Deciding what to bury under Baltimore's Washington Monument for the next century or so took only a matter of days.
When Michael Raphael saw the scaffolding go up around the 178-foot column for a $5.5 million restoration project last year, he asked the Mount Vernon Place Conservancy for permission to climb it with his company's 3-D scanning equipment to document the condition of the first president's statue at the top.
Then construction workers in February discovered the cornerstone six feet underground and conservationists opened the 200-year-old time capsule to find jars containing old newspapers, coins, an image of Washington and a copy of his farewell speech.
Those have been removed to be preserved, so Raphael offered to replace them with 3-D printed, metal-cast prints of the statue — a 2015 relic that would also show future historians the rate of the marble statue's weathering. The cornerstone will be reburied this week.
"Being a native Baltimorean and coming through the city and seeing that scaffolding up there, it was something I felt very important about, to utilize our 3-D scanning technologies to go up, scan and capture George Washington to be able to preserve him for the future," Raphael said. "When they unearthed the cornerstone and realized they were going to put it back and needed something to put in it, we volunteered the idea of putting in 3-D printed versions of George."
Scanning the statue and creating the prints cost roughly $10,000, said Raphael, president of Owings Mills-based Direct Dimensions. Raphael said the work was done pro-bono.
The prints are mini versions of the head, the bust, the full torso and the hand, holding his resignation as Continental Army commander-in-chief after the Revolutionary War at a ceremony at the Maryland Statehouse in 1783. Gaithersburg-based NextLine Manufacturing printed them in nylon, and Halethorpe-based RePliForm electroplated them in copper and nickel.
The hand print is hollow, made to contain a letter that will explain when the initial cornerstone capsule was found, what was previously inside it, the condition of the statue in 2015 and how the 3-D prints were made, according to Lance Humphries, the chairman of the conservancy's restoration committee.
A depiction of Washington was inside the time capsule, so replacing them with the prints of the president's face and torso would be keeping with that theme, said Cathy Rosenbaum, of the conservancy.
"This is our way of giving a contemporary likeness," she said.
Direct Dimensions has scanned airplanes, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., the USS Constellation and the National Aquarium in Baltimore. The 3-D digital scans are an uninvasive way of drawing blueprints for architects and engineers, Raphael said.
"Advances in printing technology in 1815 were important to the original cornerstone folks who put it together, so this is a kind of neat repeating history of what printing means today in 2015," Humphries said.
And while 3-D printing is just beginning to gain widespread recognition, the method will be long outdated in a century or more when the cornerstone time capsule is next discovered.
"In several hundred years, it'll be a marvel to figure out how that stuff was made," Raphael said.
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