Scientists Learns Secrets of Strad Violin

March 28 -- It's likely that even Joseph Nagyvary doesn't know exactly when the obsession began to take over his life.

Perhaps it goes back to 1957, when as a young Hungarian refugee in Switzerland he was allowed to take lessons on Albert Einstein's old violin. Or perhaps it was the first time he heard the extraordinary tones of a Stradivarius violin, and began to wonder why the work of one craftsman has not been surpassed in more than two centuries.

He admits he never became a great violinist. "I only play the slow tunes," he quips.

But he thinks he has discovered the secrets that allowed Antonio Stradivari to turn out such incredible instruments in his shop in Cremona, Italy.

The old master himself probably never understood all of those secrets, Nagyvary says, and that's the reason his craftsmanship died with him in 1737. He didn't know exactly what to pass on to his sons.

Bug-Free Wood

Many years ago Nagyvary turned his attention to science. He is now a biochemist at Texas A&M University, where he has researched such things as nucleic acids and cancer, but the 66-year-old professor never gave up on his first love.

For more than a quarter of a century, he has published dozens of papers explaining his theories about Stradivari. He even makes his own violins, which many experts say rival those of the old master.

Nagyvary says he began traveling down that long road in the 1960s, while he was in northern Italy. He noticed that wood artifacts in museums from the early 18th century frequently showed damage from wood-boring insects. They looked like "Swiss cheese," he says.

"But I discovered that [wooden objects from] the cities of Cremona and Venice had no, or very little, wood infestation from that period," he says.

It seemed clear to Nagyvary that someone in Cremona had come up with some way of protecting wood from the insects, and the technique was used by everybody who worked with wood, including Stradivari.

Nagyvary began experimenting with all types of preservatives, including borax. It seemed likely that borax would have been used because it was known as an insecticide long before the 18th century.