One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[caz]

Voller does say that he "assumed" Mike Barrett to be a "complete idiot" but this must be based on something, unless he has a habit of assuming everyone else in the world who he hasn't met is a complete idiot, and it can surely only be something he was told by someone. It will be unfortunate if the experts were being fed stories that Mike was stupid because it might have made them think from the start that the Diary couldn't have been forged.

David really must think 'the experts' are themselves pretty stupid, to think that just because Mike Barrett came across as a complete idiot, the diary in his possession couldn't have been forged, by him or anyone else. Are you saying these same experts were happy to believe a complete idiot like Mike owned a genuine confession by Jack the Ripper?

By October 1995, Voller, based in Liverpool, could have reached his own conclusions about Mike's self-imposed idiot status, from what he'd read about him in the papers for a start, especially from June 1994, without needing to be 'fed stories' by anyone else.

Love,

Caz
X

[David Orsam]

Another question: Was Baxendale an "ink chemist"? Or was he a forensic document examiner?

[caz]

Eastaugh goes on for another paragraph which need not detain us for I think the interesting point here is that...

Again we have an incomplete letter, this time written to Paul Feldman, so readers are unable to see for themselves what else Eastaugh wrote, or to judge David's opinion on what is 'the interesting point'.

The fact that this letter is now in David's possession would suggest that Feldman was happy to send a copy to Melvin Harris or one of his cronies, and wasn't trying to conceal 'bad news' from his point of view.

David's 'interesting point' is basically meaningless, because it should be obvious that any technique seeking to detect and measure a particular chemical, which was not yet known to be present or absent [hence Eastaugh's inclusion of 'whatever' was left in the dried ink residue], would need to be sensitive enough to pick up the smallest traces of whatever was there, or risk giving a false negative.

There is no indication that Eastaugh was 'anticipating' anything at all about the possible presence or level of chloroacetamide in the diary ink. If he was, perhaps he shouldn't have been. Wasn't he merely allowing for its presence, in any amount, and rightly wanted to safeguard against getting a false negative if this happened to be below detection levels?

Isn't that what all the fuss about nitrogen has been about?

Love,

Caz
X

[David Orsam]

Things really are desperate when one's only hopes are pinned on "transcription errors" or "selective quoting".

I don't recall the suggestion being made that Keith Skinner might have made transcription errors or quoted selectively from the Doreen Montgomery correspondence which was transcribed on this forum earlier in the year.

Voller said what I posted he said and the quoting has not been selective.

[caz]

Another question: Was Baxendale an "ink chemist"? Or was he a forensic document examiner?

If he was the latter, it seems he was the wrong man for the job of dating the writing to within the previous six months! You do seem to be scoring a lot of own goals lately, David. Time to slow down a bit?

Voller, on the other hand, was an ink chemist. And Diamine was his baby. If he knew Jack shi* about his own ink, who else would know?

I know - Mike Barrett. Silly me.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Here is what Voller said at the meeting on the 20th, no make that the 30th October 1995:

"This bronzing effect is a chemical process which is not understood...you only get pronounced bronzing where the ink is a blue-black that is to say when the ink is not nigrosine. With a nigrosine base the bronzing is usually less obvious. The dyestuff here is clearly nigrosine..."

So he is saying here, is he not, that if this Diary were genuinely old and written with a non-nigrosine based ink, the bronzing should be very pronounced. And he is saying that it is BECAUSE the ink contains nigrosine that there is so little bronzing. Isn't that right?

But I thought the Diary defenders tell us that there was no nigrosine in the ink because Leeds found no nitrogen in 1994.

So what is it? Is it a nigrosine based ink or not?

I'm not sure it matters, David, since nigrosine was comercially patented in 1867 and was in general use in writing inks by the 1870s, contrary to Dr. Baxendale's mistaken assertion that it was not available until the 1940s.

And Voller did think the diary was genuinely old and written with a nigrosine based ink when he examined it on 30th October 1995.

What's your problem?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Caz. I am no chemist, nor do I pretend to be, but there are a surprising number of abstracts on the internet about measuring chloroacetamides using gas chromatography, because these nasty chemicals are used in pesticides and have been linked to cancer, so scientists want to be able to accurately detect them in soil and water. These abstracts contain a noticeable amount of "hand-wringing" about the difficultly of accurately detecting certain types of chloroacetamide. For intance:

"There is no established method to measure 2-chloroacetamide and very little information on its analysis. An attempt to measure 2-chloroacetamide in solution and in soil extract by gas chromatography with electron-capture detector (GC-ECD) gave an inconsistent multipeak pattern that was not useful for even semiquantitative measurements."

--"Gas Chromatographic Determination of Chloroacetamide Herbicides in Plants and Soil." Article in Journal of Chromatography A 455:391-395

Let's repeat that together: "not useful in semi-quantitative measurements."

Chloroacetamide is volatile and it degrades in light. I am not referring to the amount of water in Diamine ink. I am suggesting once the water evaporates and the ink is dry, the chloroacetamide will slowly leach out. I think this is what Eastaugh meant when he was pondering what would be 'left' of this volatile substance and the difficulties in accurately detecting it.

Many thanks for the clarification, rj. I get you. But none of this really inspires confidence in the ability of a tiny [two-man? husband and wife?] outfit like AFI to confirm and accurately measure the chloroacetamide they found in the dry diary ink dots on paper back in 1994, let alone determine that it had been in the ink, at much higher levels, consistent with liquid Diamine, when it was freshly applied to the paper, and not as a result of much more recent contamination, having cheekily 'leached out' of something that had come into accidental contact with the samples.

Hasn't the onus been on the Barrett believers, since June 1994, to prove that the diary ink is Diamine? And how far has anyone really got with this? We are seeing the same old correspondence, the same old arguments, that did the rounds years and years ago.

What's real? What's new?
Come back John Omlor and give us a clue.

Love,

Caz
X

[David Orsam]

If Baxendale wasn't an ink chemist it simply means that he was not equipped to carry out the type of test described by RJ to date a document to the previous six months. But he was clearly equipped to carry out a solubility test. I fail to see the own goal here.

Voller did not examine the diary until more than 3 years after its production by Barrett so him being an ink chemist is of no use or relevance to the point RJ was making.

[David Orsam]

Let's just look at what the much criticised Baxendle - Dr Baxendale - actually said in his report.

This is what Robert Smith says about Baxendale's report:

"....he goes on to state boldly that "synthetic dyestuffs did not become common in inks until after the second world war. They may have been used earlier, but not before the first world war."

Is that a fair representation of what Baxendale actually says? Because here is what actually appears in his report dated 9 July 1992 (with my bold):

"Synthetic dyestuffs did not become common in inks until after the second world war. They may have been used earlier, (reliable information on this is scarce), but not before the first world war."

So Smith has simply omitted the words in parentheses, without any indication that he has done so.

Regarding Baxendale's failure to detect iron, Smith says that "Every other analyst concluded that it is an iron-gallotannate" ink which is not a particularly fair criticism bearing in mind that the other analysts, Eastaugh and Leeds, both used scanning electron microscopy for which you need specialist equipment (which an individual forensic document examiner is unlikely to possess) in order to detect iron in the ink.

Baxendale said that there was "nothing to suggest the presence of iron". He did not, therefore, state that there was no iron in the ink, just that he had seen nothing to suggest it was present. We may note that Eastaugh found that there was sodium in the ink but Leeds University found no sodium. Not everyone was getting everything right clearly.

This is Baxendale's conclusion from his 9 July 1992 report:

"The results may be summarised as follows. The ink of the diary
(1) is freely soluble
(2) gives a chromatogram characteristic of a synthetic dye."

Voller agreed that the ink contains a synthetic dye and it is hard to believe that Baxendale failed properly to conduct a solubility test. His findings, therefore, are credible.

We may note that Baxendale also stated:

"The ink of the diary is noticeably lighter in colour than the intense black usually associated with modern inks. This lighter colour could easily be obtained by diluting with water."

[David Orsam]

What is the importance of the ink containing Nigrosine?

It's nothing to do with the date of patent or manufacture of Nigrosine. It's all about the nitrogen.

Pegg tells us that nitrogen is a major constituent of Nigrosine.

http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/maybrick_diary/maybrick-diary-analysis.ink.html

Now, here is what Robert Anderson says in his 2017 essay "Ink: A Recipe for Madness and Death" regarding the Leeds University results:

"Chloroacetamide contains nitrogen (N), which makes up approximately 15% of its mass, and - unfortunately for the Diamine proponents - the Diary ink contains no notable traces of nitrogen. We can be sure of that as each element, be it iron, calcium, silicon, nitrogen or any other element you care to mention, appears at exactly the same place in the spectrum and there was no signal where nitrogen would have appeared if it had been present in the samples analyzed. Case closed - the only time these words will escape my lips in connection to the Ripper!"

But if the ink was a Nigrosine based ink why is there no nitrogen?

It should be there shouldn't it? But if you can't find the N in Nigrosine might that not be the same reason why you can't find the N in chloroacetamide? If, of course, the ink contained chloroacetamide.

And if that's the case is it really Case Closed?

[rjpalmer]

Quoting Robert Anderson's 2017 essay "Ink: A Recipe for Madness and Death" regarding the Leeds University results:

"Chloroacetamide contains nitrogen (N), which makes up approximately 15% of its mass, and - unfortunately for the Diamine proponents - the Diary ink contains no notable traces of nitrogen...case closed."

J. Pegg in 2007:

"The presence of Iron in the sample (Iron is present in the ‘Diary’ ink[46]) could have masked the presence of Nitrogen (if it is there) because of the similarities between the secondary electrons in Iron and the electrons in Nitrogen[47]."

[Scott Nelson]

Sounds like the ink should be retested using GC/MS, eh?

[David Orsam]

I just want to discuss the possibility of ink changing colour due to oxidisation.

According to Robert Anderson in his 2017 essay: "When laid down on paper, nigrosine ink offers a nearly black colour (actually a very dark lilac that does not change or oxidize over time, although it may dim through exposure to light)".

So that should deal with that.

However, he also quotes David Carvalho as saying in Forty Centuries of Ink, "Nigrosine...is much used as a cheap "black" ink, but as it is blue black and never becomes black, it really belongs to the family of "coloured" writing inks". Not sure why Carvalho doesn't mention a "nearly black colour", like Anderson, or refer to it as being "very dark lilac" but there you go.

But Anderson also says that "a nigrosine ink like Diamine WOULD have resulted in a blueish hue".

We can, I think, certainly see a "blueish hue" in the example written by Robert Smith, supposedly with Diamine Ink, in September 2012 and published in his 2017 book. Smith himself refers to "bluish undertones" (citing Voller) although it seems as much to be bluish overtones to me.

The quote from Voller about "bluish undertones", incidentally, comes in a letter written by him to Nick Warren on 21 November 1994, i.e. before he had seen the Diary. This is what he said:

"Nigrosine, although a black dyestuff, does have bluish undertones and this is all the more obvious when the dyestuff concentration is relatively low".

He then goes on (I think) to say that the concentration of Nigrosine in Diamine ink is relatively low.

But what is so surprising is that over the four pages of transcript when he discusses the Diary ink at the meeting in October 1995, Voller, who is certain that the Diary ink is a Nigrosine based ink, does not mention "bluish undertones" once, either to say that he sees such undertones in the Diary (so that it is consistent with Nigrosine) or that he does not see such undertones (so that it is inconsistent with Diamine).

Perhaps he saw those undertones, perhaps not. But what strikes me is the complete lack of obviously blue undertones in Nick Warren's Diamine test example, certainly in comparison to Robert Smith's test example. In fact, Nick Warren's Diamine example would seem to me to be best described as dark grey, just like what we see in the Diary (and this was how Baxendale described it). It doesn't really matter if Nick Warren's test example has always been dark grey since the day it was written or changed to that colour because surely Voller should have mentioned that Diamine can at some point in its life acquire a dark grey colour.

What Voller said in the October 1995 meeting was that he would have expected a Diary written with Diamine ink to be "blacker" and "more opaque". But Nick Warren actually comments in his test example that the ink is "very watery, astonishingly so at first". That's doesn't sound like a particularly opaque ink to me.

What is remarkable though is that Voller saw Nick Warren's test and said: "I agree that the ink of Nick's letter has taken on an appearance similar to that of the Diary, as regards fading and bronzing..."

So the Diary ink, according to Voller, has an appearance similar to Diamine ink regarding both fading and bronzing! We might add that with our own eyes we can see that they are both somewhat dark grey so there doesn't seem to be anything inconsistent with the colour of the ink.

I wonder if it is possible to maintain, therefore, that, from a purely visual examination that the Diary, the ink can be said not to be Diamine.

[Magpie]

http://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/ALS-IR-Forensics.html

[David Orsam]

http://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles...Forensics.html

Interesting. I wonder how much it costs! Don't suppose there is much value in the Diary at present, despite the Battlecrease evidence, so whether the owner of the Diary would be prepared to pay for further tests is questionable (although I think he has said he would do so if they weren't destructive).