The Decay and Conservation of Museum Objects of Tin

摘要

It is twenty-five years since I first read The Decay and Conservation of Museum Objects of Tin' by Harold Plenderleith and Robert Organ, which appeared in the first volume of Studies in Conservation. On reading the paper once more I was overwhelmed by a sense of awe and total admiration for the quality of the applied conservation research shown in this pioneering paper. The concern over 'tin-pest', the drastically deleterious effect of tin undergoing an allotropic phase transformation from the stable white tetragonal metallic (β) structure to the grey powdery cubic (α) form of tin (Sn), has achieved an almost legendary status. Courses in metal conservation often refer to this signal paper in Studies in Conservation as the reference to the problems of 'tin-pest' but it would appear that few presenters have read or comprehended the final paragraph of the paper where the authors state 'For these reasons we feel that its possible existence may well be ignored by the museum laboratory, and all manifestations of decay regarded as corrosion phenomena amenable to treatment by the usual methods of electro-chemical reduction.'