How to Make It Last Forever, Part One

could save time in a bottle. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going to do a little bit of meta analysis about what it means to talk about the future, because on this podcast, a lot of times, you know, the theme is the future, but really that turns into, well, here's a scientific question that will be answered in the future, or that we're currently answering now and we'll know the answer in the future. Or here's a technology that may become more prevalent or

change the world in the future. But what about the passage of time itself? What about when we turn our attention to the changing of the guard from the past to the present to the future. And that's at the heart of our topic today, which is going to be historical preservation. Yeah, and it's going to be a two parter. Guys.

We we realized that we had really quite a lot to say about this, and we've already done a few episodes on the future of the history that we are creating today, because every day we create a new history for ourselves or the new little blipping it. Yeah, isn't that a wonderfully depressing thing to think about your life? You're just leaving little drops in the ocean of history. I think it would be more depressing to think I was leaving in history when you're like man today. Today,

I cataloged my perfume. You're welcome. Future. Is funny that we want privacy from the people who are alive today, but we want the people of the future to know everything about us. Do not notice how many public posts on Facebook? I'm like, look at these. Of course I want to be in all the and all the history books of the future. That's why you never shut your curtains. Shut my mouth do weird stuff? Yeah, you know, I

like to live out there is what I do. Okay, So so other than Jonathan's open curtains, we have talked on this show about what what the ruins of today's society might look like. Sure. Yeah, our friend Christian Sager came on the show one time to talk with us about that, about what the buildings that are out there today are going to look like in a hundred years.

Or a thousand years. You can find Christian Sager on a show called Stuff to Blow Your Mind Now with with Joe McCormick, who we are sitting in a studio with, So if you want to tune into that podcast, you can, uh we We also did a couple episodes on how we can preserve the safety of nuclear waste sites in

the future. The answer is poorly yeah, as it turns out, but mostly because of difficult political and cultural issues, not just the physical limitations right right, But today we wanted to get more in to some of those physical limitations of preserving actual objects. We wanted to talk about the future of historical preservation, how we can make lovely important cultural objects last, you know, books and films and art. Sure, so this is a problem because objects on Earth tend

to deteriorate. We witness it in our own bodies through the process of aging. We witness it. If you're a homeowner, you know, you see the condition of your house deteriorate. Overscience episode is just going to continue to depress Bate,

both an old person and an homeowner. But Jonathan, yes, there is hope because there are steps we can take that we've discovered through years of technological development to stay the advances of time, to hold back the creep of decay, and to make the things that we love last long into the future. And to be fair, we also have a greater awareness now as our modern sensibility as such that we are starting to realize more within our own

time the importance of things we create. Whereas if you look at ages past, often the things that we hold up as the artifacts of the past were the utilitarian stuff or in some cases the works of art of people who weren't necessarily thinking how can we preserve this so that future generations will have access to it? Right, Sometimes they were, but lots of times it was just kind of the ephemera of the day, and you're interested in it, But yeah, yeah, how would you have known

back then, like, who's going to be interested in this? Pot? Sure? And so although it is scientific that things fall apart, it is also scientific that we can kind of help them hold together a little bit here and there. And this might be of waited interest to the three of us sitting in this room, because we are all writers and storytellers, and so we have a especially vested interest. I would say in preserving that kind of culture, including

our own. Uh and and and it's a you know, it's a huge field, and it's one that's largely invisible to the general public because if a conservationist is doing her job really well, you never see it. You just get to continue enjoying the lovely objects that she's working with. That's a really great point. I've heard a similar thing

said about like the directors of movies. The movies that have really great direction are the ones where you don't say, I'm really noticing the direction, but yeah, let's jump right into it. If if you guys are ready, I'm curious, Like, let's say there is a beautiful oil painting. Okay, there's a beautiful oil painting. There's a beautiful oil painting hanging up in your house because you stole it from a museum, right, And you're like, okay, I know I can love this

painting better than the museum would. What a long What would you do to protect this painting, to make it last a thousand years, to make it last as long as you possibly could take it into the future. And this is something where we've developed the techniques based upon years of various collections and museums, learning the best ways to take care of these often priceless artifacts. I mean, you mean, you could argue you could put a price

on them, but they they're astronomically priced. So well. Well, Also, most of the people who created these things aren't around anymore, so you can't just ask them like, hey, can you touch this up? Yeah? Are like, hey, could you just make another? Do you still have the the exact paints that you used to create this masterpiece? Like, hey, get to work on this forest? Da Vinci? We were really lacking. I mean, I do know the guy, but he's kind

of busy. So there's certain rules that are going to come up again and again as we talk about different types of stuff we want to preserve um. And it shouldn't come as a surprise because, like Joe was saying, the stuff on Earth does degrade over time. There there are very few materials that we have that are going to withstand the ravages of time, even if you are taking the best of care with that object. Ultimately, stuff

does tend to tend towards intropyte they break down. But if you are trying to extend the life of something like an oil painting, first keep it out of sunlight in particular. Uh, don't expose it to a lot of

light in general. Yeah. Have you ever seen these scenes in a museum where somebody's trying to take a bunch of pictures of a painting with a flash camera and they say, no, no, no, no, don't do that, right, Or even older buildings, like if you go through Europe and you are walking through you'll see in castles, You'll see in in churches, cathedrals, that sort of stuff, even ones that are no longer actively being used. They'll say, don't use flash photography. Yeah, and UV light is the

worst ultra violet light in general. But but any kind of light, you know, is going to start deteriorating some of the pigments in in those paints and other materials. Right, It can cause oxidization and which ends up well, it'll make stuff fade or change color. Ultra Violet light in

particular does this. And when you think of something like incandescent lights, which most art preservationists say is the best of the choices right now, maybe LEDs, but we still have to do a little more research to make sure. But incandescence tend to be uh, the safest because they emit very little ultra violet. They do emit some, but it's not much, uh compared to say, fluorescence um which do much more. And so you don't want to have uh,

those or halogen's necessarily near your paintings. And you definitely don't want sunlight hitting those paintings because otherwise you're going to get these effects, including things like the paint drying up and flaking off or cracking, which you've probably seen if you've looked at some older paintings that have been around for a really long time. Yeah, somehow, I guess it would also be a bad idea to aim an

X ray machine or something producing gamma rays that you're painting. Well, only if you, I mean, obviously, if you want the subject within the painting to turn into the incredible Hulk, which would be amazing I hope called the Pearl Earring would be phenomenal. You know, We've had to make this point several times on this podcast, but I'll say it again. Gamma rays don't give you special powers. They just killed you.

It's true, right, unfortunate but true. Yeah, pretty much. Anyway you would get a superpower in a comic book would be would be to some degree fatal in the real world. But I'm sure there are other environmental conditions that matter absolutely. Temperature and humidity the two big ones. You want the temperature to be cool, so um, probably around the sixty five degree fahrenheit range, because anything warmer than that that's kicking up my energy bill. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean,

I guess I stole a painting. I gotta live with the consequences. I mean, if you don't care about how long it lasts, go ahead and you know, knock that back up to like seventy eight or something. No, sixty degrees fair. The reason being that that paintings are made up of a multitude of materials, right, It's not just canvas. There's the frame, there's all this other stuff, and all of those materials will expand at different rates when exposed

to warmer temperatures. So if it is exposed to fluctuating temperatures, so you know, the temperature goes up and down multiple times throughout the year, this creates a constant stress on the painting and decreases its lifespan. Oh yeah, you're you're gonna get more flaking of the paint or more separation of the chemicals in the paint or etcetera. And if you have a painting that's on linen, for example, lenin

can expand in heat. So you may have sometimes seen a painting that had looked like a fold in it, like it was a little the it looked like the frame might be too small that you needed to put it in a larger frame to stretch it out. But you should absolutely not do that because if you were to do that with a linen painting, once the temperature goes down, then the material would start to try and pull away from the frame because it was trying to move back to the shape it was before it expanded

in the heat. So you want a nice, stable, cool, relatively dry but not too dry environment. Um if it's if it's a human environment, that can mean that you could have mold growing on your painting, which is not good for the longevity of the painting. If it's too dry, it can make it's bad for things rule of thumb, and unless you're swamp thing, in which case it just adds mass. And then if you if it's too dry,

can make the material brittle. So you you have to have this kind of very delicate balancing act, which is why museums and other collection areas like you'll you'll see things in case so that they preserve a particular relative humidity to keep the material in good shape. Yeah, and you can imagine that the invention of digitally controlled HVAC systems has greatly assisted in this over the past decade or so, everything from the actual control to the sensors

of that. You you have a very good idea of what the temperature and relative humidity are at any given time, so you can make those minute adjustments or even have it programmed in as an algorithm so that it maintains that relative to the environment, so that you know you have the ideal conditions to preserve that material. Okay, but

here's an issue. I would imagine that the conditions in which we store our priceless works of art, Like if you say there's an oil painting that comes from the Renaissance, we're probably better at controlling those conditions and taking care of it today than we have ever been before. Yea,

the Italian Renaissance HVAC systems were crap exactly right. So if you had an oil painting from the Renaissance hanging up in less than ideal conditions for a long time, and it became it deteriorated, it became damaged, degraded over that time. Is there anything we can do now to

try to restore it to its more pristine state? How classically we would try to restore paintings physically by either applying more paint or trying to remove areas of damage, or even just like blueing little flakes of paint back on as they kind of fell off, and and and as you can imagine, those are very permanent ways of dealing with with a with an artwork, because that's you can't go back. Once you've added more paint onto something

that's basically it, you've changed it forever. And so it's considered unethical these days generally to do that sort of thing. The extreme cases, you can't ka homo exactly. Yeah, yeah, that's and if you don't know what that is, that's a reference to a failed restoration job. I'm nearly positive that if you are on the internet right now, you have seen it. Uh so, so you know your your options at this point if you have a damaged work of art are are either too like live with it

being damaged, put it in a closet and never displayed again. Uh, and I don't like like eat it, like just throw it away, But no, I mean, and you know, none of those are really the preferred way of dealing with something that you want to keep and enjoy. But there are some things that people are doing these days to

more safely and gently restore paintings. There was one collaborative project that was presented during the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science usually called the A A S, which is a lot it's actually it's kind of easier to say, I don't know anyway. Uh. This project was restoring paintings for display by constructing highly detailed

color correcting light arrays to be shown on the paintings. So, okay, we we've already discussed how light can be bad for paint Well, that there were these five paintings, specifically that that we're being studied hung in Harvard's Holyoakes Center since the ninet in sixties. They were Mark Rothko pieces, which are these lovely abstract expressionist kind of things, and he had happened to use a very light sensitive red pigment

in them. In just a few decades of being hung, his crimsons had faded or or changed to light blues, not not what he originally intended. So this this team reconstructed faded photographs of the original pieces and then built a compensation image that could be projected onto the paintings pixel by pixel to color correct for the areas that had been damaged. And and these are huge murals, like like nine ft tall by a bunch of feet wide.

You know, they all depend but so they can be displayed again and hopefully out of UV light, and and with with these particular arrays being as gentle as possible on the remaining paint Yeah, just as long as the room raiders don't come in. And isn't that what they do? And they've got that UV one over every thing is their filth? Here it fingers crossed that no one's doing that to too many of our priceless works of art.

But okay, so in this case, I want to know if there's filth, don't you know, if I have a priceless work of art hanging up, just let it be filthy. There's where you just say like all right, uh this I will allow. Yeah, you know, like I'm not going to put my eyeballs on it. So I'm not really that worried about its particular cleanliness. I apologize, please proceeds. It's okay, it's okay. Uh so so we so this

was this was a great project. But but the restoration was done by basically looking at these restored photographs the you know, color corrected photographs used to make colored corrected light arrays. But we don't have color photographs of every original painting on the planet. I mean, rem Brandt was a total slacker about photographing his paintings, am I right? Yeah, no,

none of that camera obscira for him. Uh so so so other teams are using scanning technologies to learn about the interior composition of paints in classic works and then digitally reproduce what they would have looked like. For example, electron spectroscopy can reveal the molecular composition of paints and and and even the damage that has been done to a painting can be used in order to help reconstruct it.

One researcher by the name of URIs Dick from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, was studying the oxidation patterns on vincent vengo a k A. Since I just said a bunch of Dutch things relatively correctly vincent fungal. That's sort of close anyway, that's how you say it. I've said it wrong my entire life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with a kind of FV at the beginning of fun,

like a baby describing a scene on the street. Then oh, he was so yours, our good buddy, yours was was was studying flowers in a blue vaz and he used micro x rays to scan and record the distribution of of this gray crust that had formed on the painting over time due to one of the yellow pigments that that van Go used. And and then he was able to three D print a reconstruction of the original surface, texture and color of the painting. Wow. Yeah, pretty amazing.

I love this idea of of of incorporating new technology to preserve the old stuff. I mean, the idea of the both the lighting of the the former painting and then using three D printing to try and replicate something that had I would have just assumed had been lost

to time is really phenomenal, really cool ideas for preservation. Yeah, and that makes me think of another area of preservation that might not be as obvious as that of the oil painting, because when you think about something like an oil painting, there you're dealing with at least probably some organic ingredients, things that are more likely to just obviously

deteriorate over time. But what about film synthetic materials. Yeah, well, this is an area where I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn how perilous the idea of film archiving and film storage is because we have lost tons of films. Oh yeah, well, and it's been beaten into us since childhood, those of us who certainly grew up in the seventies and eighties, I would say that that, you know, plastic is forever, Plastic doesn't go. Yeah,

as it turns out, that's not entirely true. The it's only true about the garbage that kills ducks. Films, on the other hand, films about ducks being killed by garbage very ephemeral. As it turns out, now they film is perishable. Plastic. Film will degrade over time, it will it will rot, and it just eventually dissolves until you no longer have

something that will hold an image at any you know anymore. Yeah, In fact, There are even classic, well loved, well respected films that do not exist in any entirely undamaged state. They've had to go through restoration projects where people go through the film and try to patch it and clean it up. And these are for films that people care about.

There there are movies where there's no longer a master print, and the closest we have is a kind of a hodgepodge of the copy of a restoration of a copy right where you you would end up saying, well, the first reel was mostly undamaged on this print, and the second reel was mostly undamaged on this print. So we started to kind of splice these together to make a Frankenstein print, perhaps of the movie Frankenstein, so that you would be able to watch the whole thing and as

good a quality as possible. Here's another thing is that we were talking about how in ages passed people weren't really aware that the stuff they were creating could one day be considered art or important, and therefore there wasn't this this need for preservation. The same things true with the film industry. Absolutely the case, I think especially in the silent film error and a lot of you know, like early films. I think a lot of them, the people who were taking care of them just didn't have

an eye towards permanence. Well, yeah, even if you then this extends well beyond the early days of film. If you watch any documentary about the comedy group Monty Python, they talked about how their original tapes were being held by the BBC, and I think it was Eric Idle who went and purchased them from the BBC because they

were scheduled to be taped over. The BBC was using the same tapes that they had used to shoot they and they had done it before, the company had done it before, because they had shot stuff before that had been That's why we don't have copies of a lot of the early doctor who's they were taking. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, but see, that's the thing is that at the time you thought, well, this is something we show, and then after we show it, like, there weren't necessarily thoughts of

syndication or or keeping it around for any reason. There was no home home market, so there it was kind of the need to reproduce it. We aired it once. I guess that's it. It's kind of like kind of like going to see a play, You're like, well, it was meant to be seen at this one time, and then once the play is over, then it's over. Uh,

move on exactly. So if we look back at the earliest films, we have only about twenty percent of the movies produced from around nineteen ten to nineteen thirty incomplete form, So the movies completed then we either have completely lost or we only have partial prints. Um, now do we know what percentage of that was? People taping over it? Was like I need to make Harry and the Henderson's and well, some films that film you can't. It's not

magnetic tape. It's it's actual film where you've well, you can tape over it, but it would produce really interesting images once you've developed it. It's done. You would be able to do multiple exposures before developing it. But yes, uh, and people did. But about half the features produced before nineteen exists in a complete form, so we've lost half

of those. Uh. There's no telling how many short or independent films have been lost over time, because no one was really paying much attention to those at all, So there could be countless ones that we will never see again. They don't exist. Um, so one of the important things. Actually, the film preservation relies on three basic steps. The first is to print old film onto new film stock that's

designed to last longer than the old films. So the old old films essentially the glycerin stuff that needs to be transfer or two different types of film that can last longer. That transfer process, obviously is very meticulous and you have to be extremely careful or else you could end up corrupting getting you know, yeah, yeah, you could end up really causing some severe damage. Here's another thing. What do nuclear waste and film have in common? Salt mines.

They've both been stored in salt mines. Yeah. Yeah. Storing the original film and master copy in a cool and dry places absolutely necessary. So one of the and it's like we were talking about with paintings. You want it to be in a an environment where the temperature is nice and stable. It's cool, no moisture if you can help it. Salt mines great place to put these things. And there are tons of films being stored in salt mines.

In fact, there's one called the Hutchinson Facility. It's in Kansas and it is the largest storage facility for movie and television film and has more than one point seven million square feet of space. That's about a hundred fifty eight thousand square meters. By the way, they have a website, so if you want to store something for posterity's sake, you can actually look into it. They have a link

and everything where you can look and see. Probably not gonna be cost effective unless you're also like an enormous television studio, but I didn't go that far to look into it. So the third part of preserving film, after you know, the storage and the transfer to a stronger form of film, is providing public access through copies of the film. So you've got a lot of societies and organizations that are dedicated to preserving film. And in every case I came across, one of their major points was

that they had to allow for public access. Otherwise you're just storing something you're hoarding like the bureaucrats at at the end of waters at the last start top top top top man, yeah, top gun. Yeah. It was a little more straightforward. It was. It was not not as many mavericks in that one. Alright. So here's the thing. I was looking into this and preservation of a single

film is not cheap. According to the National Film Preservation Foundation in two, if you wanted to preserve a seven reel black and white silent feature film, which is just a standard length silent film, it would cost eighteen thousand dollars for that one film. And that's that. That's just the transfer process. Uh, that's without any restoration work. So if you need to do any restoration work, that would

add obviously to that to that fee. If you wanted to make a digital video copy of that so that people could actually watch it, because obviously, if all you have is the master print and then the copy print, people are not going to be lining up at the salt mine in order to get a look at this movie. So if you wanted to make it available by creating a digital copy, that would add another three thousand dollars to the total. And keep in mind that's for one,

that's the process for one silent film. If you wanted to do a feature that had sound, it would cost more because there's more information that you have to preserve, and so you have to be even more careful and meticulous in the process of transferring it over into a new form of film. Uh, and this is you know, this is non trivial. Is is difficult, and it's expensive, and it's if you don't do it right, then you lose it. Sure. Now, I think with movies there are

two different levels of preservation to talk about, um. I mean, one of them would be preservation of the film at you know, the way it was intended to be seen, and it's you know, on the original type of film at its peak level of quality, against a screen that literally has silver woven into it, reflective, not necessarily, but

you know, preserved in its pristine state. What about the possibility of films that essentially still exist but not in a very good way, Like what if there's a film that you can own we find through a VHS copy? So you know, this is where we bring up my rant about the movie the cheap B movie horror film that I was in, Blood Salvage, as the example. I use, yeah, because Blood Salvage, I mean, I honestly don't know what the status is of this movie in the sense of

I don't know if anyone owns the print anymore. I don't know where the print is. So it was shot on film. It was shot on film. Now this is before digital video was really a thing. Shot on film. It seems like everything is digital now. Well, yeah, this was done back in the early nineties, so shot on film. And then when it came to making a home theater version, a lot of people say, well, home theater, that's kind

of an act of preservation. Not really, because it's dependent upon whatever the medium is that the film has been committed to. Right, So in this case VHS tapes, Well, I mean yeah, but clearly the type of media that we watch things on in our homes never changes. It changes so fast. And that's the problem, right, That's why I still watch everything on Beta Max. And that's boy. I can't tell you I cannot wait for Star Wars Episode seven to come out on HD DVD. Uh, yeah, no,

it's there. There's so many formats that either fail or they just become obsolete because some other more you know, superior format comes out. Uh And though they can always mount a comeback for nostalgic or irony basis. Sure, Yeah, I mean I do love VHS tapes, Like I mean, I'm not saying I think they look better. I'm just saying they're fun. It's fun to hold a VHS tape of Teenagers Mutant Ninja Turtles three in your hand. Yeah, if you if you're Joe or you live in Brooklyn,

then obviously they's a big import No. I I agree. I Actually I still own VHS tapes, although I don't have a VCR that works anymore. Um, but there's the tape still sit there. That's a big problem. That means that you no longer have access to that media. You may still have the media itself, but you don't have the access to what's on there. Yeah. I've got a friend who keeps a bunch of laser discs handy just because it's funny. He doesn't have his laser disc layer

hooked up. Yeah, Yeah, I mean I can completely identify with that, and that there's there might be an emotional attachment to the physical form there, whether it's whether it's serious or not. There can be a real kind of sentimental attachment to this stuff. But it doesn't mean that the art itself is accessible. And and as much as I'm joking about Blood Salvage in particular, like I said, it only ever came out on VHS, and it only came out for rental companies, so it's never intended to

be purchased for the home. In fact, if you ever looked up at the price, it was like because it was just meant for rental facilities. Um, I mean, I can imagine a lot of things surviving like this in the digital age where we what we end up having is a fairly low quality, compressed file version of a movie. Yeah, if it exists digitally, makes many cop pieces you want, you're not really scared about losing them, right, But it's

not what it originally was. It would be like it would be like you got a picture of someone's polaroid photo of the Mona Lisa. That's what your version of the Mona Lisa gets to be from that point forward. Because that's essentially what we're talking about here. So for example, if you really really wanted to see Blood Salvage, you could go to YouTube. It's actually on there, the whole movie. It's a terrible transfer. And uh, it's also got a different title because it's under the UK title, which I

think is mad Jake. So if you if you really want to see it, it's out there, but it's not the experience that I would want it to be. So that is one of the things We also have to keep in mind is that the it's not just preserving the media, it's preserving the way we access that media. You were in a movie with John Saxon, Yes, I was. Vander Holyfield was also in that, as was Ray Walston, my favorite Marshall. Yeah, Mr hand, I'll tell you all

about it later on. Okay, okay, So anyway, really really important to again stress that it's not just the media, it's also the equipment we we used to access because that's going to come up again later. And so I think we're gonna in there for today. But this is not the end. It is never the end, except for those bits of film that we lost forever sorry bits of film. No, no, no, uh, it is not the end because this, as I said, is just part one of our two part episodes. So be sure to tune

in next time to hear the second half of the story. Yeah, and if you guys have any suggestions for our future episodes of Forward Thinking, whether it's something similar to what we're covering today or just you know, whatever you were wondering, like was that going to be like in the future, send us a message. The email addresses FW thinking at how stuff works dot com, where you can drop us a line on Twitter or Google Plus or Facebook. Twitter

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