How X-ray technology helped write the history of printing

Johannes Gutenberg is considered the inventor of movable metal type printing, and thus the founder of modern book printing – at least in Europe. In Korea, a collection of Buddhist teachings appeared 78 years before the world-famous Gutenberg Bible, which was also printed in metal lettering. A collaborative research project has now set itself the task of finding out more about this topic, analyzing historical Eastern and Western prints using a high-resolution X-ray fluorescence (XRF) process.Author Rachel Berkowitz reports on the findings in an article in the Journal of Physics, the online journal of the American Physical Society. The prints were scanned literally pixel by pixel at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California using a high-resolution X-ray fluorescence imaging method. How the research team led by Uwe Bergmann, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has been developing and applying X-ray spectroscopy methods for years, proceeded is roughly described in the Journal of Physics article as follows: Historical publications are included in the appendix, which is specifically designed for fragile documents such as The XRF spectrum of each pixel was inserted using X-rays in order to provide information about the chemical composition. “When we started using XRF imaging […] We started out, we could only do ten [chemische]Measure channels per pixel. “We are now capturing the entire XRF spectrum with more than 2,000 channels per pixel,” Bergman was quoted as saying in the article published in the specialized journal. For printed manuscripts, this results in a 5-megapixel X-ray image. As part of the research project, pages from ten examples of Korean and Gutenberg texts before the year 1500 were examined. What was particularly interesting was whether and how much the two printing processes shared. “It’s a million-dollar question as to whether Gutenberg knew about Korean technology or not,” the physicist was quoted as saying. What was surprising in the least was that both prints contained relatively large amounts of metals in their compounds, such as copper and lead.

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