'Revealing images that seemed lost forever:' Research revives 1800s photos [View all]

[usonian]

Synchrotron light helps study the past, prevent corrosion in future
By Greg Basky, Canadian Light Source, Special to Western News,
April 15, 2024
https://news.westernu.ca/2024/04/reviving-daguerreotypes/

Chemistry professor Tson-Kong (T.K.) Sham and his colleagues recently confirmed a new synchrotron imaging technique they developed is just as effective for retrieving corroded daguerreotypes – the earliest form of photographs – as a strategy they first reported in 2018, and can also be used no matter how badly damaged the image surface is from natural corrosion or cleaning attempts. The new research, which used beamlines at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan, is published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage.

“This technique can be used widely in all walks of science, from looking at tissues to materials science,” Sham said.

“You could determine whether or how a metal may be corrosion-resistant. Or in the case of an already corroded material, you can learn what the product of that corrosion is and its distribution on the surface, and then you can work back and think about how to prevent that corrosion from happening.”

Sham said many applications are possible because synchrotron X-ray is very tunable, which means it can pick out any element and find out what its chemical surrounding is and where it is placed in the sample, even imaging it layer by layer.

snap of video at the link above



The paper is freely available:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1296207424000189?via%3Dihub
Lots of details there.