Fakes easier to spot with new technique

Scottish researchers able to authenticate Burns documents without damaging them

Researchers analysing the penmanship of Robert Burns have developed a new technique to authenticate ancient documents accurately without damaging them.

Glasgow University scientists studied a dozen examples of handwritten Burns works – three genuine documents selected from different periods of the bard’s life and nine fakes by notorious forger Alexander Howland Smith – to test the method.

Howland Smith, a lawyer’s clerk eventually nicknamed the Antique Smith, was jailed for 12 months at the High Court in Edinburgh in June 1893 – but not before the market was awash with his often-clumsy forgeries.

Authenticating historic manuscripts of any kind has been a complicated and at times destructive process, with parts of the paper or ink damaged.

But the Glasgow scientists were able to lift ink from the Burns documents, real and fake, using a simple pipetting process, performable outside the laboratory, and in a way that did not visibly damage the original material.

Details of the ink and paper were analysed, the data gathered, and machine-learning algorithms were used to develop a so-called classifier able accurately to distinguish true Burns handwriting from the fakes. The classifier was even able to tell what ink Burns used to write each of his poems -classic Iron Gall Ink, “ivory black”, or a mixture of the two.

Dr Karl Burgess, of Glasgow Polyomics, said: “Through this technique we now know some things about Burns that we never knew before.

“However, we’re particularly excited about that fact that we have a new way of providing more evidence for a fake or a real manuscript if one turns up, and we have a technique that we can apply to any manuscript to gain more information about it. The simplicity of the sample preparation method we used means that the sampling can be easily performed at the site where the manuscripts are stored, which in turn could make it an ideal technique for auction houses to confirm authenticity.

“In future, we’d like to analyse as many historical documents we can so that we can begin to build a database of inks and manuscripts.”

Dr Karl Burgess was able to find out new details of the writing methods of Robert Burns during the Glasgow University research project.