Michael Auslin on the Final Battle to Control the Declaration of Independence, LitHub – “In the summer of 1951, a month after the Declaration celebrated its 175th anniversary, an unmarked panel truck pulled into the basement of the Library of Congress. Once loaded, it drove to the Maryland campus of the National Bureau of Standards, the government’s primary scientific facility. There the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were placed in the care of Gordon M. Kline, chief of the Plastics Section. Kline and his team had one focus: to create the most technologically sophisticated cases that science could envision to preserve these delicate parchments for posterity. Kline’s mission had started before World War II. In 1940 Archibald MacLeish had charged the National Bureau of Standards with determining the best way to conserve the Declaration and Constitution. The war pulled the Bureau away from these efforts, but once peace returned, Kline and his scientists had gone back to work…While visitors in the Rotunda lifted their eyes up to the Declaration, some also looked down, aware that twenty feet below them lay a massive concrete and steel vault. Built by the Mosler Safe Company in Ohio, the vault’s doors opened upward, activated by two massive counterweights that swung down at the press of a button. In just forty seconds, the inner cases could be carried down on a scissors-jack platform into the fifty-ton vault, where the reinforced doors would shut tight, protecting the priceless parchments from atomic attack…”