“Did Curator Engelbach of the Cairo Museum say, or didn’t he”, I interrupted,” ‘For God’s sake keep it secret until you get out of the country, and on no account let Howard Carter know’?”
“I don’t think he said ‘for God’s sake,’” Dr. Wood replied, “and the only reason we didn’t want Carter to know was that we didn’t want to enrage him. After all, he was the one who had dug the stuff up. He fancied himself as a sort of sole executor and publicity agent for King Tut, and had never tolerated others cutting in on it”.
“All right”, I agreed, “you didn’t purloin them. I’ll let you tell in your own way in a minute exactly how you did obtain their — shall we call it? — temporary legitimate possession”.
Dr. Wood had become interested in the purple gold while on a visit to Egypt in 1931 with Mrs. Wood, traveling with Ambrose Lansing and his wife, Caroline, who were going to Cairo to superintend excavations at Lisht. It presented a mystery which Egyptologists, metallurgic chemists, and modern goldsmiths had been unable to solve. They hadn’t even been able to agree on the nature of the problem. A dispute had arisen since the discovery as to whether the purple gold was the product of an art known to King Tutankhamen’s goldsmith and subsequently lost for over three thousand years or was due to chemical changes resulting from long burial.
When Wood heard all this and saw the actual ornaments, all rose and red and purple, his scientific detective instincts were challenged, and I suspect also that his ubiquitous cat curiosity was involved in the subsequent events for more than a little. The problem, as a matter of fact, was a fascinating one for anybody. In the meantime Lansing had arranged with the authorities that the Woods were to receive all the privileges extended to archaeologists. Many of the smaller gold ornaments from the tomb were covered with a rose-purple film, quite unlike anything that had ever been observed on gold jewelry or coins either ancient or modern.
Wood leaned almost immediately to the theory that the purple sequins were the result of art rather than chemical accident. He noted the resemblance of the colors to those of certain gold films which he had prepared many years before when engaged in the study of the optical properties of very finely divided metallic granules, and felt sure that they had been produced at the time of manufacture, for on one of the king’s slippers small purple-gold rosettes and yellow-gold bars had been sewn in alternation, making a color pattern. There was, however, the possibility that the rosettes and bars had been made by different goldsmiths, with metal from different localities, one sample containing an impurity which slowly oxidized during the centuries, forming the purple film.
The objects on which the colored film appeared were small ornaments exclusively, sequins — some in the form of flowers from 1.5 to 2 cm. in diameter and others circular concave disks — which ornamented the ceremonial robe of the king, and a number of pendants and other head ornaments, on some of which the colors were extremely brilliant, ranging from a rich red to purple and violet.
Wood made a careful examination of the gold ornaments from other tombs displayed in the Cairo Museum, but found nothing resembling the Tutankhamen gold with the exception of a queen’s crown from the next dynasty, which was decorated with gold flowers showing the purple film in many places. This made it seem possible that the secret of the coloring process had been handed down from father to son, but had finally been lost.
So this all made a pretty problem. Said Wood to himself and to Lansing, and to their friend A. Lucas, who was British Chief Chemist for the Department of Antiquities in Egypt, “I believe I could rediscover the secret — if I could get hold of some of the ornaments”.
Lucas was for it, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Howard Carter wasn’t going to be eager to lend them to an itinerant American professor who wasn’t even an Egyptologist to play with. And they were all locked up and screwed down in their museum case in Cairo.
“The only thing we can do”, said Lucas, “is to get the consent of the Curator”.
When the plot was disclosed to Curator Engelbach, he agreed in the interest of science, but concurred emphatically — with or without the “for God’s sake” — when Lucas said, “We’ll have to keep this secret. No sense ever to let Howard Carter know — unless you succeed with the experiments”.
MOONSHINE: One of the photographs Wood faked for illustrating The Moon-Maker, the pseudo-scientific “thriller” on which he and Arthur Train collaborated. The “flying ring” is taking off from the surface of the moon.
MAJOR WOOD: Wood is testing the “flash telescope,” which he originally constructed from an old piece of stovepipe and other discarded parts, and which was the first device offered by the Science and Research Division actually put into production for overseas use in the A.E.F.
It wasn’t merely Howard Carter’s private vanity. If the government learned that Wood was trying to take out any of the sequins, he would be searched at the customs house until they were recovered, and Carter would raise public hell — not about “purloining”, but about the proposed unauthorized investigation.
What they did next, I’m letting Wood tell in his own way.
After Lucas had persuaded the Curator, the three of us went to the museum hall accompanied by two uniformed guards who had two separate sets of keys. While popeyed tourists stood around, they opened six separate padlocks and were then compelled to take out about a dozen screws which held down the glass. When the case was opened the Curator whispered to me to pick out what I wanted. I began picking sequins, with continual side glances at the Curator, watching for raised eyebrows. At the eighth, I saw symptoms and said, “Thank you very much, these will suffice”. I had been picking them out with my right hand and holding them in my left. The Curator said sternly and aloud, doubtless to reassure the pop- eyed tourists or perhaps his own guards, “Now give them to me”. He was a sleight-of-hand artist and slipped them back to me before we left the museum.
The archconspirator had scarcely returned to his hotel when a note was brought to him — from Howard Carter! It turned out, however, as coincidences happily often do, to be merely an invitation to visit the great Egyptologist in his laboratory headquarters in one of the old tombs, in the Valley of the Kings. Wood bearded the lion, and says, “I felt like the boy who’d almost been caught stealing the apples… but at the same time felt a temptation to tell him I had the sequins”.
How Wood found the lost secret of the purple gold, beginning there in Cairo with his wife’s nail polish and ending in the Johns Hopkins laboratories with a series of experiments as strange as any you’ll find in fictional scientific detection, is today a brilliant page in the history of Egyptology and of chemical-physical research. He not only rediscovered the ancient method and proved that the coloring was no accident due to chemical changes, burial, and time, but succeeded in reproducing, by a finally simple technique such as might easily have been known to goldsmiths three thousand years ago, all the gorgeous colors, ranging from roseate dawn pink through rich red, purple, and violet. Here in his own clear words is the story step by step.
My first problem (he explains) was to ascertain whether the colors were simple “interference” effects of thin films (soap-bubble colors) or due to some “resonance” action of minute particles covering the gold surface. This was purely a problem in physical optics. Since interference requires the cooperation of two streams of light reflected from the opposed surfaces of a thin film, the first step in the study appeared to be to destroy the reflection from the outer surface by covering it with a transparent varnish. This experiment I tried in Cairo, employing my wife’s nail polish, the only available material of the desired nature. The color was not destroyed, as it would have been in the case of an interference color, and after the celluloid had become dry, I found that it could be peeled off, carrying the film with it and leaving the underlying gold bright yellow. The film, however, now showed no color, either by transmitted or reflected light. This was as far as I could go at the time, but on my return to my laboratory in Baltimore I deposited metallic gold on the back of the film by cathodic sputtering and found that the purple reflection was restored. These two experiments appeared to show conclusively that we were dealing with something more complicated than simple thin film interference.