On December 5, 1985, Dr. Anand Apte, one of Northrup’s senior project engineers, was nearing the end of the first test cycle of the new plant in NASA’s Building 306. There were no books in the chamber. Apte couldn’t tell how much diethyl zinc was left inside—the temperature gauges were reading cold, indicating the presence of a liquid, but they weren’t reliable. At 6:45 A.M., hoping to neutralize whatever was left, he opened a valve and allowed some water in. The door of the vacuum chamber blew open. “Shortly after the water injection,”21 according to the mishap report, “Dr. Apte observed flames shooting out of the chamber door and immediately vacated the building.” The walls and ceiling were charred; the chamber door and O-rings had fire damage; the sprinkler system went off.
Yes, it was bad, but not horrible, and the library was determined to get the system purged and proceed—a congressional appropriations-subcommittee meeting was on the calendar for the end of February 1986. (“[Name whited out] has been applying pressure22 to get the job done even after the December 5, 1985 incident,” reads the NASA report.) Before NASA had completed its investigation23 into the accident—the agency was in turmoil anyway after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle on January 28, which also involved hypergolic fuels—a “disenchanted” electrician24 was called in to make some repairs to the DEZ delivery system, and workers cleaned the inside of the reaction chamber. Not all the diethyl zinc had been consumed in the fire, as it turned out; a substantial volume25 still lurked in the complex of delivery pipes and brine-seal tanks. (Afterward, in a weighing of a supply tank, seven hundred and thirty pounds of the chemical were unaccounted for.) A jet of “black goop”26 spurted from one valve on February 11, 1986; the next day, a copper elbow pipe27 was discovered to have mysteriously straightened. Other plumbing was too hot to touch.28 Northrup did not inform NASA29 of these anomalies. On February 14, at a signal from one of his colleagues, the hapless Dr. Apte pressed a switch to open valve V-303. The pressure gauge spiked, there was a boom and a flash, and (said the NASA report) “the walls were blown apart,30 and the two doors leading into the room were blown off.” The NASA report theorizes that something pyrophoric happened in one of the vapor condensers: “The violence of the explosion31 suggests a mixture of DEZ and water (brine) or air resulting in a rapid overpressurization of the condenser and subsequent rupture of adjacent piping and blower housing.” Nobody was hurt, though.
February 20 was looming—the day of the crucial appropriations-subcommittee meeting. Daniel Boorstin was planning to make a cri de coeur for more money. Meanwhile, engineers from Texas Alkyls were flown up to take a look at the situation in Building 306; they noticed, among other things, that there were no relief valves32 to vent trapped fluids in the piping. And the piping itself wasn’t going to hold forever—the DEZ was attacking the seals, and there was a thought that it could even react with the metal oxides in stainless steel. NASA, unable to figure out how to drain all the abscesses safely, called Welsh and said, “We’re going to blow it.”33 Welsh was upset. He offered to go in himself, wielding an infrared camera, escorted by armored vehicles34 if need be, to locate pressure spots. But NASA said no.
On Thursday the twentieth, the congressional subcommittee was called to order. Daniel Boorstin, a chronic bow-tie-wearer who could really crank it out when he needed to, told the members that the “vast and unprecedented cuts35 in the Library’s budget” were “dangerous, and could become tragic for our nation, the Congress, and the whole world of learning.” (The library was being asked to cut about seven percent.) Boorstin was not an alarmist, he told them—far from it. His library had, he hoped, acquired “a reputation for honesty and conservatism” in its budgetary requests. The current crisis “has not been created by inexpertise, neglect, waste, indolence, or dishonesty in the Library of Congress.” No—the crisis was created by Congress. “We will fail in our duty to our posterity,” Boorstin said, “if we do not hand on to them the fully stocked, properly organized treasure of wisdom of the past which it has taken us two centuries to accumulate.”
The next day, an Army demolition unit drove over from Fort Meade. Welsh wanted to be there, but he wasn’t allowed to watch. Half a million dollars worth of pilot-plant piping was, to quote the NASA report, “disassembled by means of shaped36 explosives.” There was a whoomp37 and a surprisingly large fireball. The DEZ bomb had finally gone off.
The marvel is, though, that even this disaster wasn’t the end of the program. Leading off a rather grim discussion of diethyl zinc before the subcommittee in 1987, Boorstin said that “there has never been an important38 technological advance that was not controverted by people who had rival schemes or who didn’t think any scheme should be pursued.” There were still large sums to be spent—including over a million devoted to forcing rats39 to inhale megadoses of zinc-oxide dust in order to demonstrate that deacidified books weren’t toxic. (The library had already paid to have rats gassed with a mixture of diethyl zinc and hexane vapor—the tests were “inconclusive”40 because it wasn’t clear which of the two poisons killed the animals.) What were a few rodents, though, when all of written history was on the brink of disaster? Peter Sparks was a very determined man, and William Welsh’s pride was also on the line. The two of them had been talking up DEZ for years as one of the library’s two top-priority projects (the other was the optical-disk program41)—it just had to work.
The first step was to muffle the NASA disaster with some confusing specificity. “On Friday, February 21,”42 said the Library of Congress’s Information Bulletin several weeks after the fireball, “the line cutting charges were set off opening the pipes. Liquid diethyl zinc in the lines spilled out and burned for about 30 seconds and the wood structure burned for about one hour, causing considerable damage to the temporary building frame, walls, and roof that was over the chemical delivery section of the test facility.” The second step was to shift blame from the library to Northrup and NASA—which wasn’t difficult to do, since the space shuttle had just blown up, and Northrup had been incontrovertibly sloppy. “The Library’s own review43 of the test facility has revealed serious design and procedural deficiencies in the prototype chemical delivery system that will be addressed and corrected in a redesign of the facility,” reported an article in the Information Bulletin in July. Welsh told the congressional subcommittee that he hadn’t known that NASA and Northrup “didn’t have the chemical processing experience.”44
Welsh himself may not have known, but surely the library’s scientific staff had reviewed the plans and signed off on them many months before the black goop began to squirt? They were the process’s inventors; they’d designed the tests; they’d seen and used the hardware; they’d been driving to the Goddard vacuum-chamber sites and fine-tuning their dream for years, longer than anyone, and they claimed that they had reduced the handling of DEZ to a matter of mere routine. If Peter Sparks and his crew didn’t have the competence to evaluate the chemical-delivery system as detailed by Northrup Services ahead of time, shouldn’t they have shown the schematics to engineers who knew how to handle large volumes of extremely dangerous gases and liquids? Offering an aerospace vendor like Northrup the job of designing the diethyl-zinc plant was like asking three heart surgeons and a urologist to design an offshore drilling platform: the probability was high that they would make mistakes.
Peter Sparks was unsinkable. He transferred the project to Deer Park, Texas; the library began paying Texas Alkyls to engineer yet another plant. Library Journal protested—“It’s Time to Dump DEZ”45 was one of their editorial headlines in the fall of 1986. The editorial’s author, Karl Nyren, suggested that, like a gambling addict, the library was unable to “abandon behavior that is manifestly unfruitful.” Nyren wrote:
Sometimes it seems that there is an epidemic of “entrapment” in government: the Sergeant York gun that, after millions spent upon it, just doesn’t work; the predilection for backing the finally discredited losers in international affairs; the loss of the Challenger. The DEZ pro
cess belongs right alongside these failures.
Neither Congress nor the library community had been told, said Nyren, “of the preponderance of evidence for the danger and unmanageability of DEZ.”46
William Welsh published a rebuttal47 in a later issue of Library Journal; he said that diethyl zinc “has for many years been used as a catalyst in the production of common plastics, including polyethylene, polystyrene, polypropylene, and polyester.” Welsh does not mention that the plastics industry, when it does use DEZ48 as a so-called Ziegler-Natta catalyst in the manufacture of polyethylene and related compounds (and it has never been commonly used), uses it in tiny amounts, in diluted form, whereas the library’s preservation factory would at full capacity consume DEZ neat and by the ton.49 Not surprisingly, there is in Welsh’s reply no breath of missiles or incendiaries. Then, to further allay fears, Welsh engages in a little semantic subterfuge: “DEZ is produced50 as a liquid, and in that form is pyrophoric, i.e., it burns spontaneously when it comes in contact with the air. When used as a deacidification agent, DEZ is vaporized into a gas in a contained vacuum environment where, as a gas, it is not pyrophoric.” Whether diethyl zinc is a liquid or a gas has nothing to do with its pyrophoricity—it burns either way. And since “pyrophoric” just means “inflames on contact with air” it is highly misleading to tell librarians that it isn’t pyrophoric in a vacuum. DEZ gas is pyrophoric in a vacuum; there just doesn’t happen to be any air around to demonstrate that fact, and the danger is that there is a world of air outside the vacuum that wants to get in. “DEZ is and always will be51 pyrophoric,” Ahti Koski wrote me.
In 1988, the newly appointed librarian of Congress, James Billington, and his senior staff—William Welsh and Peter Sparks included—greeted eminent library visitors at the brand-new $2.8 million52 Texas Alkyls deacidification plant, which could handle three hundred and fifty books at a go. Curious preservation administrators peered into the yawning vacuum chamber, and saw custom-made book carts with wire spacers, and lots of purposeful plumbing, and it all looked very scientific. “I think the safety questions53 are completely resolved,” Sparks told The Washington Post in 1988. “We now know how to use this technology and this material safely. It works very well. And we’re getting ready to scale up to a major facility that will meet our needs and also be able to treat books for other libraries.”
Trusting the Sparksian sell-job, a number of universities, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins, began sending batches of books to Texas for treatment at a cost of about ten dollars a book. But although the engineering was much better this time, the process itself failed. In 1991, Robert J. Milevski, who was then the preservation librarian at Johns Hopkins, found, on examining books that he had sent to Texas, that the effects of treatment “were so startling54 that I had to wonder why these results had not been known earlier, considering especially all the DEZ research conducted by and for the Library of Congress.” Milevski wrote:
In some cases, the physical damage to some items was so great that it required commercial rebinding, or replacement. Covering material components—binding adhesives, cloth, paper, and illustration colors and inks—were all affected to one degree or another, depending upon the items selected for treatment. Book paper cockled. All paper discolored somewhat and emanated an odor.
Out of 667 books treated by Akzo Chemical (the Dutch company which had by then absorbed Texas Alkyls), forty-four percent had some sort of damage (not counting cockling, smell, and yellowing, which was pretty much universal), and twenty-four percent might need “remedial treatment.” And some books were not deacidified, either. One of the pictures that Milevski includes illustrates what he calls the “edge-burn effect”: evidently not enough of the residual moisture had been baked out of some books; when the diethyl zinc found it, the reaction was hot enough to leave scorch marks. Peter Waters was invited to Texas once when he was head of conservation at the Library of Congress (head of conservation, not preservation—Peter Sparks was head of preservation). “While Peter Sparks and the rest were having a meeting,” Waters says, “I got taken into the site and saw one of the chambers being opened. I was totally horrified with what I saw.” He saw distorted books and books burned around the edges. There was a kind of “metallic-musty” smell.
Sparks, though, was still talking about full-scale plants in Fort Detrick, and about one-hundred-million-dollar twenty-year contracts,55 and about sending tank trucks full of neat diethyl zinc across the country. And he’d boosted his figure: he told Congress that the library hoped to treat thirty thousand books a week,56 or a million and a half books a year. That way, presumably, the plant could catch up on the Library of Congress’s own arrearage of acidity and also serve the nation. Eventually, reality took hold: doubts were pointedly expressed to James Billington; Sparks left the library in 1990. “When Billington heard about some of the problems that he hadn’t been told about, after Sparks had left, he totally blew his top,” one former employee told me. “And if you know Billington,57 when he blows his top, the foundations of the library vibrate.” Sparks is now a consultant; on a webpage for Neilsen Bainbridge, a framing-supplies company, beneath a picture of Sparks standing before some statuary, he is quoted as endorsing the Alphamat58 Artcare line of framing supplies, which feature patented life-extending “MicroChamber” technology: “Laboratory observations made on these test photographs clearly show that Alphamat Artcare inhibits yellowing and fading of these color images. With Alphamat Artcare, you achieve worry-free framing every time.” The fine print says that the matboards were exposed to nitrogen dioxide (a pollutant) “in an accelerated laboratory test that simulates 77 years of aging.”
It wasn’t that James Billington was against spending lots of money on machinery—he likes doing that. It’s just that he was more interested in mass digitization than mass deacidification. The Library of Congress’s collections were, as he told the Senate in 1994, part of the nation’s “ ‘strategic information reserve59’ that will provide the intellectual cargo on the information superhighways.” The library, he said, “hopes to contribute to the electronic future by being an exemplary catalyst for the library community more broadly in building the National Information Infrastructure.” He told the Information Industry Association that the Library of Congress was “substituting technology for paper”60 in its digitization of “key American collections.” He wanted to “get the champagne out of the bottle.” Putting old books in gas chambers was not his thing.
Even so, diethyl zinc clung to life. Something about it appealed to the scientists—its unnaturalness, perhaps, its counterintuitiveness, its racy propulsiveness, its danger. Between 1992 and 1994, Chandru Shahani (who worked at India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Center61 before he emigrated) commissioned twelve more test runs in Deer Park, Texas. By the last run, he and his coworkers felt they had beaten the stench problem: a panel of conservator-sniffers determined that “95.2 percent of the books have acceptable odors”—meaning that if you diethyl-zincked a million books a year, forty-eight thousand of them would smell bad. Better, but not great. “The tragedy is,” Shahani told me, with genuine regret, “we perfected the process just as the rug was being pulled from under the process.”
Shahani remains scornful of Northrup and NASA. In a 1994 write-up of the last twelve test runs, he and Kenneth Harris refer to the “pathetically poor engineering62 practice and design” at the NASA pilot plant. When I talked to Shahani in 1998 (seated across from Diane Kresh and Helen Dalrymple of the Public Affairs Office), he said: “I had been here long enough to see how bumbling those people were, the contractors who were contracting those tests. I don’t know if that’s how DoD contractors are or what, I don’t know. I mean, I’m saying this on tape. But I hope they aren’t like this one.” Shahani briefly detailed their lack of qualifications and explained the chemist’s responsibility to maintain mass balance in reactive processes, a responsibility not met at the NASA installation. Then he went on: “And these people were so bad. In the first place, ev
ery run that they did—I was there for five or six runs before this thing happened—every run they would do, some gauge or another would not be working. Nothing was ever a hundred percent functional. They would still go on with it.”
And then something went wrong. “Instead of pumping out from the chamber, they were pumping in,” Shahani said. “And then they sent water in there. I mean, how could you do that? I just cannot imagine that. And then NASA made it worse. They took them off. I mean, those guys at least would have been able to pump the thing out. When there was the fire, NASA said, ‘Go, you’re out of here.’ They wouldn’t let them pump it out, even. So then the diethyl zinc sat there for months—weeks, maybe, or days, I don’t remember now. But enough so that the diethyl began to react with the plumbing. It will find any moisture anywhere, the slightest amount of moisture—and all materials contain some moisture. So they had all kinds of problems, and then we lost track at that point, because we were not in the picture.”
Here Helen Dalrymple finally bestirred herself. “If we’re going to get on to anything else,” she said, with forced gaiety, “we do need to move on, because Mr. Baker needs to leave at two-thirty.”
Okay, we’ll move on—enough about diethyl zinc. Now, in a modest ongoing program, the Library of Congress pays a small company in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, to strap minor works of American poetry onto steel-finned agitators, seal them in drums that fill up with a costly inert liquid called perfluoroalkane, which is made milky by the presence of quadrillions (approximately) of very tiny magnesium-oxide particles, in which liquid the books rise and fall, turning first one way, then the other, their pages waving like pale seaweeds, until some of the magnesium-oxide particles, small as they are, tumble into declivities in the surface of the paper, where they are allegedly held in place by static electricity. After twenty minutes, a vacuum pump sucks out the carrier liquid, and the books, unstrapped and stacked on metal tables, look and feel almost as they did beforehand, except, in some cases, for a slight powdery texture to the paper.
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