Word: schwab
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...circulating beam of protons up to velocities as high as one-third the speed of light. By focusing the penetrating but low-intensity beam on the documents and then analyzing the spray of the X rays emitted when the protons collide with atoms in the target, Historian Richard Schwab and Physicist Thomas Cahill can determine in remarkable detail the chemical composition of both ink and paper, without damaging either. That composition, they have shown, holds the key to many bibliographic mysteries...
...most dazzling success enjoyed to date by Schwab, Cahill and their colleagues is the resolution of a controversy involving the first book printed with movable metallic type. Most experts have awarded that honor to Gutenberg's two-volume, 1,282-page Bible, printed some-time between 1450 and 1455 with 42 lines of type a page. But doubts remained because of two cruder works of the mid-1400s: a rare 36-line Bible and a scrap of paper known as the Sibyllenbuch fragment, also printed in 36-line type. The question that has nagged scholars for years is whether these...
Just as remarkable, says Schwab, is that the cyclotron analysis "gets us right back into Gutenberg's original printshop, for which there are no records whatsoever. We've pretty well cracked the code of the day-to-day or page-by- page organization of the Bible." From the various physical and chemical characteristics of the printed page, Schwab has concluded that Gutenberg used six production crews and at least two presses to complete the Bible. He can even identify by page the times when different tasks were shifted around to keep the production crews busy...
...Davis, where researchers confirmed that the documents had been preserved by being soaked in salt water, probably from the Dead Sea. They also found that earlier scrolls were written in the purest carbon-based inks. But ink on the later scrolls contained elevated levels of copper. The significance, Schwab speculates, is that a change in rabbinical decree might have allowed the substitute ink to be used if none other was available...
...foreward, Said compares the monumental scope of Schwab's project to Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge. Still, in its overwhelming depth and detail and cloquently subjective vision, it surpasses even Foucault's work, which it anticipated by 19 years...