In Washington, everyone talks about the Constitution, but the National Archives is actually doing something about it.
For nearly a half-century, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights -- the nation's "Charters of Freedom" -- have been in the care of the National Archives and Records Administration. They've been guarded with the care and diligence, the pomp and circumstance, they deserve as the nation's founding documents.
For almost 50 years now, the documents have reposed in green-filtered, airtight, helium-filled This line is longer than measure/can't be broken bronze encasements. They're displayed daily in an august marble-columned shrine under the high, soaring elegance of the half-dome Rotunda of the National Archives Building. Each night the documents descend 22 feet into a 55-ton bomb-proof vault.
More than a million Americans pass before the charters each year; most pause with a kind of hushed reverence before the parchments that bear the signatures of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, George Mason, James Madison, John Hancock and all the rest.
Now the National Archives and Records Administration is embarked on a five-year campaign to re-encase and re-install the charters. The Archives has just unveiled a manufacturer's model of the proposed encasements that they hope will assure the documents "will survive as long as the United States does."
There's no clear and present danger to the charters. The documents, in fact, have barely changed since they were soldered into their present encasements in 1952. But the Thermopane glass protecting the charters is showing its age. And new preservation techniques have come about that conservators want to incorporate into the new display.
The plan is for the charters to go into new encasements of titanium, aluminum and tempered glass that amount to the world's most highly engineered picture frames. But not until 2003. A host of tests and trials of the new enclosures remain to be done. The National Archives doesn't take many chances, though they still have to balance protection and exhibition.
"If you're not willing to take any risks," says John W. Carlin, Archivist of the United States, "then probably when the documents were stored at Fort Knox for a short period of time, that is the place where the documents should be.
"We don't buy into that theory because we think one of the values of saving these documents is for the public to have access to them."
These are the charters that undergird our democracy, Carlin says.
"Records that, yes, are old," he says, "but very much alive. Just witness the huge debate in recent weeks, constant talk about the Constitution."
No question that during the yearlong Clinton impeachment This line is longer than measure/can't be broken process, practically every utterance began with a reference to the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The Archives' determined preservation of the authentic originals ensures at least the possibility that the "references to the primary documentation are truly accurate."
The early years
Little deterioration has occurred in the 50 years the charters have been in the care of the Archives. "The problem," he says, "was the early years."
The Constitution and Bill of Rights remain quite readable, in case you ever want to check the Constitutional mutterings of your elected representatives. But the Declaration of Independence is badly faded.
"It's been displayed more and longer under uncontrolled conditions," explains Kitty Nicholson, a senior conservator.
For the first century of its existence, the Declaration banged uncertainly around the country and then around Washington. It spent about four months in Baltimore in 1776 and 1777, when Philadelphia, then the nation's capital, was threatened by the British. While it was there, Mary Katherine Goddard, the publisher of the Maryland Journal, made the the first authentic copy with all the signatures. After the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, the Declaration spent almost a year in Annapolis.
The Declaration was folded and rolled, unrolled and rerolled, copied in dubious ways and exhibited for years flooded with light, which is very bad indeed. A very popular symbol of American freedom, the Declaration was displayed throughout the 19th century with little regard for temperature, humidity or light. People simply didn't know. Somebody's even left a handprint on it, which you'll probably be able to see in the new encasements.
"Its legibility is " Nicholson sighs, searching for the words, " not good. You can read it a little bit. You can read the top large lines."
Fading of the signatures, which were written in a variety of inks, was noticed as early as 1817. At the Centennial Celebration in 1877 in Philadelphia, reporters wrote the Declaration was "faded and time-worn."
Then, for about 25 years after the 1890s, the Declaration was taken off exhibition and stored in the dark -- in a safe at the State Department. In 1924, the Declaration came back into view, installed along with the Constitution in a specially built marble and bronze shrine that still exists at the Library of Congress.
Well-preserved Constitution
The Constitution has spent a more "serene" existence than the Declaration. Residing at the State Department from just after the War of 1812 until the installation at the Library of Congress, it remains in "excellent" condition. Two hundred years after they were engrossed by the hand of Jacob Shallow, the words of the Founding Fathers are eminently readable.
The charters spent World War II at Fort Knox, Ky., with the nation's gold reserves, and that's where professional conservators first examined them.
In 1952, the National Bureau of Standards sandwiched the charters between a bed of specially made papers and their triple-layered glass shields, encased them in bronze and pumped in helium to produce an inert atmosphere in the wafer-thin universe of the encasements.
They were enclosed in wooden crates, laid on mattresses in a Marine Corps armored personnel carrier and then escorted from the Library of Congress to the Archives by a ceremonial guard, including four servicemen with submachine guns, and two tanks.
Now on the eve of their re-encasements, the charters are probably the most scrutinized documents in the world.
Deep inside the Archives building near the vault into which the documents now descend each night, Mark Ormsby, a physicist, peers at a big monitor where a gray image looks like a barren, otherworldly landscape. He's looking at a swatch of the transmittal letter George Washington signed when he sent the Constitution to Congress Sept. 17, 1787.
The image was made by a high-resolution electronic remote-sensing camera modeled on technology developed for the Hubble Space Telescope. Made by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the camera allows Ormsby and other members of the re-encasement team to examine the charters without removing their glass shields.
The camera hovers in the middle of a very accurate positioning system between the solid granite frames of a 6,000-pound table. The whole thing floats on pneumatic legs that cushion the camera from vibrations in the building or from the Metro next door.
"That's the beauty of this whole camera operation," says Alan Calmes, an archivist on the team. "The positioning system can get us back to the exact same spot where we took a picture a year or so ago."
.00003937 on an inch
A laser sensor allows them to move one micron step at a time, that's one-millionth of a meter, or .00003937 This line is longer than measure/can't be broken of an inch. The camera examines eight patches each on the four pages of the Constitution, the transmittal letter and the Bill of Rights and 16 patches on the Declaration. Each patch is a 1,024-pixel square. So they're measuring shades of gray between 0 and 1,024. In this system, incidentally, each pixel is about 30 microns.
"We're looking for any movement of the ink, loss of ink by flaking off or getting attached to the surface of the glass," Calmes says. In these 1952 encasements, the glass presses down directly onto the charters. In the new frames, there will be a space of about 3/8 of an inch between the glass cover and the document.
Ormsby flicks his images between a picture taken recently and one taken four years ago, looking for change. He sees very little.
"We've only seen one very small area where we've actually seen some ink loss since 1987," he says.
He points to a small white spot like a flake of dandruff on the tail of a Y, which may or may not be a problem area. They won't know for sure until the encasements are opened, which won't be until nearly July 4, 2003, when the new encasements are to be unveiled.
But it's the only change that has occurred in the last five decades of the 1952 encasements.
"The tricky part is deciding what's on the glass and what's on the parchment," Ormsby says. Almost everything he sees is some form of crystallization.
"We've not found any degradation of parchment," Calmes says. "Instead we've found that inner sheet of glass was forming crystals from the water vapor inside the encasements."
Parchment, which is an animal skin, needs a certain amount of moisture so it doesn't dry out; but too much can lead to the growth of fungus and other bad things. The Archives has settled on a relative humidity of about 40 percent inside the new encasements.
"I don't think anyone anticipated the glass would be the weak link," says Nicholson, the conservationist. The glass is deteriorating much faster and more noticeably than the parchment.
Archivists and conservationists worry that the alkaline crystals could react with the acid of the ink and that as the documents are raised and lowered each day there could be abrasion from the crystals. Crystallization and "grizzling," the formation of surface scratches, This line is longer than measure/can't be broken could eventually become a "cosmetic issue." You might be looking at the Charters of Freedom through a glass fog.
High-tech materials
All these issues and a lot more have been addressed by a core team of about a dozen and a half experts in everything from inert papers to the coefficient of thermal expansion of glass and metals. NASA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have contributed expertise. Outside preservationists and analysts swell the number involved in designing the new encasements to 50 or 60.
In the model being tested now, the charters will lie on a bed of inert paper -- manufactured by NIST, as the paper in the present encasements was made by their predecessor the old Bureau of Standards -- resting on a perforated platform of aircraft-grade aluminum.
They'll be covered by three layers of tempered, heat-soaked, glare-resistant glass. The frame will be cut from a single block of pure titanium. The titanium frame will be bolted to the aluminum base, so they can be opened without destroying the frame -- something that will happen when the present display cases are opened.
The aluminum base will be plated with highly polished nickel to create a "diffusion path" seal where it comes in contact with the glass. A ring of spring-like Incobel metal plated with gold or lead will provide the final seal.
The new frame will be tested with helium, which has a very small molecule that can "migrate" through glass. But when the charters are finally re-encased, the air inside will be replaced with argon, a gas with a much bigger molecule that will presumably stay put.
Among all the experts there's a pervasive sense of dealing with some of the country's "most precious documents."
No one, of course, will know everything about the precise state of the charters until the present encasements are opened.
"There's a lot of excitement about this project," says Rick Judson, the project manager for the Archives. "But there's a little apprehension too. For one thing nobody's touched these documents in almost 50 years. The other thing is you really don't get a second chance to make a good first impression. You can't fail."
You don't want to drop the Declaration of Independence, so to speak.
"We're trying to be extremely familiar [with the condition of the documents]," Nicholson says. "When we get ready to carry out the change, we'll be very well prepared. We don't want to be surprised. We want to be totally prepared for what's going on."
This, after all, is one Constitutional question that can't be appealed to the Supreme Court.
Pub Date: 3/15/99