MADE LEGIBLE AGAIN

Timaru Herald, Volume CL, Issue 22063, 9 September 1941, Page 6

MADE LEGIBLE AGAIN

BLITZED ROYAL AUTOGRAPHS LONDON. July 12. Signatures of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in a book reduced to ashes by Nazi incendiary bombs have been made legible again by a new chemical process discovered by research chemists of London’s Metropolitan Police Laboratory. The autographs were written in 1883, when the Royal pair were Prince and Princess of Wales, in the visitors’ book of the City of London College, which since 1884 has been giving business training to young men and women employed in the City of London, many of whom have lately emigrated to the Dominions and Colonies.

Razed to the ground one night by incendiary bombs, the College lost all its possessions, yet resumed work next day in loaned premises without even a sheet of notepaper.

The blackened remains of its treasured visitors’ book were sent to the Police Laboratory when the page bearing the Royal signatures was treated with chloral hydrate in a 25 per cent, alcoholic solution and dried at 60 degrees Centigrade. After repeating this several times, a mass of chloral hydrate crystals formed on the surface, and at this stage a similar solution, containing 10 per cent, glycerine, was applied and the paper dried as before. It was then photographed, and the result was excellent. The process, which needs no special apparatus, is proving of great value when important documents in ink, typescript or print, are burned by enemy action.