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The Fordyce paper is very much a sales pitch, intended to convince the industry that with the new triacetate base, Kodak had overcome the problems or durability and brittleness that had prevented the widespread use of safety stocks up to that point. As we know with the benefit of 50 years' hindsight, it worked!

Of course this won't help you with polyester. If John P or anyone else knows of a similar study which compares the physical characteristics of all three using similar criteria (perhaps the Image Permanence Institute has done some research along these lines?), I too would be very interested...

I don't have the precise reference for Fordyce to hand - I have the paper in my files at home and will try to dig it out over the next few days. I'd be happy to scan it and e-mail it to Brad for posting as a download here, but am not sure if this would be an infringement of copyright. Brad?

Polyester film support was introduced by DuPont in 1955: "Polyester Photographic Film Base", D.R. White, D.J. Glass, E.Meschter and W.R. Holm, Journal SMPTE, December 1955, Volume 64, pages 674-678.

When Agfa-Gevaert was heavily promoting the conversion of 35mm release prints from triacetate to polyester in the early 1990's, they had quite a few presentations and publications.

On March 8, 1994, I presented the results of a study of polyester release prints at the ShoWest conference. It noted concerns with static, print dusting, and the extreme strength of polyester prints. To address those concerns, Kodak developed Kodak VISION Color Print film, which it introduced in 1998.

Kodak's website has information on film base characteristics:
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/support/h1/base.shtml
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/support/h1/base.shtml#characteristics
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/support/h1/base.shtml#other

To try and answer Matthew's original query, the only totally reliable known process for dealing with acetate elements that have already decomposed to the point of becoming brittle is to copy them. AFAIK, brittleness is not a characteristic of nitrate decomposition, although shrinkage certainly is. There is a debate going on in archive circles as to whether preservation resources should be channeled into preservation copying or in providing optimal atmospheric conditions to inhibit decomposition. There is no easy answer to this one, especially for collections of varying types of element in varying stages of decomposition.

For more information, see the following (click to go straight to amazon.com order page)

Henry Wilhelm with Carol Brower, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures (1993).

and

Read, Paul & Mayer, Marc-Paul, The Restoration of Motion Picture Film (2000).