In general, making a digital version of printed material is a good thing, because then you can search it and share it and enlarge the type and do other useful things.
What you can’t do with a digital version, however, is use X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to analyze a 147-year-old priority fight over synthetic dyes. To do that, as was discovered by Mary Kate Donais, an analytical chemist and professor at Saint Anselm College, requires the power of the original search engine: Library archives.
“It was a little surprising,” she admitted.
The archives in question are deep in the basement of the college’s Geisel Library, which sounds like it should be dark and gloomy but is actually a clean, well-lighted place. Among the hundreds of bound volumes of periodicals on the basement’s many, many shelves can be found every issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
As Donais tells it, this story began when a colleague was killing time in the archives, as one does when you are a researcher. Out of curiosity she decided to look at the very first issue of one of the most prominent journals in the field, printed in 1879. Unexpectedly, amid the pages were cardboard sheets holding samples of fabric dyed various colors.
The colleague knew that Donais’ research focus is cultural heritage analysis, including work on fiber analysis using tools such as the X-ray spectrometer, which can tell what elements were used in dyes without having to damage the fabric by hitting them with X rays and seeing what bounces back. “She thought, ‘Mary Kate would want to know about this. I will take it back to her!'” said Donais.
Dyes were big business
Dyes using natural material like plan ts date back to antiquity but it wasn’t until after 1856, when a man named William Perkins created mauve through one of those happy accidents which litter the history of science, that chemists were able to make dyes in the lab using other materials, often petroleum.
GEOFF FORESTER / For the Monitor
This was cutting-edge science but it was also lucrative, since clothing manufacturers spent big bucks for new colors and cheaper, more durable dyes. That produced, as you might expect, a lot of arguments about who discovered which dye.
One of those debates was over who first produced a dye called anthrapurpurin, the topic of that 1879 article written by Henry Morton, a famous scientist of his day. The magazine included two sets of five fabric samples, each made using the methods described by the two competing claimants, and the different colors bolstered Morton’s belief that Perkins had been first. “The swatches of dyed test cloth accompanying this paper, as illustrations, speak for themselves,” he wrote, as described in an article in the July issue of Chemical and Engineering News.
However, the article didn’t give details about the process for creating the fabric swaths. That’s not surprising: Scientific habits were different back then and dye “recipes” were often kept secret. Donais realized that samples preserved for 140 years can provide a window into their creation and indirectly into the creation of modern chemistry.
Donais examined the fabric blocks and found that they were created with distinct processes. But was Morton right? That will be revealed in an article published by a team including analytical chemist Thomas Tauge.
More importantly for Donais and others interesting in scientific history is the realization that fabric samples were often included in early chemical journals, for reasons that aren’t always entirely clear. It might have been a form of indirect advertising of a lab’s accomplishments.
The team has been hunting down swaths in journals saved in other university library archives, casting light on the history and development of a technology that shapes almost everything we do.
And they’re also giving thanks to librarians who maintain all those copies of old journals in storage areas around the globe. Because not all of them do.
“I reached out to Royal Society of Chemistry’s librarian about this,” said Donais. “He only had access to the digital copies.”
