The process of understanding what these scanned images actually mean will take some time, but Gardezi is optimistic that the findings will be impactful. Courtesy of Jacqueline Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory UNESCO’s Angelica Noh prepares a document from 15th century Korea to be scanned on the synchrotron. “We can compare that against what the scholars know about what papers and inks were being used back then,” she says. Minhal Gardezi, a PhD student in physics at the University of Wisconsin Madison, says that the ultimate goal is to see if they can get traces of the printing press itself. These images will help scientists determine whether the moveable types used on each page left any residue, which would teach them more about the original printing process. The radiation produced by the synchrotron takes a snapshot of the chemicals on the object that are invisible to the naked eye. Think of it like the X-rays taken at a doctor’s visit. The 40 Korean pages as well as 20 Western pages-including an early printing of The Canterbury Tales- have been studied using a synchrotron, a type of particle accelerator, to take fluorescence scans. They want to know what happened in the history of printing between the production of the Jikji, a Korean Buddhist document published in Heungdeok Temple in 1377, the earliest printed book on record, and the Gutenberg Bible, printed in Mainz, Germany in 1455. Courtesy of Jacqueline Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator LaboratoryĪt Stanford University in California, where physicists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory eagerly awaited Noh and her luggage, researchers are now in the process of analyzing these texts.
John, head of conservation services at Stanford University, prepares a page of the Gutenberg Bible to be scanned on the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource. Making sure that these documents made it to California safely was key, as they could reveal previously unknown history about the evolution of the printing press.ĭuring the summer of 2021, UNESCO’s International Center for Documentary Heritage (ICDH) built a team of nearly 50 people, including Noh, spanning across time zones and academic fields from physics to bookbinding preservation to study these and other historic texts to expand our knowledge of the culture and history of printing technology in the Eastern and Western worlds. The team at UNESCO in South Korea had sandwiched each page between new blank sheets of mulberry paper and then put them in individual plastic folders before placing them in the suitcase. Traveling in business class with Noh, a program specialist at UNESCO whose focus is on endangered documentary heritage, was a locked carry-on bag containing 40 irreplaceable pages from historic Korean texts, some almost 900 years old.įrom the outside, Noh’s bag was nondescript-she didn’t want to draw attention to herself-but inside, the leaves of mulberry paper were carefully packed. When Angelica Noh boarded a 12-hour flight from Seoul to San Francisco in July, she carried some unusual cargo.
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