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CCI Newsletter, No. 33, May 2004
Preservation Study of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights
by Gregory Young, Senior Conservation Scientist, Conservation Processes and Materials Research
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The British parliament passed the Stamp Act in
March 1765. Intended to help pay for the global Seven
Years War that Great Britain had just won and to help
keep an army in the Americas, this new tax on paper and
documents precipitated growing sentiment against British
rule and foreran another decade of political and economic
conflict. The open hostilities that eventually broke out
in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, set the American
Revolution in motion. On July 4, 1776, a year after the
war began and weeks before 30,000 British troops sailed
into New York harbour, a majority of the 13 colonies adopted
the Declaration of Independence; by July 19 it was unanimous.
In September 1787, four years after the signing of the
Treaty of Paris that officially ended the war, the Constitution
of the new United States was adopted. At the First Congress
of the new republic in 1789, the Bill of Rights comprising
the first 10 amendments to the Constitution was drafted
to allay long-standing concerns about potential future
violations to individual freedoms.1
These three parchment documents comprise the Charters of Freedom of the United
States of America. For 50 years, ending in 2001, the individual pages of the
Charters were sealed in hermetic glass cases in a humidified helium atmosphere. For
most of those years, the three, including just pages one and four of the
Constitution, were on display in the Rotunda of the National Archives Building in
Washington, DC.
On July 5, 2001, the Charters were removed from the
Rotunda during major renovations. Microscopic crystals and liquid droplets had been
detected by microscopy in 1987 on the inside surface of the original glass cases.
During the following eight years, the cases and parchments were monitored for any
change using the Charters Monitoring System developed by the Image Processing Lab of
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The conclusion reached was that the crystals and
droplets were the result of glass deterioration. Therefore, during the renovations,
the parchments were removed from their degraded cases, examined and placed into
newly designed encasements that employ a humidified (45% RH) argon atmosphere held
at 19°C. Rededication of the Charters in the renovated Rotunda took place on
Constitution Day, September 17, 2003. The seven new cases were built by the National
Institute of Science and Technology; six for the Charters and one for the
Transmittal page of the Constitution. Unlike the old cases, the new ones can be
re-opened to examine the parchments if and when necessary.
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CCI participated in examining the Charters' parchment. Conservators at the
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requested that thermal
stability (shrinkage temperature) measurements be taken from microscopic samples
to determine the current state of the parchments' preservation. The work included
studying any detectable difference in stability between the pages that had been
on display during the past 50 years and those that had not. As well, the effect of
the iron gall ink used to handwrite the documents was studied.
Sample quantities were, of course, severely limited. This presented real
challenges both for the measurement technique and for sample preparation. In
response, CCI began redeveloping much of the technology. The short article
"Quantitative Image Analysis in Microscopical Thermal Stability Measurements" in
CCI Newsletter No. 31 (June 2003) described just one of the current
three methods that use combinations of computer algorithms to obtain numerical
data from microscopical images of the parchment samples.
Just as egg whites change during cooking from clear and fluid to white and solid
because of heat-induced protein denaturation, the collagen fibres in the parchment
samples shrink up to 70% in length because of denaturation. Each of the three methods
teased out data on this shrinkage phenomenon from 220 time-lapse digital images taken of
the fibres in each sample. The images were collected as the samples denatured and shrank
during heating in the microscope. What is significant in the data is that the
temperature range within which the shrinkage occurs depends on the degree of chemical
and physical deterioration in the fibres. Lower temperature ranges indicate greater
levels of deterioration.
At this writing, the project has produced over 100 gigabytes of image data, which are
currently being used to determine the starting temperature of fibre shrinkage by the
three methods. Early on, during examinations at NARA, initial results helped set limits
to handling and to designing potential treatments. When completed, the project will also
establish benchmark values for the parchments to which any new measurements can be
compared in future studies monitoring change over time.
Meeting the demands in the Charters project for improved precision and accuracy in
the measurement technique has allowed CCI to renew this avenue of broad practical
research on collagenous materials. Above all, the project gave CCI the extraordinary
opportunity and privilege to make a contribution to the preservation of some of
history's most significant documents espousing democracy.
- The Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights owe much to the deliberations of
George Mason, the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776). The ideas
expressed concerning inalienable individual rights arose during the Age of Reason and
contributed to popular revolutions on two continents in the late 1700s.
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