but they had not yet proved “of practical value.” “They are difficult to control and constitute a great storage hazard,” wrote Brigadier General Alden H. Waitt of the Chemical Warfare Service. “However, there are a number of substances that ignite spontaneously on contact with the air, and methods may be devised for making practical use of them.” Gas Warfare: Smoke, Flame, and Gas in Modern War, 2d ed., Fighting Forces ed. (Washington, D.C.: Infantry Journal, 1944), p. 52.
09. “encapsulated flamethrower”: Interview with Allen Tulis, April 4, 2000. Later, the Air Force picked up on the idea of a pyrophoric flame weapon, adapting it for air-to-ground use, but they chose a slightly less reactive compound called triethyl aluminum in place of diethyl zinc. Triethyl aluminum also bursts into flame on contact with air, but it’s cheaper. Tulis worked on chemical demining and fuel-air explosives, as well.
10. rupture eardrums: For a description of blast injuries related to fuel-air explosives, see United States Department of Defense, “Clinical Presentation of Primary Blast Injury,” Virtual Naval Hospital, www.vnh.org/EWSurg/ch05/05ClinPresPrimBlast.htm (viewed September 25, 2000).
11. its own voraciously combustive chemistry: See G. von Elbe and E. T. McHale, Annual Interim Report: Chemical Initiation of FAE Clouds, report by Atlantic Research Corporation to Bernard T. Wolfson, Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C. contract no. F49620-77-C-0097 (Washington, D.C.: Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1979). The report is marked “Approved for public release; distribution unlimited.” Von Elbe was a bomb designer with a Ph.D. from Berlin; he wrote a paper on “The Problem of Ignition” in the Fourth Symposium (International) on Combustion (Combustion and Detonation Waves), held at MIT in 1952 (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1953).
13. Dr. John Lee: Much of the Air Force’s FAE research is still restricted; Dr. Lee, however, holds a relevant unclassified patent. John H. Lee, “Chemical Initiation of Detonation in Fuel-Air Explosive Clouds,” U.S. patent no. 6,168,123 (December 1, 1992), which lists diethyl zinc as one of the liquid initiators.
CHAPTER 13 — Getting the Champagne out of the Bottle
01. a grant from the Counciclass="underline" Nancy E. Gwinn, “CLR and Preservation,” College and Research Libraries 42:2 (March 1981).
02. unhappy time at a pesticide company: Kelly told me that the plant would get a boatload of white arsenic from Europe and make a big pile of it in a warehouse. Then, in the heat of summer, managers would hire men off the street to shovel it into the reactor to make pesticides like calcium arsenate and lead arsenate. The men “were sweating like pigs, and they’d get arsenic dust all over them,” Kelly said. “Inside of about two weeks, they’d be unable to work because of arsenic poisoning. The plant said, ‘It’s okay, just go ahead and work, you won’t get hurt.’ Finally they couldn’t work any more so they just laid them off and got some more in.” Kelly left the company after nine months.
03. thirty and seventy pounds of liquid DEZ: The DEZ was initially diluted with a solvent (which “provides increased safety in the handling of the agent,” according to Williams and Kelly’s patents) but later used in its undiluted, neat form. John C. Williams and George B. Kelly, Jr., “Method of Deacidifying Paper,” U.S. patent nos. 3,969,549 (July 13, 1976) and 4,051,276 (September 27, 1977).
04. “thoroughly acidified”: John Williams, phone interview, April 2000.
05. General Electric was lukewarm: GE was “unwilling to take the risk of an incident with the chemical diethyl zinc.” Carolyn Harris, “Preservation of Paper Based Materials: Mass Deacidification Methods and Projects,” in Conserving and Preserving Library Materials, ed. Kathryn Luther Henderson and William T. Henderson (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 67.
06. “small air leaks”: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Book Preservation Technologies, OTA-0-375 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), p. 30. One GE worker burned his arm when some diluted DEZ “dripped on his skin from piping that he was cleaning.” The injury did not require hospitalization (p. 73).
07. “we have demonstrated”: George B. Kelly, Jr., “Mass Deacidification,” in Preservation of Library Materials, ed. Joyce R. Russell (New York: Special Libraries Association, 1980). In the discussion that followed this paper, Kelly was asked whether other conservation labs might adapt an existing vacuum-drying chamber to treat books using DEZ. “It is possible,” Kelly wrote, “but you are going to have to have some extremely good engineers and extensive modifications of the chamber. You cannot afford one mistake. One mistake and you have a disaster on your hands. Proceed with caution.”
08. “400 to 600 years”: W. Dale Nelson, “Space Technology Used to Prolong Life of Books,” Associated Press, May 23, 1982, Nexis.
09. “at least five million volumes”: “Conquest of Brittleness, the Ruin of Old Books,” The New York Times, August 8, 1984, sec. B, p. 8, late city final edition, on microfilm. In a 1990 Times article on deacidification, Malcolm Browne, the great war journalist, apparently divided 77,000 by 365 days in order to come up with a fresh-seeming number: “At a rate of more than 200 volumes a day, books in the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, are turning to dust. But after a decade of research, accidents and administrative delays, the library reports that it is about to take a major step toward stopping the rot.” Malcolm W. Browne, “Nation’s Library Calls on Chemists to Stop Books from Turning to Dust,” The New York Times, May 22, 1990, p. C1.
10. “handling of diethyl zinc”: Library of Congress Information Bulletin, April 23, 1984; quoted in Karl Nyren, “The DEZ Process and the Library of Congress,” Library Journal, September 15, 1986.
11. “no known safety risks”: Daniel Boorstin, “Letter to the Honorable George M. O’Brien, Member of Congress [Transmitting] Statement on the Library of Congress’s Diethyl Zinc Gas Phase Book Deacidification Process,” July 10, 1984, quoted in a footnote to Smith, “Deacidifying Library Collections.”
12. weapons procurers: The library’s secretiveness and its unwillingness to document its experiments in peer-reviewed journals are discussed in Jack C. Thompson, “Mass Deacidification: Thoughts on the Cunha Report,” Restaurator 9:4 (1988).
13. 113 degrees: Glenn Garelik, “Saving Books with Science,” Discover, March 1983.
14. “self-sustaining and uncontrollable”: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 25.
15. The results were “mixed”: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, pp. 31, 42–43.
16. Thus many of the stacked books: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, pp. 42–43.
17. “Cause of odor a mystery”: Kenneth E. Harris and Chandru J. Shahani, Mass Deacidification: An Initiative to Refine the Diethyl Zinc Process, Library of Congress Preservation Directorate, October 1994, lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/deacid/proceval.htm (viewed September 20, 2000).
18. “a Library of Congress representative”: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center, Accident Investigation Board Report of Mishaps at the Deacidification Pilot Plant, Building 306 on December 5, 1985, and February 14, 1986, James H. Robinson, Jr., Board Chairman (September 4, 1986), p. 96.