INDUSTRY NEWS

Ions ago

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are using a tabletop blower from Ion Systems to help them preserve papyrus scrolls dating from before the birth of Christ. The scrolls were discovered stuffed inside crocodile mummies during an archaeological expedition sponsored by the university in 1899. Offerings to the Egyptian god Sobek, the documents include legal papers and literature by Homer and Sophocles.

In the early 1930s archivists at UC Berkeley sealed the scrolls in Vinylite, a flexible plastic material. The Vinylite has yellowed, and acid from the tape used to seal the plastic has stained the delicate documents, which have deteriorated from handling.

Armed with a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the university plans to transfer about 400 of the estimated 20,000 scrolls to glass frames, photograph them, and put the photographs on the Internet. However, the scientists soon discovered that exhuming the documents from the yellowing Vinylite sleeves created a static charge that can cause the documents to rip.

Ion Systems, a hometown vendor of ESD-control equipment, has now installed an ionizing blower with its fan set at low speed to neutralize the static, enabling the Berkeley scientists to easily peel the plastic off the documents.

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