r-. A HIS TOR Y OF THE 

NATIONAL BUREAU 

OF STANDARDS 

DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE 

Rexmond 

C. 

Cochrane 

MP 275 

fif lv 

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE 
MEASURES FOR 

PRO GRESS 

A HIS TOR Y OF THE 

NATIONAL BUREAU 

OF STANDARDS 

REXMOND C. COCHRANE 

Editorial consultant—James R. Newman 

First printing: 1966 

Second printing: 1974 

NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

U. S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE 

For Bale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402 

(Order by SD Catalog No. C13.l0:275.) Price $8.50 
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Prints and Photographs Division of the 

Library of Congress-for the illustrations on pages 4, 10, and 113, the latter from the 

Herbert French collection; to the National Archives for those on pages 22, 40 (Public 

Buildings Service collection), and 230 (Bureau of Reclamation collection); to the 

and Geodetic Survey for those on pages 25, 56, 516; to the Smithsonian Institution 

for Those on pages 6 (Transportation Section) and 205 (National Air Museum collection); to the National Geographic Society for the copyright photograph used as the front end páper md that on page 481; to the Archives Library of M.I.T. for the 

portraits on page 652; to the Baltimore Sunpapers for the illustration on page 85; to 

Harris & Ewing for that on page 292; and to Charles B. Kipps of NBS for that on page 168. 

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65—62472 
FOREWORD 

If men are to accomplish together anything useful whatever they must, 

above all, be able to understand one another. That is the basic reason for a National Bureau of Standards. 

True, men may get together themselves and agree on terms and defini. 

tions. Those who make screws may, for example, agree to avoid confusion 

by manufacturing a ,common range of sizes and thread numbers. But in 

broad areas the only possible way of securing agreement is by authoritative 

action by an agency of the Federal Government: The early history of the 

confusion in this country demonstrates this clearly. 

There is also a genuine difference between the setting of fundamental 

standards and the practice of standardization as conducted in industry. The 

former has to do with definitions, with specifying clearly and exactly what 

technical words mean, in a fundamental and, scientific sense. The latter 

may be concerned with commercial definitions, but it is primarily involved 

with the task of agreeing on limiting ranges of sizes and forms which shall 

be manufactured in large numbers. 

The former may sometimes go too fast, but it can never go too far. As 

applied science ramifies there are always new terms appearing, where am- biguity or inaccuracy can hold up progress, where undue delay in forming 

exact specifications can slow down accomplishment. Yet too much speed can sometimes pin matters down in ways that are later found to be clumsy or 

expensive. It requires good judgment, and this can be applied only when 

there is sound comprehension not only of the science involved, but also of the 

ways in which it is being applied, and, more subtly, of the ways in which it 

is likely to be applied in the future. Sound fixing of standards can hardly 

occur in an ivory tower. 

The latter can indeed go too far. The subject does not need treatment 

here. We have all witnessed commercial situations in which premature 

freezing of performance has throttled progress. 

Now there is a popular fallacy about this business of setting standards. 

It is the belief that it is inherently a dull business. One of the reasons that 

I am glad to see the present history appear is that I believe it will help to' 

dissipate this misunderstanding. Properly conceived the setting of standards can be, not only a challenging task, but an exciting one. 

III 
IV FOREWORD 

There are many examples of this as the history is traced. Let me mention 

just one. How long is a second? Certainly we ought to know that. Do we just take the time for the earth to revolve on its axis, and divide this by 

86,400? The earth does not turn uniformly. Shall we use the time for the 

earth to complete a path around the sun? This depends, to a slight degree, on what other planets are doing in the meantime. How about the time for 

light to travel a measured distance? This would be in a vacuum no doubt, 

and the technique is difficult. There is even a possibility of becoming 

involved with questions of special relativity. Shall we use the time necessary 

for some specified atom to emit a certain number of vibrations? Now we are on sounder ground, but not entirely out of the woods. We have to be 

sure we have the right atom, and that we can count correctly. I am not 

of course attempting in this example to really explore this problem. I 

merely wish to indicate how deep an apparently simple question can lead. 

Should an agency that is committed to the duty of setting standards also 

do research? I believe the answer is clear. Those who would set scientific 

standards wisely cannot limit themselves to working with science, they needs 

must work in science. Only those who are practicing scientists can grasp 

clearly where need for definition lies, and what constitutes useful definition. 

The National Bureau of Standards has had a good history of accomplishment, and has contributed much to the scientific and technical progress of 

this country, to its security and well being. It is well that the story should 

be told. I assure you that the story will not be dull. 

VANNEVAR BUSH 
PREFACE 

This book is designed to provide a better understanding of a highly 

specialized Federal agency among the community of scientists and engineers 

that the agency serves directly, among the general public whose taxes support it but who are usually only indirectly aware of its existence, and among 

Government officials who depend on it for services or whose policy actions 

control its destiny. 

The need for a definitive history of the National Bureau of Standards 

became apparent about the time of its 50th anniversary in 1951. This 

need developed primarily from the very rapid expansion of the role of 

Government in the scientific and technological progress of the Nation and 

the evolution of the Bureau's uniquely critical role in this expansion. A 

properly documented history would serve to clarify the dynamic nature 

•of the Bureau's mission by recording its responses to the changing needs 

of the increasingly complex scientific activities within the Federal Government and throughout the Nation as a whole. Because of the intimate relationship of progress in measurement to progress in science, a history of the Bureau 

contributes to a better understanding of the extraordinary development of 

science and technology in this century. 

A comprehensive and easily accessible record of the experience and goals 

of those whose achievements made the National Bureau of Standards what 

it is today should help significantly in making the organization even more 

effective in the future. The cumulative experience of those who managed 

the Bureau's affairs in the past would be of great value to those responsible 

for its future. 

Initial efforts to produce an objective history from within the Bureau's own staff were unsuccessful. It was finally concluded that the task should 

be done by professional historians and writers. After an extensive survey 

of various alternatives, in 1960 we succeeded in obtaining the assistance 

of the distinguished scientific editor, James R. Newman, and of Dr. Rexmond 

C. Cochrane, an experienced and talented historian. Mr. Newman consented 

to provide general supervision for the production of the history, and Dr. 

Cochrane agreed to undertake the exacting professional task of research 

and writing. It is also most fortunate, and especially fitting, that Dr. 

V 
VI PREFACE 

Vannevar Bush, architect of so much of the Nation's scientific and technological structure and a member of the Bureau's Visiting Committee from 

1942 to 1946, should provide the history with a foreword. 

Actual work on the history began in 1961, the same year that construction 

began on the Bureau's new laboratories at Gaithersburg, Md. It was hoped 

that the history would appear about the time that the new laboratories 

were ready. Although both projects have been delayed, publication of the 

history in 1966 will coincide with the expected move of the great majority 

of the Bureau's staff to the new site. 

An important and planned byproduct of providing a history of the Bureau's 

development has been to bring together for ready reference the major 

documents bearing on important policy decisions and technical achievements. 

Extensive footnotes throughout the history identify these documents. Copies 

of all these, either in full size or microfilm, will be available in the Bureau's 

Gaithersburg Library. 

The Bureau's first 50 years coincide almost exactly with the terms of 

service of its first four Directors. The history has been limited to this 

period, although a final chapter provides a brief résumé of major events 

since 1951, particularly the relocation plan. A detailed examination of the 

period of my own administration as the fifth Director will be left to later 

historians. 

ALLEN V. ASTIN 

Director 

National Bureau of Standards 
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION 

This is the history of the origins and development of a key scientific 

agency in our Federal establishment. It is also a study of the long-debated 

role of science in government, of science as an activity of the Federal Government, illustrated by focusing a magnifying glass, as it were, on a single 

such agency. By choice I have written the history from the point of view of 

the men who sought the establishment of a central agency dedicated to providing standards of measurement for the Nation, and of those who accomplished the first 50 years of that history. 

In the early months of the undertaking some among the staff seniors questioned whether the history of the Bureau could be written. There was no possible way to cover in a single work, let alone do justice to, the thousands 

of research and investigative projects that have occupied the Bureau over a half century. And the flavor of the past, so important to those who had 

known it, was probably beyond recapture. The challenge, repeated at suitable intervals, was to prove a spur throughout the research and composition 

of the history. Color leaped to the eye out of the middle of blurred typescript. But it was inevitable that, considering the far-ranging research of 

the Bureau, some compromises had to be made. 

The record of the scientific and technologic research at the National Bureau of Standards is contained in its more than 10,000 papers published 

since 190L No attempt has been made to mention more than a fraction of 

them or of the investigators who wrote them. Only the outlines of that 

research and some of its highlights have been presented, for their reflection 

of the changing nature of Bureau research, and to set it in the framework 

of the scientific, social, and political history of the past half century as events 

have impinged upon the Bureau. 

Some wonderful controversies have engulfed the Bureau from time to 

time. They were perhaps unavoidable, in view of the nature of the Bureau 

misSion. I have been permitted a remarkable degree of freedom in setting 

down my judgment of these and other Bureau affairs as found in the historical records. 

I have been immeasurably helped by the strong academic tradition that 

has been characteristic of the Bureau since its founding, and the sense of 

VII 
VIII AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION so many of its members, renewed from decade to decade, that the Bureau was in the stream of the history of science and creating a history of its own. How else explain the extensive collection of memorabilia found in every 

section and division, handwritten and typed, and labeled "Save"? 

The concern of the administration for historical documents of the Bureau was manifested formally in the spring of 1956 when all divisions were asked 

to locate historical materials in their possession and forward them to a central file. Many formal documents that were nowhere else available, as well as much that was informal, were thus brought together, and with other 

historical documents secured in the course of research, made part of the 

NBS Historical File that was set up as the project began. 

I have also been fortunate in being able to interview or. correspond with 

several score members or former members of the staff, the employment and 

memories of many of them spanning the administration of all five Bureau 

directors. Their names and those of others outside the Bureau who have 

furnished knowledge of the Bureau's past appear in the footnotes to the 

history. 

The research and writing of the history was facilitated by the fullest 

possible cooperation of all members of the present staff, who have made 

their time, their files, and their information freely available, who have provided leads to material and clues to the meaning of some of that material, 

and who have patiently read and reread the sections of the history within 

their province or recollection. 

Among the many present or former members who have kindly read the 

sections on research in their province and made contributions to its historical 

background or that of the Bureau, to whom I wish to express my particular 

thanks, are Franz L. Alt, William D. Appel, Howard S. Bean, Louis Barbrow, 

William Blum, Wallace R. Brode, Fay C. Brown, Edward W. Cannon, Ray. 

mond Davis, Hugh L. Dryden, William I. Ellenberger, Paul D. Foote, Irvin 

H. Fuilmer, Roman Geller, Kasson S. Gibson, Raleigh Gilchrist, Clarence H. 

Hahner, Wilbur S. Hinman, Jr., John Hoffman, Dagfin S. Hoynes, Horace S. 

Jsbell, Victor J. Johnson (Boulder), Deane B. Judd, Lewis V. Judson, Carl 

C. Kiess, Gordon M. Kline, William B. Kouwenhoven, Percival D. Lowell, 

A. G. McNish, William F. Meggers, Fred L. Mohier, Douglas E. Parsons, Yin. 

cent B. Phelan, Earle K. Plyer, Jacob Rabinow, Mrs. Ida Rhodes, Raymond 

L. Sanford, Frederick J. Schlink, Ralph W. Smith, Wilbert F. Snyder 

(Boulder), Wilmer Souder, Harold F. Stimson, Lauriston S. Taylor, J. B. 

Tallerico, George N. Thompson, Elmer R. Weaver, Samuel C. Weissburg, 

and Lawrence A. Wood. 

I wish to express my gratitude to all on the Bureau staff who have been 

levied on for fact and clarification, singling out Miss Sarah Ann Jones, 

librarian at the Bureau since 1920, W. Reeves Tilley, chief of technical 
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION IX 

information and publications, and Dr. Archibald T. McPherson, former 

NBS Associate Director, for their unfailing enthusiasm and help with the 

work in progress. 

I am deeply indebted to the retired chief of the electrical division, Dr. 

Francis B. Silsbee; the former Director of the Bureau, Dr. Edward U. 

Condon; and the present Director, Dr. Allen V. Astin, for their close reading 

of the complete text for errors of fact, emphasis, and omission. 

A special word of thanks is owed to my two most able research assistants, 

Mrs. Margaret M. Iwamoto, who read through the vast collection of NBS 

correspondence files in the National Archives, and Mrs. Elisabeth Bregenzer, 

who searched the congressional documents in the Library of Congress, in 

addition to countless other distracting tasks allotted to them. 

Despite the wealth of assistance that has been rendered it, the history 

inevitably tefiects the final decision of the historian himself. Mine alone 

therefore is the responsibility for the ordering and weighing of the available 

facts and for the excesses of simplification of highly complex scientific 

research—an amiable contention from first to last with the specialists at the 

Bureau. 

REXMOND C. COCHRANE 

Baltimore, Md. 

January 1966 
CONTENTS 

Page 

FOREWORD 'U 

PREFACE v 

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION vu Chapter I. AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

MAIN STREET, 1900 1 

national standardizing bureau"—America in 1900— 

A century of science and invention—The new electrical 

world—Business,, industry, and laissez-faire government—Cost of living—Wealth and the industrial 

potential. 

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 9 

The promise in science and technology—The prophets 

of the new century—Advance of physics, 1900—1925-— 

Edison as symbol of the age of electricity—Rise of 

industrial research laboratories—Role of the Bureau. 

GOVERNMENT, SCIENCE, AND THE 

GENERAL WELFARE 16 

Federal role in the promotion of science and the useful 

arts—Early scientific agencies in the Government— 

Proposal for a Department of Science (1884)—Federal 

attitude toward science and industry. 

LOOKING BACK 20 

Charles S. Peirce and the Office of Weights and Measures in the Coast Survey—Jefferson and Adams on 

weights and measures—Hassler and his standards 

(1832)—The metric system legalized (1866)—Mendenhail's fundamental standards of 1893—Makeshift 

standards of the 19th century—Adoption by Congress 

of electrical standards (1894). 

XI 
XII CONTENTS 

Chapter I. AT ThE TURN OF THE CENTURY— 

Continued 

Page 

LAISSEZ-FAIRE STANDARDS 33 

Conflicts among standards—The 

tem of weights and measures in ordinary use—Federal 

and State standards and commercial weights and 

measures—The proliferation of local arbitrary standards. 

NATIONAL NEED * * * A NATIONAL 

HUMILIATION" 38 

The establishment of European standards laboratories 

since 1870—Secretary of Treasury Gage proposes a U.S. standardizing laboratory (1900)—Professor Stratton brought to Washington as "lnspector of Standards"—Nationwide endorsement of the proposed 

laboratory—Establishment of the Bureau. 

Chapter II. FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF 

STANDARDS (1901—10) 

SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON 49 

Stratton's background and association with Michelson 

at Chicago—Pritchett's, Stratton's and Vanclerlip's 

accounts of the founding of the Bureau—Stratton in 

the Office of Weights and Measures—Goes to Europe 

for ideas and instruments—The Reichsanstalt as 

model—Selecting the Visiting Committee—Choosing a site for the Bureau. 

EDWARD B. ROSA 62 

Rosa called to head electrical research—Building a staff 

and planning a program—Expansion of temporary 

facilities and operations in downtown Washington. 
CONTENTS XIII 

Chapter II. FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF 

STANDARDS—Continued 

Page 

THE NEW BUREAU LABORATORIES 68 

Transfer of the Bureau from the Treasury Department 

to Commerce and Labor—Constructing the laboratories on Connecticut Avenue—Rosa's description of 

North and South buildings—The electrical group 

moves in. 

ACQUIRING NATIONAL STANDARDS 73 

The Bureau in 1904—Classes of standards—Status of 

standards in the new Bureau divisions, and planned 

programs of work. 

AN AUTUMN FIRE AND A CONSUMERS' CRUSADE 82 

The Bureau exhibits its wares at the St. Louis Fair and 

buys Dewar's liquid hydrogen plant—An autumn leaf 

fire and hoses that could not be coupled—The Bureau 

holds its first conference on weights and measures— 

The national reform movement against commercial 

and political knavery—Stratton puts weights and 

measures into the crusade. 

THE BEGINNING OF GOVERNMENT TESTING 90 

The Government discovers it is a consumer—Congress 

worries about the growth of the Bureau—Industry 

seeks •Bureau help and research at the 

Bureau expands—Preparation of standard samples— 

Transfer of Geological Survey laboratories to the 

Bureau—West building—Personnel problems—Note 

on NBS scientists starred in American Men of Science— 

The graduate study program at the Bureau—Rosa's 

group becomes the premier division at the Bureau. 
XIV CONTENTS 

Chapter Iii. ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO 

(1911—16) 

Page 

STANDARDS FOR THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY 103 

Progress in electrical measurements between 1903 and 

1910—International agreement on new values for the 

ampere, ohm, and volt—Congress feels that Bureau's 

electrical research is completed—Construction of East 

building—A program of electrical measurement 

research. 

STANDARDS FOR PUBLIC UTILITIES 110 

Need for standards of quality, of safety, and of service 

in public utilities—Rise of the public service commissions—Waidner and Burgess' standard of light—Specifications for incandescent lamps—Standards of gas 

service—Resistance of the public utilities—Bureau 

track scales and test cars—Railway accidents—The 

trolley car, electrolysis, and underground corrosion— 

NBS as clearinghouse for' scientific and technical 

problems of public utilities. 

TESTING GOVERNMENT MATERIALS 124 

Rapid growth of - Government testing—The cement 

testing program—Cooperation with industry—Metallurgical research—Electroplating and electrodeposition— 

Burrows' permeameter—Physical constants—Fire resistance properties of materials—Materials testing and 

the consumer. 

STANDARDS FOR THE CONSUMER - 133 

The problem of Bureau testing and the ultimate con 

sumer—Three circulars for the "Measurements for the household," "Safety in the household," "Materials for the household"—Thomas Edison 

discovers the Bureau. 
CONTENTS XV 

Chapter III. ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO— 

Continued 

Page 

RADIO, RADIUM, AND X RAYS 138 

"Radio telegraphy and radio activity"—Austin's early 

radio research for the Navy—Dellinger and radio 

measurements—Koister's decremeter and radio direction finder—Radium research in Europe—The International Radium Standard—Dorsey's hands." 

"REVISING" THE ORGANIC ACT 147 

The Bureau's 200 projects and its vast testing program 

exceed intention of organic act—Stratton and the 

Congress—The device of special appropriations— 

Criticism of Bureau expansion—Congress makes testing 

and research of materials a specific Bureau function— 

Secretary of Commerce Redfleld and the Bureau— 

Stratton's restatement of Bureau functions. 

Chapter IV. THE WAR YEARS 

(1917—19) 

THE BUREAU TURNS TO WAR RESEARCH 159 

The war in Europe—Planning for war—The Bureau 

organizes a gage laboratory and a series of experimental 

expansion—From peacetime to 

military research. 

NEW SOURCES, RESOURCES, AND SUBSTITUTES 171 

Allied scientific missions—National shortages—Toluol 

extraction—Coke and natural gas investigations— 

• Alloy and other metallurgical studies—Concrete ships— 

Leather, paper, and textile substitutes—The War 

Industries Board and the drive for standardization, 

substitution, and conservation of resources. 
XVI CONTENTS 

Chapter IV. THE WAR YEARS— 

Continued 

Page 

THE AIRPLANE IN THE LABORATORY 179 

The status of aviation here and abroad—Spark plug, 

fuel, and oil problems—Development of aeronautical 

instruments—Dr. Briggs and the wind tunnel—The 

Liberty engine—The dynamometer and altitude laboratories—New sources and substitutes in airplane 

materials. 

OPTICAL GLASS AND OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS 186 

Shortage of high-grade optical glass—Bleininger's 

crucible—Glass production—Optical instrument development—Military photography. 

"NEW THINGS IN RADIO COMMUNICATION" 191 

The Navy takes over radio for the duration—Wartime 

radio requirements—Bureau publications on radio 

measurements and radio principles—Kolster's radio 

compass—Note on Bureau patents and patent policy— 

Bureau work on vacuum tubes—Resumption of patent 

litigation at the end of the war. 

FROM GAGESTO GASMASKS 199 

The gage and mass production—The Johannson and 

Hoke gages—Standardization of screw threads and 

other investigations—Gas warfare—Submarine detection—Goddard and his rocket weapons—The Garand 

rifle—Life at the Bureau during the war. 

THE BUREAU AND THE METRIC SYSTEM 207 

The metric controversy—The AEF adopts the metric 

system—Bureau support of metric legislation—The 

antimetric Institute of Weights and Measures—The legislative failure. 
CONTENTS XVII 

Chapter IV. THE WAR YEARS— 

Continued 

Page 

"THE LEGACY LEFT TO US" 212 

The war ends abruptly—Peacetime applications of war 

research—The device of transferred funds—The new 

alliance of science and the Bureau of 

Standards capable of extension into a national research 

institution?"—The Bureau's Industrial building as its 

war legacy—The Bureau plan to become the national 

research laboratory for industry. 

Chapter V. THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY 

(1920—30) 

THE POSTWAR WORLD 221 

Growth of new and old industries in the 1920's—The 

new cost of living—Research associates—The depression of 1920—21—Rosa's study of Federal expenditures 

and of Government research—The Republican ascendancy. 

HERBERT HOOVER AND THE 

BUREAU OF STANDARDS 229 

Hoover's plana for the Department of Commerce— 

Note on a comparison of NBS with NPL—The Bureau 

comes under Hoover's wing—Deaths of Rosa, Fischer, 

and Waidner—Dr. Stratton leaves the Bureau. 

GEORGE KIMBALL BIJRGESS 237 

Burgess as administrator—New limitations on his freedom of action—Continuation of Stratton policies— 

Bureau program for postwar research—Fundamental 

research during and after the war. 

A 
XVIH CONTENTS 

Chapter V. THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY— 

Continued 

Page 

BUILDING AND HOUSING 249 

Hoover's plans for recovery and reconstruction— 

Better homes—Bureau publications on home owner. 

ship and care and repair of the home—Note on NBS 

Letter Circulars. 

CRUSADE FOR STANDARDIZATION" 253 

Reconstruction through elimination of waste—Stand. 

ardization, specifications, and simplification—The AESC 

and trade associations as agencies of standardization— 

NBS Standards Yearbook—The Federal Specifications 

Board—Obstacles in the standardization program and 

the end of the crusade. 

RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRY 263 

Conservation of raw materials, elimination of waste, 

and assistance to new industries—Household gas, gas 

appliances, and so-called sugar 

research—Utilization of waste products from the land— 

Industrial and scientific instruments—Standardization 

of color—Dental research—Building research—Screwthread standardization—Optical glass—The Bureau 

standard of planeness. 

AUTOMOBILES AND AIRCRAFT 276 

Automotive engine research—Brakes and braking distances—Rubber research—Storage batteries—Battery 

additives—Airplane engine research—The helicopter 

and jet propulsion—Lighter than air craft—The new 

aeronautical division m the Department of Commerce. 
CONTENTS XIX 

Chapter V. THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY— 

Continued 

Page 

THE ETHER" 286 

The radio boom—Bureau publications for making 

simple radio sets—The Federal Radio Commission— 

Problems of radio reception—Frequency studies— 

Radio wave propagation and fading phenomena— 

New radio equipment—Harry Diamond and an instrument landing system for blind flying—The tide of 

industry and commerce at the flood.. 

Chapter VI. THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 

(1931-.-40) 

THE BUREAU IN THE PUBLIC VIEW 299 

The Bureau and the public press—The Bureau and 

the consumer—Criticism of the Bureau by private 

industry—The NBS-American Standards Association 

quarrel—Increasing criticism of the Bureau's 

of precision"—Congressional investigation Into Government competition with private industry. 

LYMAN JAMES BRIGGS 308 

Onset of the depression—The Bureau's eebanner year"— 

Note on a comparison of PTR and NBS—Death of Dr. 

Burgess—Selection of Dr. Briggs—His paper on the 

curve of a baseball—Dr. Briggs as Director—Attitude 

of the New Deal toward business and industry. 

TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF 

BUREAU FUNCTIONS . . . 320 

The New Deal attack on the depression—The Science 

Advisory Board—The slash in Bureau appropriations— 

The Science Advisory Board and Governnient research—The . depression at midcareer—Risé of the 

consumer movement—Life at the Bureau during the 

depression—New Bureau facilities, branch laboratories, 

and new programs. . 
XX CONTENTS 

Chapter VI. THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION— 

Continued 

Page 

SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 335 

A new international meter—Absolute electrical units— 

Practical photometric units—Standard of ultraviolet 

radiation—Color temperature standards—Standardization of X-ray dosages—Radioactive luminous compounds—New spectrochemical measurements—The 

Mathematical Tables Project—Physical constants of 

pure substances. 

BY LIMITATION OF FUNDS" 344 

Photographic emulsion research—Other research termmated in the 1930's—New NBS-ASA agreement— 

Note on Bureau patent litigation and policy—New 

standardA in radio—NBS radio prediction service— 

Radiotelemetry and cosmic ray research—Telemeteorography and the in the 

stratosphere." 

HEAVY WATER 357 

Atomic and nuclear research—Urey and the discovery 

of deuterium—Note on German attitude toward atomic 

research—Dr. Briggs and the Advisory Committee on 

Uranium—Status of atomic research in the spring of 

1940—Transfer of the Committee to NDRC and 

OSRD. 

Chapter VII. WORLD WAR II RESEARCH 

(1941—45) 

"IN THE EVENT OF WAR" 365 

The Bureau offers its services—Educational orders— 

Cautious preparations for defense—NDRC and 

OSRD—The Bureau reports its eve-of-war research— 

Strategic materials studies—Civilian defense investigations—Petroleum conservation and gas rationing—Synthetic rubber—Quartz crystal—Optical glass— 

Bureau organization for war. 
CONTENTS XXI 

Chapter VII. WORLD WAR II RESEARCH— 

Continued 

Page 

THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB 377 

Degree of Bureau participation—Heavy water research—Bureau purification of graphite and uranium— 

Dr. Briggs and the Uranium Advisory Committee— 

Status of project in June 1941—The Bureau 

over analytical procedures—Fermi produces the first 

nuclear chain Los Alamos Primer"— 

Detonation. 

THE RADIO PROXIMITY FUZE 388 

Theory of the proximity fuze—The Bureau undertakes 

development of fuzes for nonrotating projectiles— 

Development of the fuze for rockets—The photoelectric 

fuze—Ordnance Development Division—Requirement 

for a bomb fuze—Bomb director mechanism—The 

mortar shell fuze—Printed. circuits—Restricted use 

of the proximity fuze. 

A GUIDED MISSILE CALLED THE BAT 399 

NDRC seeks a winged bomb—The TV-guided 

"—Radar-guided missiles—The '— 

The tests in 1944—Use in the Pacific 

theater. 

RADIO AND RADIO-WEATHER PREDICTING 403 

The high-frequency direction finder—Fundamental 

work of Diamond and Norton—Military value of radio 

weather predictions—Formation of IRPL—Problems 

in radio weather predicting—Forecasting mvf, luhf, 

terrestrial and ionospheric storm effects—The Bureau's 

short-time warning system—IRPL Radio Propagation 

Handbook—The quartz crystal stockpile project. 

RESEARCH IN CRITICAL MATERIALS 410 

Shortages in raw material resources—Synthetic rubber—Dr. Briggs and the Truman Committee—Steel 

alloys—Protective coatings and electroplating as steel 

CONTENTS XXIII 

Chapter VIII. THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE— 

Continued 

Page 

NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIO PROPAGATION 467 

Program of the atomic physics division—A complete 

set of atomic standards?—Radioactive tracer studies— 

Atomic Energy Levels—Nuclear properties of hydrogen"—Cryogenic operations at Boulder—New research in radio propagation—Broadcasting 

standard time—Microwave spectroscopy and the 

atomic clock. 

HIGH POLYMERS AND BUILDING RESEARCH 477 

Note on guest lecturers and consultants at the Bureau— 

High polymers—The Bureau as the national agency for 

rubber research, mathematics, and radio propagation—The building technology and 

repair of the house" 

GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY 487 

Dr. Condon's handbook of physics—Amendment to 

the organic act of 1901—Restatement of Bureau 

activities—Semicentennial of the Bureau's founding— 

Dr. Condon and the House Un-American Activities 

Committee—Dr. Condon resigns. 

THE CRUCIAL DECADE—AN ENVOI 

AN AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORTS 495 

The Kelly (Ad Hoc) Committee and its recommendations—A personnel survey—Readjustments in the 

Bureau testing functions of the 

Bureau." 
XXIV CONTENTS 

THE CRUCIAL DECADE—AN ENVOI— 

Continued 

Page 

GAITHERSBURG 503 

The 50-year-old Bureau plant—To reconstruct or rebuild?—Gaithersburg plans—New guidelines—Science 

and the Federal Government—The measurement 

pinch—The Bureau's central, continuing mission. 

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 509 

The Bureau in its first five decades—The Bureau as a 

focal point in the Federal science program—A regrouping of Bureau programs—An envoi. 

APPENDICES 

A. FERDINAND RUDOLPH HASSLER: First Superintenclent of the Coast Survey and of Weights and 

Measures. 515 

B. THE METRIC SYSTEM IN THE UNITED 

STATES 527 

C. BASIC LEGISLATION relating to Standard Weights 

and Measures and to the Organization, Functions, and 

Activities of the National Bureau of Standards. 537 

D. THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS IN 

THE FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION 555 

E. MEMBERS OF THE VISITING COMMITTEE of 

the Secretary of Commerce to the National Bureau of 

Standards. 557 

F. NBS APPROPRIATIONS and other Supporting 

Funds, 1902—1955. 559 
CONTENTS XXV 

APPENDICES—Continued 

Page 

G. NBS SPECIAL APPROPRIATIONS, 1910-1935 561 

H. NBS AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL 563 

I. PUBLICATIONS by the Staff of the National Bureau 

of Standards. 565 

J. NBS ADMINISTRATIVE, SCIENTIFIC, AND 

TECHNICAL STAFF CHIEFS, 1905-1960 569 

K. NBS PUBLICATIONS representing RESEARCH 

HIGHLIGHTS in SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 

1901—1951 631 

L. LAND PURCHASES for the National Bnreau of 

Standards. 649 

M. SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON: Founder and First 

Director of the National Bureau of Standards. 651 

N. BOOKS by Staff Members of the National Bureau of 

Standards. 663 

0. BUILDINGS AND STRUCTURES of the National 

Bureau of Standards. 669 

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE 673 

INDEX 683 
AT THE 

TURN OF 

THE CENTURY 

CHAPTER I 

MAIN STREET, 1900 

On May 3, 1900, the House Committee on Coinage, Weights and Measures 

met to consider a letter recently submitted by the Secretary of the Treasury. 

The Secretary requested the establishment of a national standardizing bureau. 

Knowing little, perhaps, of the science of measurement, but learning 

that it was "a matter in which a great many people seem to be interested, one which is thought to be very necessary for this country," the committee heard 

out the group of eminent men called from science and industry to testify at 

the hearing. It was a brief hearing, lasting less than 2 hours and reported in 

15 pages, yet so persuaded was the committee that its members reported to 

their colleagues in the House: 

It is therefore the unanimous opinion of your committee that no more essential aid could be given to manufacturing, commerce, 

the makers of scientific apparatus, the scientific work of the Government, of schools, colleges, and universities than by the establishment of the institution proposed in this bill.1 

There were some in Congress by no means certain such an agency was needed, 

but 10 months later the bill founding the National Bureau of Standards passed 

both houses of Congress. 

The idea of a national bureau of standards was presented at an 

auspicious hour. America in the year 1900 thought well of itself. The hard 

times of 1893—95 were all but forgotten in the aura of prosperity and sense 

of achievement that energized the Nation. Industry and invention boomed 

and business flourished as never before. The prophets at the turn of the 

century unanimously agreed on the good years to come. 

The Nation was now an industrial power to be reckoned with. In 

the 3 years preceding 1900 the value of American manufactured goods sold 

abroad almost trebled, and total foreign commerce passed the 1 billion mark as exports exceeded imports for the first time. The great commercial 

invasion of Europe had begun. 

1 H.R. 1452, "National Standardizing Bureau," 56th Cong., 1st sess., May 14, 1900 

(U.S. House Reports, serial 4026, vol. 6, 1899—1900). This is the inscription over the new Bureau laboratories at Gaithersburg, Md. 1 
2 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

In a reverse invasion that had been going on for a century, immigration had swollen the population to 76 million, more than two-thirds of the 

increase occurring since 1850. Although concentrated in the East, fully a quarter of the population had spread across the Midwest, clustered in Texas, 

and settled along the Pacific coast. Gold miners, oil prospectors, homesteaders, ranchers, and builders of railroads and cities had followed the 

course of empire westward, urged on by the growing financial power of the 

bankers and industrialists in the East. And with the splendid prizes of the 

recent Spanish-American War, the United States had at last become a world 

power, complete with an oversea empire. 

The little war with Spain from May to August 1898 freed Cuba, Puerto 

Rico, and the Philippines. Cuba, returned by our troops to the revolutionists who had called for help against Spanish oppression, became a protectorate in all but name; Puerto Rico was made an outright protectorate, as was Guam, ceded to us at the peace table. But the Philippines, destined for 

self-government, but then coveted by Germany and Japan and eyed with 

concern by England, France, and Russia, we decided to annex. Soon our 

burgeoning industry would be glad of those 7 million customers, and beyond 

them the teeming millions of China. Our share in that great market in the 

Orient was assured through Secretary of State John Hay's announcement of 

the Open-Door policy, in a note sent in 1899 to the major European powers. 

That same year the Hawaiian Islands came under our wing, gaining territorial status the next year, and in 1900 Samoa was thrust upon us by her 

island king, made uneasy by the European warships roaming the Pacific. 

The new sense of power was flaunted at the Pan-American Exposition 

that opened in Buffalo in May 1901 to proclaim the coming of age of the 

Western Hemisphere. The great fireworks display that closed each day of the 

fair ended with an emblematic pageant entitled "Our Empire," dramatizing 

in patriotic pyrotechnics our winning of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the 

Philippines. 

Looking back as the new year came in, all America acclaimed the 

century of science and invention to which it was heir. In the past 30 years 

alone the steam engine had changed the Nation from an agricultural to an 

industrial economy, turning the wheels of factories, farm machinery, locomotives, and electric dynamos. The original 131⁄2 miles of railroad track 

built in 1830 between Baltimore and Ellicott's Mills, Md., now sprawled 

across almost 200,000 miles of the Nation, and a new high-speed train was making the trip between New York and Chicago in an incredible 20 hours. 

The character of the Nation's waterfront was also changing under 

the force of steam. Two-thirds of the ships built in 1900 were still sailing 

vessels or auxiliaries—barks, schooners, sioops, canal boats, and barges— 

but that year also saw 19 side-wheelers, 117 stern-wheelers, and 216 propellerdriven ships built for the lake, river, and coastal traffic. 
MAIN STREET, 1900 3 

The marvel of the age, however, was not steam, whose power could 

only be used in place, but electricity—power made portable over wires. 

And the turn of the century saw the greatest threat to further development 

of electric power removed. The reciprocating steam engine had about 

reached the extreme limit of practical size for the production of electricity 

when it was replaced by the high-speed steam turbine. Originally designed 

for the propulsion of battleships and ocean liners, the new turbine proved a peerless electric generator. 

The commercial application of electricity, beginning with the telegraph, was half a century old, but checked by hit-or-miss methods of development, costly power sources, and the natural conservatism of the public, 

its promise had been redeemed only in the last decade. In urban transportation electric trolleys were rapidly replacing the old horse cars. Electrification of the elevated railroads in Boston and New York would soon end 

the noise, smoke, and ash of the overhead steam trains. It had made 

practicable the 5 miles of subway recently completed in Boston, and New 

York and Chicago planned similar systems under their streets. New York's 

rapid transit line, begun in 1900 and completed 3 years later, ran 9 miles 

under Manhattan, from City Hall to the Harlem River. As ground was broken there was talk of extending the line by a tunnel under the East River, 

connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. 

Beginning with a single strand on poles set up between Baltimore and 

Washington in 1845, electric telegraph wires now festooned city streets 

everywhere and followed the railroads from coast to coast. A new development was a printing telegraph, in which the Postal Telegraph Co. and the 

Associated Press were interested. More amazing were the reports of 

Guglielmo Marconid's experiments in transmitting electric signals without 

wires. His signal had already spanned the English Channel. In December 

1901 he would astound the world with his demonstration of transatlantic 

wireless telegraph. 

If the telegraph was everywhere, the telephone, even with more than 

half a million subscribers, was still found only in the largest cities and 

towns, in business houses, shops and factories, and the homes of the well to do. 

Even Edison's electric lamp, invented in 1879 arid first sold commercially 

3 years later, was still a novelty. His Pearl Street power station opened in 

September 1882 with six generators of 125 horsepower each, sending current 

along 13 miles of wire and lighting a few streets and shops with arc and 

incandescent lamps.2 But in 1900 most of the streets in New York, as elsewhere, were still lighted by gas lamps, and except in the city homes of the 

2 Only one generator was used that night in September, to light 400 lamps for 85 cus- tomers. By 1904 a single generator supplied enough current to light 100,000 lamps; by 

1914 it lighted 1,700,000 lamps. 
4 

Carriages and buggies and horse-drawn wagons continued to predominate on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1908, but the electric trolley had replaced the horse car. 

By 1904 the elevated railroads in New York had been electrified. None of the new 

electric trucks is visible here in Herald Square. The elegant car in the foreground is 

probably a 1904 Locomobile, a gasoline car that was made by the Stanley Steamer 

Co. for several years. Almost half of the 54,590 cars then registered in the United 

States were new that year. 
MAIN STREET, 1900 5 

prosperous more than a decade would pass before electric wire and bulbs 

began to replace the oil lamps and gas mantles in common use. The promise of things to come dominated the Pan-American Exposition of 190L As gaudy and significant as its patriotic fireworks display was the symbol of the fair, the 410-foot Electric Tower. Lighted by the three 

5,000-horsepower generators built at Niagara Falls 6 years before, 40,000 

lamps made a torch of the tower for 50 miles around.3 

For all the islands of light in city and town, the application of electricity most in evidence at the turn of the century was in transportation, 

propelling the trolleys that went out to the suburbs and the vans and drays in 

the commercial center of the big cities. Electric delivery wagons capable of 

speeds up to 15 miles an hour trundled along with the throngs of wagon 

teams in downtown New York, while up on Fifth Avenue electric taxis sped 

past the horse-drawn stages and weaving crowds of bicycles. As late as 

1913 the National Bureau of Standards in Washington did not own a single 

gas-driven car or truck, depending on electric vans for ordinary express and 

teams of horses to bring heavy equipment up the hill to the laboratories.4 

The electric truck, more reliable and efficient in city traffic than the gasolinedriven car, had but one drawback. Its huge storage battery had to be re- charged after every 20 or 30 miles of service. 

Yet the gasoline auto had ceased to be a rarity by 1900. Henry Ford 

had built his first buggy, run by a two-cylinder, 4-horsepower engine, in 1892 

while working at the Edison Illuminating Co., in Detroit. By 1900 at least 

80 firms, owned by or hiring the services of the Duryea brothers, Ford, 

Elwood Haynes, F. E. Stanley, A. Winton, Elmer A. Sperry, Ranson E. Olds, 

and the Studebaker brothers, were making gasoline, electric, and steam automobiles. About 700 of their cars were on the road as the century began, 

and almost 4,000 more were rolling before the year was out.5 

'Communication from Mr. Gardner H. Dales, Niagara Mohawk Power Corp., Jan. 26, 

1962 (in NBS Historical File). The symbol recurs: the Tower of Light planned for the 

1964—65 New York World's Fair was to be a 24-million-candlepower beacon, visible by 

night from Boston to Washington. As actually erected, its brilliance was of the magnitude of 24-billion-candlepower, but it was not visible for any great distance because 

it was a stationary light and because of the great quantity of ambient lighting on the 

fairgrounds. 

Letter, Stratton to Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, July 13, 1913 (National Archives, 

Record Group 167, NBS Box 11, file IG). NBS records in the National Archives will 

hereafter be identified only by NBS box number and file letters. 

Gardner D. Hiscox, Horseless Vehicles, Automobiles and Motor Cycles (New York: 

Norman W. Henley, 1901), p. 14, said 700 "was probably an exaggeration." An appendix 

in.Hiscox,Iisted 272 manufacturers of automobiles and parts across the country. Bulletin 66, U.S. Bureau of Census, April 1907, reported 1,681 steam, 1,575 electric, and 936 

gas automobiles manufactured in 1900. 
6 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

The great wonders of the age, everyone agreed, were electricity and 

the electric light, the automobile, the telephone, the railroad, and telegraph 

lines threading the Nation, and the growing number of farm machines 

operated by steam engines.6 Tributes to new engineering skills included 

such stone structures as the Cabin John Bridge above Washington, the great 

steel Brooklyn Bridge, and the combination of these materials in the new skyscrapers in Chicago and in the 21-story Flatiron Building, New York's first 

skyscraper, then under construction. 

Of the telephone Thomas C. Mendenhall, president of Rose Polytechnic Institute, said: 

"But the wonder of it all is [that it works] - Nothing like it in simplicity of construction, 

combined with complexity of operation, is to be found in any other human contrivance." 

A Century of Electricity (Boston and New York: Houghton & Muffin, 1887), p. 

208. 

The Bureau's electric van, with "Bureau of Standards, Department of Commerce and 

Labor," somewhat blurred, inscribed on its panel, at the express office on Pennsylvania Avenue, picking up a shipment of instruments or equipment. The van has been 

identified as a Pope-Waverly, probably the 1903 or 1904 model. 
MAIN STREET, 1900 7 

Equally amazing were the phonograph and gramophone with their 

sound tracks on cylinders and disks, the Pianola, and the kinetescope parlors 

exhibiting Mr. Edison's 1-minute amusements on film. Everybody seemed 

to be inventing something' and looking for ways and means to make their 

notions commercial. A crude washing machine had recently been patented 

and would soon be on the market, but the zipper, invented back in 1893, 

• was still being 'tinkered with and as yet had no use. 

• Business firms by the thousands had spawned across the country to 

provide raw materials or to make new products, as well as to supply the 

increasing everyday needs of the soaring population. Small, inefficient, 

and often brutally competitive, they were destined to be swallowed up by 

combines and corporations organized to exploit theiE growing success. The 

last decade of the 19th century became an age of trusts as industrialists, bankers, 'and speculators bought out or merged the multitudes of individual enterprises into great monopolies. The first had been Standard Oil, founded in 

1882 when it began consolidating the oil industry by taking in 80 companies 

that year. By 1900, sugar, whisky, tobacco, glass, lead, cordage, copper, 

rubber, timber, waterpower, coal, steel and iron, wire nails, tinpiate, sheet 

steel, urban railroads, farm machinery, gas, electric, and telephone utilities, 

stoves, watches, carpets, beef, flour, matches, candles, kerosene, and even coffins, school slates, and castor oil had passed into the hands of trusts.7 

With no other power to appease but its conscience, monopoly in these com- modities more often than not resulted in higher rather than 'lower prices and 

frequently in an inferior product. On the other hand, it was a manifest stage 

in industrialization, the consolidation of scores and sometimes hundreds of 

• small businesses engaged in a single commodity leading to a degree of standardization of product and introducing economy and quantity production 

,and centralized management. 

Under a traditionally laissez-faire government, public and private 

complaints against the abuses of big business fell on deaf ears, and the SherAnti-Trust Act of 1890 remained unexercised lest it endanger continued 

prosperity. Even Theodore Roosevelt, that maverick wielder of the big 

stick, was to clinch his place on the McKinley ticket in 1900 by declaring: 

"We are for expansion and anything else that will benefit the American 

laborer and manufacturer." All monopolies profited from the assumption 

• that such so-called natural monopolies as the railroads, the telephone and 

• telegraph, gas and electric companies, and the traction systems in the cities 

were public necessities, and theoretically at least, subject to some degree of 

regulation in the public interest. 

Ernst von Halle, Trusts or Industrial Combinations and Coalitions (New York and 

• London: Macmillan, 1895), pp. 328—337, lists over 473 commodities controlled by trade 

combinations. 
8 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

In the half-century between 1850 and 1900, as a result of the development and marketing of inventions, the enormous growth of business, industry, 

commerce, and banking, and the ascendency of the empire builders, the 

national wealth increased from $41⁄2'to $88 billion.8 Much of this was con- centrated wealth through the consolidation of industry and few of its rewards 

reached the marketplace. Prices had actually gone up slightly in the past 

decade. Yet the standard of living of the man on Main Street in 1900 was 

said to compare favorably with that anywhere else in the world. 

For much of the Nation, the comparison of American living standards 

with those of other nations did not stand up very well in daylight. At least 

two-thirds of the workers, immigrant and native born, in the mills, mines, 

factories, farms, and offices of the country, who put in a 12- to 14-hour day, 

6 days a week, made less than $600 a year (roughly equivalent to $2,400 

today), or well below what economists then considered a living wage. The 

relatively small middle-income group, the professions, technicians, businessmen, and minor executives, however, with incomes between $1,000 and 

$5,000, lived comfortably and by present-day standards sometimes well.9 

A house in the best residential section (Dolphin Street in Baltimore, 

for example) cost a middle-income executive less than $5,000. A two-story 

house with bay windows and a furnace, in a slightly less desirable section or 

out in the suburbs, could be had for as little as $750; a three-story house for 

$1,200. Or the young executive could rent a 7- to 10-room house in the city 

for between $10 and $25 per month. Other expenses were commensurate. 

His good business suit might cost as much as $10.65, his wife's wool Kersey 

and covert cloth outfit, $5.98 ("Buy now and pay later," the 1901 handbill 

said). A felt hat was $0.89, children's shoes sold for $0.19, those for men and women from $0.98 to $2. Food prices in the city were not considered 

excessive when an 8-pound leg of mutton came to $1.20, prime rib roast was $0.15 a pound, corned beef $0.08 a pound, butter $0.28 a pound, eggs $0.22 a dozen, and milk $0.08 a quart. 

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times 

to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), p. 151. Hereafter cited as Historical Statistics. 

°JoIm A. Ryan, A Living Wage (New York: Macmillan, 1906, reprinted 1908, 1910, 

1912), pp. 136, 150, 161—162. His "reasonable and irreducible minimum" for a family 

of seven came to $601.03 (p. 145). In a city like Baltimore it was $750, in Chicago 

$900, and in New York $950. See 18th Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor: 

Cost of Living and Retail Prices of Food, 1903 (Washington, D.C., 1904), p. 648, and 

Historical Statistics, pp. 179—180. 

Prices in 1900 were not appreciably greater than those itemized in Catherine Owen's 

Ten Dollars Enough: Keeping House Well on Ten Dollars a Week (Boston and New 

York: Houghton, Mimin, 1887), in which, on $100 a month a young couple spent $20 

for rent, $12 for a full.time servant, $45 for housekeeping, $15 for clothes and general 

expenses and $8 for commutation into the city. 
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 9 

Among the small pleasures of life was a trolley ride to the suburbs for 

3 cents (soon to advance, amid bitter outcries, to 5 cents), and on special 

occasions one might hire a coach with rubber tires, electric lights, and carbon 

heater for a day in the country for $3. And there were no city sales taxes, 

no State, county, or Federal income taxes. 

Freedom from taxes made it possible for Andrew Carnegie to keep 

every penny of his personal income in the year 1900, well over $23 million, 

and for Henry Clay Frick to spend $17 million for a marble and limestone 

palace covering a square block on Fifth Avenue. Charles Schwab's house 

built on Riverside Drive in 1905 had 75 rooms and 40 baths, but was no 

match for Edward Stotesbury's 130-room hail in Philadelphia, or John D. 

Rockefeller's $30 million estate near Tarrytown, N.Y. 

Under a benevolent and business.minded Government, more than 

20 percent of the total wealth of the Nation was in the hands of fewer than 

4,000 men, The bankers, speculators, and industrialists who through headlong 

exploitation of the world about them created immense fortunes for themselves 

and controlled the fortunes of the Nation. "Malefactors of great wealth," 

Teddy Roosevelt in the White House might call them, but as yet only they 

had the resources and power to turn the discoveries of science, invention, 

and exploration into the shape of things to come. THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 

The builders of America's industrial complex had little interest in 

standards as such, but the scientists, engineers, and experimenters working 

for industry or independently found themselves increasingly hampered 

without them. The need for a Federal bureau of standards was talked about 

for almost 20 years before legislation for its establishment was introduced in 

1900. By then the necessity had become imperative as science and industry, 

ready to take giant steps in the new century, looked for better measurements 

and more uniformity, precision, and control in the laboratory, factory, and 

plant. 

The climate that produced the National Bureau of Standards is thus 

to be found in the world of science and technology as it appeared at the turn 

of the century. Some of this has been described in the previous section. 

More is furnished by contemporary historians who catalogued in book after 

book the century's birthright of invention. The promise was great, and 

prophets abounded with predictions of the future of science, industry, and 

society. 

Without exception, the calendars of invention and histories of progress 

published in the early years of the new century gave first place to the 

electrical marvels of the previous decade and the "electrical magicians," 
10 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

Still the largest stone arch in America, the Cabin John Bridge was completed in 1859, a 220-foot span carrying a water conduit and carriage nov over Cabin John Creek. For 

44 years it was the largest masonry arch in the world, until larger ones were built in 

Saxony and France. Since then masonry has been replaced by concrete in great 

bridges, as more economical. 

Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Succeeding chapters in the histories 

recounted the latest developments in electric, gasoline, and steam vehicles and 

the new roadways being built for them, the growth of the iron and steel 

industry, of railroads and steamships, and the development of the machine 

tool industry, of petroleum products, textiles, clay products, rubber goods, 

glass making, and leather goods. 

Among the new instruments of science described were the spectroscope and improved telescopes, opening new prospects in astronomy; the 

X-ray machine and fluoroscope; and according to one contemporary historian, Edison's phonograph and kinetoscope, which "belong naturally under 

this chapter," though they also had their "commercial and amusement 

purposes." 10 (Yet it is doubtful whether he foresaw the use science would 

Charles H. Cochrane, Modern Industrial Progress (Philadelphia & London: J. B. 

Lippencott, 1904), pp. 406, 409. See also Edward W. Byron, The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Munn & Co., 1900); William H. 

Doolittle, Inventions in the Century (The Nineteenth Century Series, London & Philadelphia: Linscott, 1902); Trumbull White, Our Wonderful Progress (Chicago, 

1902); Calendar of Invention and Discovery, compiled by John C. Wait (New York: 

McGraw, 1903); and anticipating these, Robert Routledge's Discoveries and Inven- 
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 11 

make of recording devices and of slow-motion photography.) Engineering 

feats included new triumphs in bridge-building, the first great dikes and 

dams along the Mississippi, and canals and tunnels, while among "odd and 

curious developments" were listed the comptometer, the trackless trolley, the new towering smoke stacks of industry, the extension fire ladder, and the 

escalator and elevator, the latter developed to serve those "modern tall steel 

skeleton fire-proof buildings, commonly called skyscrapers." 

The marvels achieved presumed greater ones to come, and more than 

one prophet looking into the new century envisioned a a of years, made possible, as John Bates Clark 

said in the Atlantic, by "omnipresent and nearly gratuitous electrical 

energy!" In addition to coal and water .power, Clark optimistically predicted that it would not be long before the waves and tides and even the 

electric currents generated within the earth itself would be harnessed for 

the production of cheap and virtually unlimited electric power. Industry, 

commerce, and the home would be filled with automatic machines (". - - we 

touch a button and they do the rest," said Clark), putting in the hands of 

every man a hundred silent servants, raising wages, dispelling poverty, and 

stilling the unrest of the laboring classes.1' 

H. G. Wells, with frequent glances at the American promise, agreed in 

his "Experiment in Prophecy" in 1901 on the equalizing force of the electrical 

century to come, saw homes and factories heated, ventilated, and operated 

by electricity. But with this revolution, he predicted, would come a world so closely linked and controlled by electrical conveniences and comrnunications as to reduce all to a gray mass, to a virtually classless world of respectable mechanics. 

Even greater social and political changes than those resulting from 

electricity, Wells thought, would come from the inevitable mass production 

of commodities and the future development of the internal combustion engine. 

Certain to come was a smooth-riding, powerful, and stenchiess gasoline 

automobile and great networks of paved roads for it, making journeys of 

300 miles in a day possible. Then motor trucks would replace the railroads, 

and motor coaches supplant the horse cars and electric trolleys that ran out 

to suburbia, where, as Wells said, the conforming gray mass of the future 

lived.'2 

tions of the Nineteenth Century (London: Geo. Routledge, 1876) and the survey of 

the century's wonders in Sci. Am. 75, 50—96 (1896). 

"John Bates Clark, "Recollections of the Twentieth Century," Atlantic, 89, 4 (1902). 

Clark was professor of political economy at Columbia University from 1895 to 1923, 

specializing in trusts and monopolies. See also George Sutherland, Twentieth Century 

Inventions: A Forecast (New York & London: Longman's Green, 1901). 

H. G. Wells, "Anticipation: an experiment in prophecy," North American Review, 

vols. 172—173 (June—November 1901). 
12 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

The visible achievements of technology and invention, though many were still crude and far from generally available, made prophecy a game 

any number could play, and with some knowledge of human nature, foreseeing the social changes they would bring only meant projecting the 

changes already begun. Predicting the future of pure science, however, 

was something else, and the few who ventured any guesses did so cautiously 

and in the vaguest of terms. 

One who ventured was John Trowbridge, director of the Jefferson 

Physical Laboratory at Harvard. The work of Maxwell, Hertz, Roentgen, 

and Thomson between 1873 and 1897, in demonstrating the electromagnetic 

nature of light and formulating the concept of the electron, in mass much 

less than one-thousandth part of the chemist's lightest known atom, had almost 

certainly, said Trowbridge, made the study of the infinitely small the new 

direction science would take. 

The word "electronics" had not been invented, and Professor Trowbridge saw no "use" in the study of the electron yet, except as it might 

possibly lead to an answer to an unexpected problem recently encountered. 

This was in the electrolytic effects observed in Boston, where the iron mains 

carrying water under Boylston Street had been found badly corroded by the 

electric current of the trolley system. The investigation of this phenomenon, 

declared Trowbridge, "has laid the foundation of a new branch of science, 

that of physical chemistry, which promises to be one of the most important 

sciences in the world." Electrochemistry, the branch of physical chemistry 

concerned with electrolysis, seemed to Trowbridge certain to provide the 

key to exploration of the nature of the smallest particles of matter yet 

found.'3 

But the world of electronics and the physicist's exploration of the 

atom was still far off. For the most part, the world of science in 1900 had 

little conception of the truly revolutionary ideas to come. Robert A. Millikan was to say that of the basic principles of universal order taught at the end 

of the 19th century, not one but its universal validity was to be questioned 

by serious and competent physicists, while most were definitely proved to be 

subject to exceptions. In 1895, the very year some physicists were declaring 

that "the great discoveries in physics have all been made," that the field 

of physics was "dead," Roentgen announced his discovery of X rays. A 

year later came Becquerel's discovery of the radioactivity of uranium, 

marking the birth of nuclear physics, and in 1897, J. J. Thomson in England 

established beyond question the existence of electrons as fundamental con13 John Trowbridge, "The study of the infinitely small," Atlantic, 89, 612 (1902). 

Professor Trowbridge, a physicist and specialist in electricity, was director of the 

Jefferson Physical Laboratory from 1888 to 1910. 
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 13 

stituents of all atoms in the universe.14 Seventeen years would pass before 

the latter discovery, stirring Professor Trowbridge to prophecy, would be 

applied to the electronic amplifier tube, making possible the first wireless 

telephone and the long distance telephone. 

The breakthrough in the world of physics continued in the first 

quarter of the 20th century with Planck's quantum theory (1901), Einstein's 

concept of the relativistic transformation of mass into radiant energy, ex- pressed in his equation Emc2 (1905), and his elaboration of the principle 

of relativity (1905—25). That same period witnessed the isolation and 

measurement of the electron (1910—17), the discovery of the wave nature of 

X rays (1912), and the quantitative working out of their properties (1910— 

25). These revelations were followed by Bohr's model of the atom (1912— 

22), the investigation of crystal structures with the aid of X-ray spectroscopy 

(from 1913 on), the discovery of isotopes through the chemistry of radioactive elements (1913), and the discovery of cosmic rays (1926) 

Thus, active as pure science was at the turn of the century, in this 

country its efforts were largely unknown. For one thing, most of the work 

was done abroad. We were not to develop any significant number of pure 

scientists, let alone theoretical physicists, until the 1930's. The early career 

of the Bureau of Standards, so much of it given to basic research in standards and to technological research, is witness. (When Louis W. Austin 

came to the Bureau in 1905 by way of Cambridge, after 2 years' study 

at the Reichsanstalt, the national physical laboratory of Germany, he brought 

with him Rutherford's book on radioactivity, just published by the Cambridge University Press. Reviewed at a weekly staff meeting at the Bureau, it 

caused some stir among the assembled physicists, but more perplexity. The 

subject was as yet beyond the province of the Bureau.) 16 Besides being developed abroad, the theories and hypotheses of the 

new physicists remained incapable of proof or practical application as they 

awaited better instruments and precision measurements. Hence the general 

public, when it chanced on notice of them, hadn't the slightest understanding 

of the new discoveries, and even among men of science their implications for 

the future of science were not widely understood or appreciated. To the 

average man, science appeared to be in the hands of the experimentalists, 

inventors, and mechanics and in the application of their work to new in14 Robert A. Millikan, "The last fifteen years in physics," Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 65, 68 

(1926); Millikan, "The evolution of twentieth-century physics," Annual Report, 

Smithsonian Institution, 1927, pp. 191—199; The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan 

(New York: Prentice Hall, 1950), pp. 106, 271. 

For repeated statements of the stasis reached in physics, especially in electricity, see T. C. Mendenhall, The Age of Electricity, passim. 15 Millikan, "The last fifteen years in physics," pp. 70—78. 

'° Interview with Dr. Liewelyn G. Hoxton, Nov. 27—28, 1961 (NBS Historical File). 
14 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

dustry and enterprise. What the average man did not realize was the extent 

to which science, pure and applied, was becoming involved in experiment 

and invention. The genius of Thomas A. Edison is a case in point. 

Despite the fact that much of his best work was done before 1900, 

Edison was in many respects the symbol of the age as he was its hero, widely 

accepted as the typical self.trained, empirical genius of American science. 

Though his knowledge of physics and chemistry was ill-grounded and his 

disdain for mathematics profound, the world owed to Edison through 

his hundreds of patents the electric light bulb and phonograph, the kinetoscope, the first effective storage battery, and the first practical electric power 

system. These were the products of his invention factory. Set up in New 

York with 50 men in 1870 and moved across the river to Menlo Park in 1876, 

it was unquestionably the greatest of his inventions and the prototype of 

today's industrial research laboratories. Without detracting in the least 

from his undeniable genius, the wizard had help. Few were aware of the 

mathematicians, chemists, and physicists, many of them trained abroad, 

who worked at Menlo Park to make the necessary calculations for Edison's 

inventions. 

Behind the histories of progress and invention at the turn of the 

century, wherein Edison was accorded first place, was a new phenomenon, 

the accelerated pace at which science was contributing to the inventions and 

processes that apply it to daily life. Commerce and industry could no longer 

wait while scientists projected theories without demonstrations, while isolated inventors tinkered unassisted with crude working models. By bringing 

scientists and inventors together, along with talented engineers to translate 

their theories and models into commercial products, industry sought to 

telescope time and effort. 

By the turn of the century small research laboratories had been set 

up in the Pennsylvania Railroad yards at Altoona, Pa., at B. F. Goodrich, 

and Bethlehem Steel & Iron, staffed with inventors, engineers, and chemists. 

The first systematic effort to incorporate science and technology in industry 

was, as might be expected, in the electrical field, when the General Electric 

Research Laboratory, a direct offshoot of Edison's Menlo Park, was organized 

at Schenectady in 1900. The decade before the First World War saw similar laboratories organized at DuPont, Bell Telephone, Westinghouse, 

Eastman Kodak, Standard Oil (Indiana), at U.S. Rubber, and Corning 

Glass. In the 1920's, under the dynamics of mass production, new research 

factories for the mass production of technological ideas proliferated at the 

rate of over a hundred a year. 

Even before the founding of Edison's laboratory, scientists, whether 

directly engaged by industry or working independently in university laboratories or in their own workshops, were becoming increasingly active in the 
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 15 

commercial life of the Nation. And under pressure to produce or to satisfy 

their own demands for quantitative results, it was the scientists who sought 

better standards of measurement, better tools, precision instruments, and 

materials. It was they who realized that the arbitrary standards they worked 

with or of necessity had to create for themselves were all bu.t meaningless 

and represented a needless loss of time, effort, and money. Science, better 

than industry, was aware that only Federal legislation could establish the 

necessary criteria, criteria that would possess national as well as international 

validity. 

Other nations, more advanced in commerce and industry, had long 

since recognized the need for such legislation and had established national 

standards laboratories. America, growing in commerce and industry, in 

national power and prestige, had nothing comparable to them. The meeting of these forces at the end of the 19th century—the growing needs of / 

science and technology, coinciding with a new sense of national 

the impulse that created the National Bureau of Standards. 

When the Bureau was founded, the first power-motored flight by 

Orville Wright was just 2 years away. That first decade would see the 

development of audion tubes by Fleming and DeForest, long.distance tele. 

phony, the diesel engine, high-speed tool steel, the mercury vapor arc, and the 

first real plastic (bakelite). In the ever-widening fields of electricity, automotive engineering, aviation, plastics, textiles, and construction materials, 

the Bureau was to do basic and in some cases pioneer research. And in 

doing so it was to lay the groundwork for its later investigations in fields as 

yet undreamed of, in the application of the new physics to metrology, in free 

radical research, cryogenic engineering, atomic and radiation physics, space 

physics, plasma physics, and radio propagation engineering. 

Beginning with the formulation of improved standards of electrical 

measurement, the Bureau was to develop better standards of length and 

mass, develop new standards of temperature, light, and time. It would establish standards of safety in commerce and industry, of performance in public 

utilities, and prepare and maintain hundreds of standard samples of ma- terials for industry. The advance of science would demand increasingly 

precise instrumentation, greater and greater ranges of measurement, and 

wholly new standards such as those of sound, frequency, and radiation. 

The Bureau would eventually become the custodian of and final arbiter over 

more than 700 different standards. 

Such an agency, providing vital services to the Nation outside the 

province of any possible private, institutional, or industrial organization, 

might have had its birth simultaneously with that of the confederation of the 

colonies. Why it was over a hundred years coming into being is an integral part of its history. 
16 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

GOVERNMENT, SCIENCE, AND THE GENERAL WELFARE 

The Nation had been born in an age of scientific exploration and 

experiment, its very founding a consequence in part of the industrial revolution in England. Among the framers of the Constitution, men of science 

like Franklin, Madison, Pinckney, and Jefferson looked to the early establishment in the new Nation of a national university and Federal societies 

of the arts and sciences, for the promotion of agriculture, commerce, trades, 

and manufactures. But because the new States feared centralization of 

power of any kind in the Federal Government, these institutions were not 

spelled out. 

The powers granted Congress by the Constitution "to promote the 

progress of science and useful arts" by issuing patents to authors and inventors, by conducting a periodic census, and supervising coinage, weights, 

and measures, were exercised in spirit if not to the letter. In any case, their 

scientific implications were ignored. Small autonomous laboratories appeared before long in a number of the executive departments of the Government, providing certain functional services involving research, but 

encouragement and support of fundamental science were left to such privately 

organized agencies as the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, 

1743), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston, 1780), and in 

Washington, the Smithsonian Institution (1846), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1848). In no way an adjunct of the 

Government but merely an advisory body in scientific matters was the 

National Academy of Sciences, incorporated by an act of Congress on March 3, 1863. Without authority or independent funds, it was only required, 

"whenever called upon by any department of the Government * * * to investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art" submitted to it, the investigations to be paid from regular congressional 

appropriations made for that purpose. 

Congress repeatedly demonstrated great reluctance to provide even small sums of money for the support of any private scientific or inventive 

enterprise, however beneficial to the Nation. Robert Fulton's pleas for 

Federal aid in the 1830's went unanswered. Governments abroad were 

more helpful with his submarine, and on his return private funds made his 

steamboat "folly" possible. Only after 6 years of petitions was Congress 

persuaded to grant Samuel F. B. Morse the sum of $30,000 to set up his 

experimental telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington in 1843. 

The scant concern of the Federal Government with science is evident 

in the delayed organization of some of its most essential scientific agencies. 

Military and civil exploration were provinces of the Army Corps of Engineers 

until the Geological Survey was established in the Department of the Interior 

in 1879. The Treasury's Coast and Geodetic Survey, founded in 1807 to 
GOVERNMENT, SCIENCE, AND THE GENERAL WELFARE 17 

chart the coasts for American shipping, provided the only scientific mensuration supported by Federal funds until the miniscule Office of Weights 

and Measures was set up within the Survey itself in 1836. That same year 

the Patent Office was established in the State Department, over strong opposition from many in Congress who declared its inclusion in an executive 

branch an unconstitutional usurpation of authority. 

Government concern with medicine and public health was left to 

the Army Medical Department (1818), and except in the short-lived National Board of Health (1879—83), medical research remained a function 

of the Army until the establishment in 1902 of the Public Health Service. 

In the Navy Department was the National Observatory and its Hydrographic 

Office, organized in 1842, which, with the telegraph facilities operated by 

the Army Signal Service, provided meteorological and weather services to the 

Nation until 1890 when these functions were transferred to the Department 

of Agriculture. That Department itself was not established until 1862, under 

wartime pressure for greater food production. 

In a nation predominantly agricultural until the last decade of the 

19th century, these Government services seemed sufficient.'7 Such research as they conducted was restricted by law and lack of funds to that immediately 

necessary to carry out their functions. Yet inevitably these agencies ac- quired specialized personnel for their problems, were aided and encouraged 

by the independent scientific organizations of the Nation, and in some instances achieved on meager appropriations remarkable results. The work 

of the Naval Observatory in astronomy and of the Army Medical Corps in 

bacteriology produced contributions to fundamental science well beyond 

the pragmatic strictures of Congress.'8 

Federal reluctance to enter scientific fields and congressional agreement to keep in bounds those it perforce established grew out of the nature 

of the Constitution, which reserved to the individual and to the States the 

greatest possible freedom and the maximum opportunity for private enterprise consistent with the public good. The industrialization of America 

in the late 19th century coincided with a kind of glorification of this political 

theory of laissez-faire and its concomitant gospel of work and wealth. It was 

little wonder that a proposal made in 1884 for the establishment of a Depart. 

ment of Science in the Federal Government foundered even as it was launched. 

In 1890 agricultural, mining, forest, and fishery products accounted for 82 percent 

of our exports; domestic manufactures 18 percent. By 1900 agricultural products were 68 percent of exports and manufactures had risen to 32 percent. Statistical Abstracts of 

the United States, 1900 (Bureau of Statistics, Treasury Department, Washington, D.C., 

1901), p. 187. 

"A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government (Harvard University Press, 

1957), pp. 184—186, 263 if. 
18 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

Yet the time was ripe. By the 1880's science and invention had become as fervid subjects of public concern as welfare would be in the 193O's, 

With the dramatic rise of the electrical industry there was no longer any 

question about the necessity of Government support, only about the degree 

and immediacy of it. Indeed, in 1884 Congress went so far as to appropriate $7,500 for a national conference of electricians at Philadelphia. But 

it took no action on the recommendation of the conference for a Federal 

agency "charged with the duty of examining and verifying instruments for 

electrical and other physical measurements." 

Some felt that more than measurement was wanted in the young and 

directionless industry. Writing in 1887 about the development of the 

storage battery, Thomas C. Mendenhall, physicist and president of Rose 

Polytechnic Institute in Indiana, said: "A good deal of valuable information 

concerning [itsi behavior * * * has been accumulated; at an expense far 

greater, however, than would have been necessary, had the whole subject 

received in the beginning an exhaustive examination at the hands of a com- petent commission under Government authority and at Government expense. 

The vast importance of the questions involved would seem to justify such a course." 19 Such an authority had recently been proposed and, with little 

debate, dismissed. 

The proposal for a Department of Science arose out of an investigation of intramural bickering over functions in the survey agencies of the 

Government. A joint congressional commission, headed by Senator William 

B. Allison of Iowa, was directed to consider the possible reorganization for 

greater efficiency of the agencies involved, that is, the Army Signal Service, 

the Department of Interior's Geological Survey, the Treasury's Coast and 

Geodetic Survey, and the Navy's Hydrographic Office. The Allison Commission turned to the National Academy of Sciences and asked it to appoint a committee to make a study of similar European institutions and recommend 

methods of coordinating the work of these scientific agencies in the 

Government. 

In September 1884 the committee made its report. "The time is 

near," said the National Academy, "when the country will demand the 

institution of a branch of the executive Government devoted especially to 

the direction and control of all the purely scientific work of the Government." 

It therefore recommended the establishment of such a branch, to be called 

the Department of Science, with the purely scientific functions of the survey 

agencies in contention reorganized in this Depaitment. It was to comprise 

four bureaus: the Coast Survey, the Geological Survey, a meteorological 

bureau combining the weather services of the Army and Navy offices, and a new physical laboratory. The latter was to take over the little weights and 

T. C. Mendenhall, A Century of Electricity, pp. 213—14. 
GOVERNMENT, SCIENCE, AND THE GENERAL WELFARE 19 

measures office in the Coast Survey and extend the present investigations of 

that office to include electrical standards. It would also undertake "to 

observe the laws of solar and terrestrial radiation and their application to 

meteorology, with such other investigations in exact science as the Government might assign to it." 20 The proponents of the new department agreed that it should undertake no work that "can be equally well done by the enterprise of individual 

investigators"; that its bureaus would cooperate, not compete, with university research laboratories; that they would investigate only in those fields, 

still unoccupied, "where private enterprise cannot work"; and confine themselves "to the increase and systematization of knowledge tending 'to promote 

the general welfare' "—in particular, to research vitally affecting the establishment or expansion of new industry in the Nation. 

The committee pointed to photography, which since the daguerreotype in 1839 had grown into a $30 million a year industry, and to the new, 

promising electric telegraph, telephone, light, and electric railway industries, as proof that "the pursuit of science is now directly connected with the promotion of the general welfare" and therefore a Federal responsibility. 

But the old arguments prevailed. The Government could not fail 

to compete with the university laboratories or the enterprise of individual 

scientists. With its "capacity * * * for indefinite expansion," a Federal 

agency of science would encroach more and more upon individual effort 

and on industry, and by proliferation and publication soon come to create, 

control, and diffuse the scientific knowledge of the Nation.21 The Allison 

Commission shelved the proposal for a department of science. The prospect 

of anything like a centralized research agency in the Government was bad 

enough, but that it might ultimately lead to some kind of intervention in 

industry or regulation of business was too much for the times. 

In those last decades of the century, as Frederick Lewis Allen has 

said, "business was supposed to be no affair of the government's." The farm 

States in 1887 had forced creation of an Interstate Commerce Commission to 

regulate the railroads, but its powers were small, uncertain, and unexercised. 

There was no Department of Commerce, no Department of Labor, no Federal 

Trade Commission, no Federal Reserve System, and when in need of credit, 

Washington without the aid of John Pierpont Morgan was helpless.22 The 

Federal Government was without the power or inclination either to interReport of M. C. Meigs, Chairman of NAS Committee, to 0. C. Marsh, President, NAS, 

Sept. 21, 1884 (Allison Commission, Testimony, Mar. 16, 1886, 49th Cong., 1st sess., 

S. Misc. Doe. 82, serial 2345), p. 8.* Hereafter cited as Allison Commission, Testimony. 

21 Ibid., pp. 7*_8*, 66—69, 177—179, 999—1001; Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, pp. 215—226, 231. 

Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900—1950 (New 

York: Harper, 1952; Bantam Books, 1961), p. 72. 
20 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

fere with business or to aid it, and its concept of the public welfare remained 

nebulous to the end of the century. 

The golden years of unregulated private enterprise were abruptly 

interrupted almost singlehandedly by Teddy Roosevelt, who became President 

following the assassination of McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition on September 6, 1901. After a century of unfettered enterprise, a quarter 

century of trusts and monopolies, Roosevelt's mediation in the anthracite 

coal strike of 1902, the indictment of the meat-packing trust in 1905, the 

passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, and his victory over 

Morgan's steel trust in 1907 came as unprecedented and incredible intrusions 

by the Government. 

The fight against monopoly in business and industry, buttressed as they were by their special franchises, tax privileges, tariffs, and patents, would 

continue in the new century. But while the maverick President established 

the Government's right to regulate, and to mediate between big business and 

the public, he did not deny the very real benefits of the corporations in the 

industrialization of the Nation. With curbs, they were destined to be tolerated 

and even aided by the Government that had subdued them. 

LOOKING BACK 

Except for the recognition by the committee of the National Academy 

of Sciences that areas of investigation existed in the realm of "exact science" 

that were Federal responsibilities, little in the Office of Weights and Measures 

in the year 1884 recommended it as the nucleus of a physical laboratory in 

the proposed Department of Science. 

In charge of weights and measures and of gravimetric studies in the 

Coast Survey at that time was Charles S. Peirce (1839—1914), a brilliant 

scientist, philosopher, and logician, lecturer at Harvard, and a member of 

the National Academy of Sciences, who spent 20 years of his life with the 

Coast Survey. Long before the necessary precision instruments were available he made the first attempt to use the wavelength of a light ray as a standard unit of measure. He is deservedly the subject of one of the longest 

and most interesting memoirs in the Dictionary of American Biography.23 

Testifying before the Allison Commission—the question of a depart. 

ment of science had already been disposed of—Peirce was asked about the 

work of his office. "The office of weights and measures at present is a very 

slight affair, I am sorry to say," he had to admit, * * a nonentity, having 

hardly any legal existence." It consisted of himself and two assistants, and 

23 See also Victor F. Lenzen, "The contributions of Charles S. Peirce to metrology," 

Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 109, 29 (1965). 
LOOKING BACK 21 was maintained only "to keep up the supply of standards and balances" to the 

States, territories, and the country's agricultural schools, as required by law, 

and to "take occasion to verify any standard that is referred to us." The latter 

service was of questionable value since in most instances "we want the means 

of executing the verifications asked of us." 24 The full title of Peirce's agency in appropriation acts, at that time 

was the Office of Construction of Standard Weights and Measures, indicating 

its limited scope in the eyes of Congress.25 Its history reflects the centurylong hestitation of the Federal Government to exercise even that most elementary degree of control in the affairs of the individual' citizen—the 

imposition of a discipline of weights and measures—and the failure of the 

States to exercise it in the absence of Federal regulation. 

The provision in article 9 of the Articles of Confederation (1777—78) 

granting Congress "the sole and exclusive right and power of * * * fixing 

the standard of weights and measures throughout the United States" was 

repeated in article I, section 8, clause 5 of the Constitution (1789), its principal purpose to make "all Duties, Imposts and Excises * * uniform" 

throughout the colonies. Without direct taxation, funds to maintain the 

Government depended largely on these imposts. Yet excises on flour, sugar, 

and other imported commodities, as well as the tonnage tax on vessels, the 

Government's other principal source of income, depended upon guesswork 

of a low order so long as barrel sizes and their contents and the weight 

of a ton met no uniform definition or standard. For over a hundred years 

it was to prove as difficult to legislate standards as it was to determine them. 

President Washington in his annual messages in 1790 and 1791, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in an elaborate report to Congress in 1790, 

President James Madison in his eighth annual message in 1816, and Secretary 

of State John Quincy Adams in a 'report in 1821 that has been called "a 

classic in weights and measures literature," all urged the establishment by 

law of uniform and reliable standards in weights and measures.26 To allay 

public fears and lessen the inconveniences attending the introduction of uniform standards, when determined, Jefferson recommended that they be 

introduced first iri the customhouses, to familiarize merchants with them, then 

among merchants and traders in foreign commodities, and finally offered to the 

'4Allison Commission, Testimony, p. 370. 

The Appropriation Act of Aug. 5, 1882 (22 Stat. 230) first designated the agency as the Office of Construction of Standard Weights and Measures. The name continued in 

appropriation acts until 1901, although after 1891 the agency was otherwise officially 

designated the Office of Standard Weights and Measures. 26 Source references for these documents appear in Ralph W. Smith's "The Federal 

basis for weights and measures," NBS C593 (1958). For a recent study of Jefferson's 

report see The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton University 

Press, 1961), XVI, 602—675. 
h' fe/fe' 

/ 

4 

f.e lee 

/ edy/C1d4S 

€i i' / (ICIIC" 

Y' ,//,e.€J //el L 

/ wa' '1, 1/ / Ic' 

I/if 

le /u 

// 

/ 1/i' flU! 

7 

AJYR, 

A fragment of Jefferson's letter of transmittal accompanying his report to Congress on measures, weights, and coins in 1790, shortly before he became 

Secretary of State. The original of the copperplate transcription of Jefferson's message is in the National Archives, Record Group 59. 
LOOKING BACK 23 

general public. Adams suggested that public officials such as custom officers, 

public land surveyors, and postmasters be the first required to adopt the new standards, when devised, with general enforcement of them left to the 

individual States.27 

Scientists, statesmen, and business men throughout the first quarter 

century of the Republic repeatedly called for such legislation, and House and. 

Senate committees were appointed in 1791, 1795, 1798, 1804, 1808, 1816, 

1819, 1821, and 1826 to fix on a uniform plan of standards for adoption by 

Congress. None denied their necessity, but a majority invariably bridled at 

the thought of general enforcement. A. standard of coinage was another 

matter, and on April 2, 1792, Congress established without a demur the decima! system for the money of the United States. Weights of coins, on the other 

hand, fared little better than commodity weights until in 1828 Congress 

adopted the British troy pound of 1758 as the standard for American coinage. 

Troy weight had been more or less "standard" since colonial days, 

and continued to be even after Great Britain reformed her system of weights 

and measures in 1824, at which time she adopted new imperial standards, including a new avoirdupois pound. Nevertheless, in 1827 Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury from 1801 to 1814 and at that time American Minister 

to Great Britain, secured a brass copy of the old troy pound. It was deposited with the Director of the Mint at Philadelphia and the next year additional copies were made and supplied to all U.S. mints as the for the 

weight of a pound of gold. 

But as Charles Peirce pointed out to the Allison Commission more 

than 50 years later, the troy pound at the mint was not suitable for precision 

weights of any kind. For one thing, it had never been weighed in a vacuum 

to determine its true weight, and in point of fact, the Government had no balance that. could do that. Moreover, since the destruction of its prototype 

when the Houses of Parliament burned in 1834, there was no way of telling 

how much that brass pound at Philadelphia really weighed, except in terms 

of the British avoirdupois pound. In other words, said Peirce, the weight 

of the American pound "is not known." 28 Nevertheless, this pound re- mained the standard for coinage until 1911 when it was replaced by weights 

certified by the National Bureau of Standards in terms of the platinum-iridium 

kilogram.29 

But coinage was not alone in dealing with unknown quantities. The 

history of weights and measures in this country had more than its share. 

21 Gustavus A. Weber, The Bureau of Standards: Its History, Activities, and Organiza. 

tion (Institute for Government Research, Service Monograph No. 35, Baltimore: The 

Johns Hopkins Press, 1925), pp.2, 3, 9. 28 Allison Commission, Testimony, pp. 372—374. 20 NBS Annual Report 1910, p. 7; Annual Report 1911, p. 11. 
24 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

The first real effort to provide accurate, if nonlegal, standards of 

weights and measures was made by Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler (1770—1843), a Swiss engineer and metrologist who emigrated to this country at the age 

of 35. Upon the establishment of the Coast Survey in the Treasury Department, Hassler became its first superintendent, holding that office from 1807 

to 1818. When in 1830, acting on complaints of unsatisfactory customs collections at the ports, a Senate resolution directed the Secretary of the Treasury 

to make an examination of the standards used in the customhouses, Hassler, 

then 60, was called back to Washington to undertake the investigation. Two 

years later he was reappointed superintendent of the Coast Survey.30 

He collected the standards then in use in the various Government 

departments, the weights and measures used at the customhouses, and as See app. A for a biographical sketch of Hassler. 

The troy pound of the U.S. Mint at Philadelphia, with the nested packing cases in which 

it was shipped to the United States in 1827. An exact copy of the imperial troy pound, 

thLs standard for coinage virtually became the fundamental standard of the United 

States. irom which the avoirdupois pound in common use was derived. 
LOOKING BACK 25 

many more as he could obtain from other domestic and foreign sources, and 

presented his findings in two reports on January 27 and June 29, 1832. As 

had Secretary of State Adams in 1820, Hassler found no two customhouses 

in the country where the pound or bushel were the same, the great discrepancies producing "inequalities in the duties levied at the different ports." In 

fact, "hardly any custom houses have actual standards. All equally refer, for 

weights and measures of any kind, to the city sealers of the place or those 

Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, first Superintendent of Weights and Measures, from a painting made probably sometime between 1830 and 1840, by Capt. William G. Williams 

of the Topographical Corps, U.S. Army. 

According to a long inscription pasted on the back of the canvas, the recollection of 

Mary Hassler Newcomb, granddaughter of Hassler and wife of Prof. Simon Newcomb, 

the portrait hung for many years after its completion on a bare brick wall in the Lee 

home in Arlington, Va. In April 1864 it came into the hands of Prof. Louis Agassiz, 

who gave it to the National Academy of Sciences, to keep "as a forerunner of portraits 

of our noted scientists." 

It was hung for several years in the west end of the Smithsonian, then disappeared 

until 1874, when Professor Newcomb, going "to the tower of the Smithsonian to see after the working of the artificial transit of Venus," found it there covered with dust 

and somewhat damaged. Hassler's granddaughter claimed it and plans were made to send it to the Coast Survey. In concert with Prof. Joseph Henry, Prof. Julius E. 

Hilgard, and Prof. Charles S. Peirce, Mrs. Newcomb had the painting restored at 

Mr. Hem's studio for $20. 

Either the Coast Survey refused the portrait or Mrs. Newcomb decided to keep it, 

for it has remained in the Hassler family since. In 1965 its present owner, Dr. Ha.ssler 

Whitney oJ Princeton, N.J., had the painting restored once more and presented it to the Coast and Geodetic Survey, to be hung in its new quarters at Rockville, Md. 
26 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

appointed by the respective States." And most customhouses, like the city 

sealers, used "coarse iron, or other weights * * * which * * * on account 

of their great mass, could not be adjusted but upon common balances." 31 While Congress debated, the Secretary of the Treasury directed Hassler 

to secure apparatus and a shop and prepare copies of the standards he recommended in his reports. The Treasury Department at least, with its coinage 

and customhouse functions, had to adopt something like uniform standards. 

Thus in 1832, "with the President's approbation," Secretary Louis McLane 

preempted a corner in the United States Arsenal in Washington, and "with 

all the exactness that the present advanced state of science and the arts will 

afford," Hassler set to work on his standards.32 

He adopted brass for their construction, as did most European countries, because it was "the cheapest metal, not subject to prompt very evident 

oxidation," and its ordinary expansion was "too minute to have any effect 

upon the practical application to standards within the limits of magnitude 

they generally have." Platinum, despite its less destructible nature, was not 

well enough known, he said, and might have unsuspected differences greater 

than brass.33 

The units as defined by Hassler were not new but were those most 

widely used in the United States. By defining them, he gave them an authority 

they had not had previously. The standards which he constructed were the 

best then obtainable, and to them Hassler gave precise and reproducible values so that careful copies derived from them would at least assure uniformity 

in the offices of the Treasury throughout the nation. 

His standard of Jength was an 82-inch brass bar, made for the Coast 

in 1813 by Edward Troughton, the best of the London instrumentmakers, and brought to this country by Hassler himself 2 years later. The 

yard measure on this bar was between the 27th and 63d inch marks and was supposed to be identical with the English standard at 62° F, although it had 

never been directly compared with that standard. The standard of weight 

the troy pound, that made by the English metrologist, Captain Kater, 

for the United States Mint in 1827, and from it Hassler derived the avoirdupois 

pound in common use, the ratio of the avoirdupois to the troy pound precisely 

defined as 7,000 grains to 5,760 grains. 

The gallon, based on the English wine gallon of 1703, was a vessel 

with a volume of 231 cubic inches (holding 8.3389 pounds avoirdupois of distilled water, or 58,372.2 standard grains) when weighed in air at 30 inches 

81 [Hassler,J "Weights and Measures", Report from the Secretary of the Treasury, July 

2, 1832 (22d Cong., 1st sess., H. Doc. 299), pp. 1, 95. 

NOTE.—By common balances Hassler meant ordinary commercial scales, since precision 

balances were not yet made or available in this country. 

Ibid., pp. 1—2. "Ibid., p. 16. 
LOOKING BACK 27 

barometric pressure and 62° F. The bushel, based on the old English Winchester bushel, established in the reign of Henry VII, was a measure with a volume of 2,150.42 inches (holding 77.6274 pounds avoirdupois of distilled 

water or 543,391.89 grains), weighed at the same barometric pressure and 

temperature as the gallon.34 

Two years after the Treasury's adoption of Hassler's weights and 

measures, the 1758 originals of the Troughton yard and Kater pound were 

irreparably damaged by fire. Despite the fact that their prototypes were lost, Congress recognized the merit and enormous convenience of the new 

standards. if it could not bring itself to legalize them, it could at least 

approve them, and in 1836—the generally accepted date of the establishment of an Office of Weights and Measures in the Treasury—a joint resolution of Congress directed the Secretary of the Treasury to make copies of 

Hassler's standards, 

to be delivered to the governor of each State in the Union, or such 

person as he may appoint, for the use of the States, respectively, 

to the end that a uniform standard of weights and measures may 

be established throughout the United States.35 

Arbitrary and without any authority but Hassler's (except that Congress 

had been fully informed of Hassler's choice of units), these were in most 

instances promptly adopted by the States thus 

becoming the first nationwide standards in this country. 

Two years later another congressional resolution directed that a standard balance be made "under the superintendence of Hassler" for each 

State. Resolutions, however, are not statutory laws, but further than that 

Congress would not go. 

Constructing these weights and measures with all their multiples and 

submultiples was slow and. difficult work, and not until 1838 were sets of the 

weights delivered to the States. The customhouses received them a year 

later. When Hassler died in November 1843 at the age of 73, only half 

the capacity measures and a third of the measures of length had been com- pleted, and work on the balances had just begun. 

[Hassler,] "Weights and Measures", p. 12; Louis A. Fischer, "History of the standard weights and measures of the United States," NBS M64 (1925), pp. 7—10. NoTE.— 

M64 refers to the numbered series of Miscellaneous Papers of the NBS, as C designates 

its series of Circulars. 

The British abolished the wine gallon of 1703 and the Winchester bushel in 1824 

when imperial measures were adopted. The imperial gallon was considered as 277.274 

cubic inches of distilled water (10 pounds of water), the imperial bushel 2218.19 

cubic inches (8 gallons of water), both at 62° F and 30 inches barometric pressure. 

Thus as Peirce testified in 1885, the English and American gallons and bushels dif. 

fered by about 17 percent and 3 percent, respectively, as they do today. Apothecaries' 

weights in the two countries differ by almost 10 percent. 

Quoted in NBS M64, pp. 10—12. 
28 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

In 1856, 13 years later, a report by Alexander D. Bache, Hassler's 

successor as superintendent of the Coast Survey and in charge of the Office 

of Weights and Measures, said that full sets of weights, measures, and balances for the States had at last been completed and nearly all delivered. 

Most of the hundred or more customhouses were now equipped with weights, 

but only 91 standard gallons, 24 sets of their subdivisions, 22 standard yards, 

and 11 standard bushel measures had been completed and sent to them.36 

A decade later, as the last of Hassler's measures was dispatched, the metric 

system arrived in America. 

Established in 1791, the French metric system had been adopted 

during the past century by most civilized countries, with the notable exception of Great Britain and the United States.37 Then in 1864 Great Britain, 

compromising with science and commerce, authorized the use of the metric 

system concurrently with its imperial system. Two years later, on July 28, 

1866, Congress in a singular gesture legalized the use of the metric system 

in this country—something our common system of weights and measures 

has not achieved to this day. However, use of the metric system was neither 

then nor later made compulsory, but by legalizing the relationship between 

the yard and meter (construing the meter as 39.37 inches), Congress sanc- tioned continued use of the common system based on Hassler's adaptation 

of the British imperial yard and pound. 

Implementing the new law, a joint resolution of Congress that same 

year authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to furnish each State with a set of metric weights and measures. Until replaced at the end of the cen- tury by new international metric standards, a brass meter brought by Has. 

sler to this country in 1805 and a brass copy of a platinum kilogram obtained 

by Gallatin in 1821 were the basis for the sets made by the Office of Weights 

and Measures. By 1880 practically all the States had sets of metric stand. 

ards.'8 What became of these, as well as Hassler's standards distributed 

earlier, was, as we shall see, disclosed during an investigation begun shortly 

after the founding of the present National Bureau of Standards. 

[Bache,] Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the Construction and Distribution of Weights and Measures (34th Cong., 3d sess., S. Ex. Doc. 27), Washington: 

A. 0. P. Nicholson, 1857, pp. 2—8. Long current has been the legend that in July 1864 when Jubal Early's army crossed at 

Harper's Ferry and approached Washington, the Troughton yard, Bronze yard No. 11, 

Troy pound of 1827, Imperial pound of 1855, Arago kilogram and other standards collected by Hassler and his successor were sent into the Vermont countryside for safekeeping (letter, F. S. Holbrook, May 23, 1936, and attached correspondence, NBS 

Box 400, 1W). 

See app. B for a brief history of the metric system. 

"NBS M64, pp. 16—19. See also metric legislation in app. C. 
LOOKING BACK 29 

Meanwhile, the simple and logical metric system had been found 

wanting. in 1867 serious differences in metric measurements came to 

light in France while carrying out a series of geodetic surveys. The metric 

system was based on a natural concept which assumed the meter to be one 

ten-millionth part of a meridional quadrant of the earth. Investigation 

disclosed that realization of the concept in the adopted meter was erroneous, 

and further, that the original standards, kept in the Archives of France, had 

simply not been constructed with the of precision possible threequarters of a century later. 

With the United States participating, the series of international con- ferences that were held in 1872—73 to construct new metric standards led to 

the selection of a graduated line standard as a new basis for the metric system. Rejection of a natural basis for the meter made international agree. 

ment necessary in order to maintain the validity of this artificial meter. 

The conferees therefore agreed to the establishment of a permanent International Bureau of Weights and Measures, to be located at Sèvres, near 

Paris, which would not only keep custody of the new prototype meter and 

Prototypes of the weights and. measures distributed to the States at the direction of 

Congress in 1836 and 1866. The newly established Office of the Construction of 

Weights and Measures fashioned these sets modeled after British standards (1836) and 

the metric measures of France (1866). From top to bottom are complete sets of 

standards of capacity, mass, and length, and their handling equipment. The standard 

of flatness, a quartz disk, did not become a standard provided to the States until many 

years later. 
30 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

kilogram when constructed, but make comparisons between them and the 

fundamental standards of nonmetrical weights and measures in other coun- tries. The convention was signed on May 20, 1875, by representatives of 

17 countries, including the United States, and ratified by President Ruther 

ford B. Hayes, on the advice of the Senate, on September 27, 

In 1889, after more than 10 years of labor, the instrumentmakers at 

Sèvres completed the new metric standards. From among 30 carefully 

constructed meters and 40 kilograms, all of platinum-iridium, a committee 

selected an International Meter and International Kilogram as prototypes. 

The remaining standards were then distributed to the contributing countries, 

the United States receiving meter Nos. 21 and 27 and kilogram Nos. 4 and 

20.40 The Coast Survey's Office of Weights and Measures accepted custody 

of them the next year. Subsequently two other meter bars designated Nos. 

4 and 12, made of an earlier platinum composition, the alloy of 1874, as 

it was called, were secured. 

On April 5, 1893, Thomas C. Mendenhall, then superintendent of 

the Coast Survey and its Office of Weights and Measures, adopted with the 

approval of the Secretary of the Treasury the new meter and kilogram as 

the fundamental standards of length and mass in the United States, deriving 

from them the common yard as meter and the avoirdupois pound as 0.453 592 427 7 kilogram.41 in doing so Mendenhall assumed, as did 

Hassler, considerably more authority than he had, since he changed the 

value slightly for the kilogram from that given in the law of 1866, on the 

basis of more recent comparisons made between the kilogram and the English pound. 

From the beginning, use of the metric system in Government agencies as elsewhere was a matter of choice, except for laws passed in 1866 and 1872 

requiring balances marked in metric grams for all post offices, and an order 

of 1894 enjoining use of the metric system in requisitioning medical supplies 

for the War Department. Though extensively used in scientific and technological research, the metric system made very meager inroads into ordi. 

nary government or commercial transactions in this country. 

'° A contemporary account of the organization of the International Bureau appears 

in Statement of Professor J. E. Hilgard before the Committee on Coinage, Weights and 

Measures, May 8 and June 3, 1878 (45th Cong., 2d sess., H. Misc. Doc. 61). Julius 

E. Hilgard (1825—91), a Bavarian geodesist hired by Bache, was with the Coast Survey 

from 1834 to 1885, succeeding Bache as superintendent in 1881. 

40Letter, B. A. Gould to Secretary of State James G. Blame, Nov. 4, 1889. In Correspondence of the Office of U.S. Standard Weights and Measures, vol. V, pp. 436—449 

(National Archives, Record Group 167). 

""Fundamental standards of length and mass," Coast and Geodetic Survey Bull. 

26 (1893); NBS C593 (1958), pp.15—16. 
LOOKING BACK 31 

Without the force of law the two sets of weights and measures deposited in the National and State capitals, one based on British standards, 

the other on French, tended to gather dust. Special legislation or depart. 

mental orders were necessary to enforce their use in Federal agencies, and 

for want of direction and centralized authority Federal statute 

books became crowded with acts setting up still other standards. Many of 

these were freely conceived, merely expedient, and as often as not limited 

in application to a single agency. 

Among the plethora of Federal standards alone were those enacted 

between 1825 and 1875 for the Treasury Department and Commissioner of 

Internal Revenue specifying the kinds of hydrometers to be used to deter. 

mine the proof of distilled spirits, defining the term "proof gallon," the 

number of pounds of grain in bushel measures used in distilleries, and the 

number of gallons to a barrel. In 1868 a standard gage for bolts, nuts, and 

screw threads, adopted by the Secretary of the Navy, became mandatory in 

all Navy Yards but nowhere else. 

Other acts between 1789 and 1880 established the measurement of 

vessel tonnage, prescribed rules and measures for surveying public lands, 

and fixed procedures for examining and testing steam engines used by the 

Government. Periodically, revised acts specified the number of pounds 

in a bushel of grain, peas, and similar commodities for estimating import 

duties, defined the weight and measure of a ton of coal or a cord of wood 

when bought for Federal agencies, and authorized Treasury standards for 

the quality of imported sugar. Still another act provided funds for investigating the physical properties of wool and other animal fibers, and one 

even imposed the use of proper weights and measures (without defining 

them) for determining the provisions served to American seamen. 

This year to year legislation in measurement, operating nowhere below 

the Government level, became increasingly unsatisfactory and was of no use to 

science or industry. By 1884 the telephone and electric light had become 

commercial realities, the first commercial electric trolley car was a year away, 

the first commercial electric power plant 2 years away. These and other 

electrical developments would continue to advance by wasteful trial and error 

methods, for lack of definitions and measurements that neither scientific 

institutions nor industry were qualified to provide. That Congress recognized its responsibility seems evident from the appropriation it made underwriting the conference of electrical workers and scientists that met at the 

Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in the autumn of 1884.42 

In complete agreement on the necessity for Federal intervention, 

the conference appointed a committee headed by Prof. Monroe B. Snyder to 

make a strong recommendation to Congress for "the establishment of a See above, p. 18. 
32 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

Bureau of Standards * * * charged with the duty of examining and yenfyirig instruments for electrical and other physical measurements 

{ and] * * * to determine and reproduce all the physical standards with re- lation to each other." That was the year the National Academy of Sciences 

proposed a Department of Science in the Federal Government. 

By 1893 some sort of agreement on electrical measurements had become imperative, and an international electrical congress held at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago that summer adopted values for the basic units 

of electricity. In December, Mendenhall, in one of his last acts as superintendent of the Coast Survey, issued a bulletin announcing their formal 

adoption by the Office of Weights and Measures. On July 12, 1894, Congress 

enacted the definitions and values of these, units into law. The founders 

of electrical science were honored by using their names for the units, and by 

international agreement the ohm was designated the unit of resistance, the 

ampere the unit of current, the volt the unit of electromotive force, the 

coulomb the unit of quantity, the farad or faraday the unit of capacity 

(now, capacitance), the joule the unit of work, the watt the unit of power, 

and the henry the unit of induction (inductance). 

Congress also charged the National Academy of Sciences with prescribing and publishing such specifications as might be "necessary for the 

practical application of the definitions of the ampere and volt," from which 

all the other electrical units could be derived. The next year Dr. Frank 

A. Wolff, Jr., in the Office of Weights and Measures, was directed to begin 

preliminary experiments and tes&s on certain specifications adopted by the 

Academy. 

But as Peirce pointed out a decade earlier, the metrological work 

2 of that office had little standing and less legal status; nor was it, for lack 

of funds,'to be notably enhanced upon assumption of this new responsibility. 

From 1832 until 1870 the expenses of the Office were met out of general appropriations made to the Treasury Department and later to the Coast Survey. 

Then in 1870 Congress for some reason made all its appropriations for the 

Coast Survey specific that year, leaving no funds whatever for weights and 

measures. 

The Office languished until the Appropriation Act of March 3, 1873, 

for the first time included an explicit appropriation in Coast Survey funds 

"for construction and verification of standard weights and measures for the 

customhouses and for the several States, and of metric standards for the 

States, $12,000." The first recognition of the Office by name and as a separate agency, in any legislative act, occurred in the Appropriation Act of Au. 

gust 5, 1882. But except for the addition of the clause in 1890, "and for such 

Report of the Electrical Conference at Philadelphia, September 1884 (reprinted in 

49th Cong., 1st sess., S. Ex. Doc. 45, 1886), pp. 45—48. 
LAISSEZ-FAIRE STANDARDS 33 

necessary repairs and adjustment * * * to the standards furnished to the 

several States and Territories * * * [and] the functions 

of the Office, as quoted, remained unchanged until 

Little wonder that Peirce declared that "an office of weights and 

measures in the sense in which it exists in every other country * * * which 

should be prepared to make exact verification of all sorts of standards and 

certify officially to them, does not exist in the United States." Asked what 

his office should be equippçd to do to fulfill reasonably public and Federal 

requirements, Peirce, in keeping with the mood of Congress, replied modestly 

that besides acquiring units of electrical measurement it shouldbe ready to 

verify the legal units of length and weight, "say the yard, the meter, the 

pound, and the kilogram," and be prepared to verify speedily and certify 

officially for the public the multiples and submultiples of these units of mass 

and length. More importantly, in order to carry out these responsibilities, 

it should be given legal recognition and support. This would permit the 

Office to act with authority at home and to work for international agreement on the imperial measures shared by the United States, Russia, and Great 

Britain.45 

Such a program, said Peirce, could be carried out with an increase 

of nine members in the Office, making a total of twelve, who would confine 

themselves to supplying and verifying standards within the scope he had outlined. Ignoring the fine work in astronomy then being done by Simon 

Newcomb at the Naval Observatory, Peirce rejected the idea of basic research 

in his Office, or in any government agency, for that matter. "A bureau of 

of the government cannot very properly be expected to do original scientific 

work," said Peirce. "Its natural functions are to do routine work. * * * It 

is hardly to be expected that scientific investigation undertaken incidentally 

by a Bureau of the Government should, in the long run, be of the very highest 

character." No one contradicted him. 

A further natural limit to the scope of work of the Office, declared 

Peirce, was that "it need not enter upon the business of inspecting com- mercial standards, because that is done already by the States in a satisfactory 

way." One must remember that the year was 1884. 

LAISSEZ-FAIRE STANDARDS 

The States were no better equipped to control commercial standards 

than the Office of Standard Weights and Measures was to provide national 

standards. In 1892, William Mason, a member of the Rensselaer Poly- -. 

'4Weber, The Bureau of Standards, pp. 35—36. 45Allison Commission, Testimony, pp. 370, 371—372, 375. 

46Ibid., pp. 372,378. 
34 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

technic Institute faculty, complained in the pages of Science magazine that 

he had to contend with eight different "authoritative" values for the U.S. 

gallon, including two accepted by the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, three found in 

current standard chemical textbooks, one in Oldberg's Weights and Measures (1885), and two in Treasury Department reports—that given by Bache 

in his 1857 report describing Hassler's 8.3389-pound gallon and a currently 

adjusted standard, an 8.3312-pound gallon. In this confusion, Professor 

Mason declared he had elected to work with a ninth value, one he had deter. 

mined for himself. 

Although dignified by the term "standard," said Professor Mason, the 

truth was, "the U.S. gallon has no statutory existence whatever," nor had 

any of our common weights and measures with the single exception of the 

troy pound. "It seems * * * highly desirable that this whole question 

of standards and relation of weight to measure, be finally settled by law, and 

preliminary to this, by a new scientific investigation." 

Thomas C. Mendenhall, author of A Century of Electricity (1887) 

and in charge of weights and measures as superintendent of the Coast Survey from 1889 to 1894, fully agreed: "The system of weights and measures 

in customary use is so confusing, so unscientific, and, in some instances, 

apparently so contradictory that it is difficult to write of it, even briefly, 

without falling into error." 48 Permissive use of standards, poor construction of commercial weights and measures, and the progress of science had 

long since combined to vitiate the merits of Hassler's good work. 

Some degree of the confusion in precision measurement at least may 

be traced to Hassler's standard of length—and the basis for all the other 

standards. As Mendenhall said: "The Troughton 82-inch scale was formerly accepted as a standard of length, but for many years it has not been 

actually so regarded. By reason of its faulty construction it is entirely 

unsuitable for a standard, and for a long time it has been of historic interest 

only." 

The hazard in Hassler's yard measure, based on the Troughton scale, 

seems to have been first pointed out by John Henry Alexander, Maryland 

metrologist and later professor of natural philosophy at the University of 

Maryland. For lack of the necessary equipment, Alexander carried out 

many of the metrological tests for the construction of his yard measures for 

P. Mason, "Confusion in weights and measures," Science, 20, 358 (1892). 48 Mendenhall, Science, 21, 79—80 (1893). 

Upon completion of construction of its new imperial standards in 1855, Great Britain 

presented copies of the yard and avoirdupois pound to the United States. The new bronze yard No. 11, when compared with the Troughton yard, revealed that the accepted 

36 inches of the Troughton scale was 0.00087 inch longer than the British imperial yard. 

Since the new yard was far superior as a standard of length, the Office of Standard 

Weights and Measure adopted it as the U.S. standard. NBS M64 (1925), pp. 12—14. 
LAISSEZ-FAIRE STANDARDS 35 

the State of Maryland in Hassler's Washington laboratory and continued to 

work there after Bache took over.50 The brass in Hassler's yard scale, made 

with "ingenious and novel methods" and containing a zinc of more than 

usual purity, said Alexander, presented— 

in several physical characters a marked difference from the ordinary brass of commerce; it is softer, freer, more uniform in texture, 

of a more agreeable color, and oxidates even with a pleasanter 

aspect. This last particular was a point upon which the late 

Superintendent, whose remarkable versatility of genius found 

nothing too great or too small for attention, in a manner piqued 

himself; and the bright eye of the aged philosopher gleamed 

brighter as it watched the deepening of what he called his "oerugo 

nobilis." * * * All these peculiarities would have made the em- ployment of such metal, had it been possible, of great interest 

and advantage: but it was only to be procured by a repetition of 

the original process—a step manifestly disproportionate to the 

end now in view. Under these circumstances, resort was had to 

the article as more usually obtained.5' 

Alexander's use of ordinary brass made comparison with the original 

standard all but impossible because there was no "means of knowing positively the expansion of Mr. Hassler's brass." The 30 different yard-measures 

that. Alexander constructed for the State of Maryland between. 1842 and 1845, 

each with a "correction for excess of U.S. Standard," agreed with one an- other within two parts in a ten-thousandth of an inch. Even though this was "a quantity fully observable," Alexander nevertheless considered his 

bars entirely satisfactory for "measuring the yards in common use that may 

be applied to them." 52 Alexander appears to have been a careful craftsman, and he had access to the best equipment available in this country, that in Hassler's 

laboratory. It is doubtful whether many other State metrologists enjoyed 

either advantage. Yet a comment he made on Hassler's mission at the be. 

ginning of his report provides, unwittingly, a clue to the attitude of the age 

toward weights and measures arid to the outcome of Hassler's efforts: 

The Establishment of a system of Weights and Measures belongs not 

merely to the domain of mechanical science, but enters also into 

the regions of metaphysics and the higher generalizations of 

history. 

5°J. H. Alexander, Report on the Standards of Weights and Measures for the State of 

Maryland and on the Construction of the Yard-Measures (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 

1845), pp. 167, 183. 

Ibid., pp. 178—179. 

"Ibid., pp. 208—210. 
36 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

When in addition reproducibility of the basic standard was doubtful and 

comparison with the original impossible, metrology indeed became 

metaphysical. And so it proved. 

Fifty years later Mendenhall was to report that, supplied with replicas 

of Hassler's standards, "nearly all of the States made these copies their 

standards, and thus practical uniformity was secured. Theoretically or 

rigorously, however, there are about as many systems of weights and measures in use to-day as there are States in the Union." 

In its effort to maintain the highest accuracy of the yard and pound, 

Mendenhall's Office had itself contributed to the confusion. While interested 

States continued to construct their standards as best they could on Hassler's 

models, the Office of Weights and Measures, rejecting Troughton's scale, 

defined the U.S. yard as identical with the imperial yard of Great Britain, 

the standard 'of mass with the imperial or avoirdupois pound. In 1893, 

27 years after legalization of the metric system by Congress, the Office turned 

to that "infinitely more perfect order" and redefined its yard and pound in 

terms of the meter and kilogram.54 

Without an authoritative national standard or an adequate testing 

and comparison agency, regulation of Hassler's standards had been left to 

the States, and they had few funds for proper construction, maintenance, 

or control. With almost no precision instrument makers in this country, 

industry and science turned to Europe, while the construction of commercial 

- —. .— weights and measures was left to business supply houses. Some measure of 

the general ensuing chaos may be seen in the report in John Perry's The 

Story of Standards, that in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1902, "city surveyors rec- ognized as legal four different 'feet': the United States foot, the Bushwick 

foot, the Williamsburg foot, and the foot of the 26th Ward. All legal, all 

different. Some strips of Brooklyn real estate were untaxable, because, after 

two surveys, made with different units, these strips, legally, didn't exist!" 

The widening gap between so-called Federal and State standards, 

and the inability of the Office 'of Weights and Measures to supply the grow. 

ing variety of standards needed in the Nation, inevitably led to the creation 

of a whole galaxy of entirely arbitrary standards affecting almost every 

measurable quantity required by farm, factory, or laboratory. Standards were further debased as the classic laissez-faire control supposedly exercised 

by a free market broke down completely at the end of the century, a market 

that ceased to exist when not only the necessities of life but virtually every 

article of commerce came under the control of trusts and monopolies. 

Mendenhall, Science, 1893. 

Ibid. See above, p. 30. 

53The Story of Standards (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1955), pp. 5, 13. Perry's 

book, with the National Bureau of Standards as its frame of reference, is a brief, highly 

readable history of the idea of standards from ancient times to the present. 
LAISSEZ-FAIRE STANDARDS 37 

Some of the consequences were revealed in an article in Scientific 

American in 1896 describing the increasing unreliability of household - products, industrial goods, and construction materials. In the construction of buildings, between 15 and 20 percent more material than needed had 

to be ordered to allow for the uneven quality found in every lot. The tensile 

strength of cement varied with the shipment, a certain quantity of steel tubing and forgings could be counted on to prove defective, and in one recent 

test sampling only two of six makes of white lead submitted deserved the 

name. Among household items, a conspicuous example of outright fraud was lard oil containing a high percentage of paraffin oil. 

A number of independent testing agencies had sprung up to assist 

industry, the article continued, but their subjective standards were in no way comparable to those established in the bureaus under gcwernrnent supervision in Europe. As a result, "at present it is very difficult to get a paint 

which is worth anything, or a good lubricating oil at a reasonable price, 

and many of the soaps sold throughout the country are so injurious to clothes as to be worse than useless. Is this not, after all, a matter for governmental 

control?" 56 Henry Ives Cobb, designer of the Chicago Opera House and Newberry Library and consulting architect to the Federal Government, con- curred on the state of construction materials, and in testimony before a congressional committee some 4 years later, he and other highly qualified 

witnesses left no doubt of the consequences in this country of laissez-faire 

standards. Although the Office of Weights and Measures had adopted the 

English standard of light, said Carl Hering, president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, it was so indefinite and inadequate that 

scientific laboratories referred instead to the German standard as more 

precise and reproducible. The electric light industry, finding neither the 

British nor German standards useful, had adopted standards of its own in 

the manufacture and sale of lighting equipment. By agreement among the 

electric light companies, Prof. Henry A. Rowland of the Johns Hopkins 

University testified, a lamp requiring 10 amperes of current at a pressure 

of 45 volts was called 2,000 candlepower, when in reality—that is, by British 

or German standards—it amounted only to 400 to 500 candlepower.57 

Dr. Henry S. Pritchett, then superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic 

Survey, acknowledged that the Nation was with'out a definite, accurate 

standard or even the means to arrive at one. But then neither we accurate means to test thermometers, barometers, pressure gages, 

'electrical standards and measuring apparatus, polariscopes, instruments of 

L. S. Randolph, "Systematic inspection of material," Sci. Am. 75, 347 (1896). 

51 Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, Dec. 28, 1900 

(56th Cong., 2d sess., S. Doc. 70, serial 4033), pp. 12, 15. 
38 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

navigation, steam engine indicators, or almost any other instrument of 

precision. Even though many of these were being made in this country, 

'nearly all such instruments have to be sent to Europe * * * for standardization." As for those used in high-precision work in university laboratories, 

in scientific institutions, and Government laboratories, they could only be 

procured from abroad. The same was true of all our chemical apparatus. 

It came from abroad.58 

The electrical industry by 1900 represented a $200 million investment in this country, Prof. Arthur E. Kennelly of Harvard testified, yet for 

lack of recognized standards the industry was involved in frequent and costly 

litigation, putting a brake on its continued growth.59 As the crowning 

insult resulting from our failure to establish national standards, the 

Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, Germany's national standards laboratory, used the Weston voltameter.amxneter, an American-invented and 

American.made instrument, for its precision measurement of electrical currents and electrical pressures, but refused to accept the calibration of its 

manufacturer. The Reichsanstalt had also adopted the Weston cell in preference to its own standard, for the determination of electromotive force. 

These and other electrical instruments made in this country for domestic 

sale and export were regularly sent first to Germany for recalibration, because the manufacturers' standards were either not known or not accepted.'° 

National laboratories abroad were already at work answering the 

demands of science and industry for instruments of greater reliability, ac- curacy, and range. In this country we were still incapable of supplying 

either a certified ins'trument to a scientific laboratory or an authoritative 

common measure to the marketplace. Besides impeding the scientific and 

commercial development of the Nation, witness after witness told Congress, 

the necessity of sending abroad for certification was consuming of time, 

expensive, and damaging to our national prestige. Establishment of a na- tional standardizing laboratory could be deferred no longer. 

"A NATIONAL NEED. . . A NATIONAL HUMILIATION" 

A Federal standards laboratory had been under discussion for almost 

20 years before the burst of nationalism at the turn of the century and the 

surging growth of American industry together conspired to assure its serious 

consideration. The coincidence made for compelling arguments. As a result of the Spanish-American War we had in a few short months become a Hearings before the Committee on Coinage, Weights and Measures, May 3, 1900 (56th 

Cong., 1 sess., H. Rept., no document or serial number), p.2. 

Ibid., p. 13. — - Hearings * * * Dec. 28, 1900, P. 17. 
A NATiONAL NEED . . . A NATIONAL HUMILIATION 39 

world power, intensely proud of the new respect with which the nations of 

the world now dealt with us. Our foreign and domestic commerce flourished as never before; in the decade before 1900 the export of American manufactures almost doubled. Only Germany's oversea trade had exceeded this 

rate of increase in the same period, largely because, as our manufacturing 

and trade associations pointed out, she was able to guarantee the uniformity 

and of her exported goods. 

Since the 1870's, Austria, Russia, Germany, and England had established national standardizing laboratories or reorganized existing agencies, 

all with the avowed purpose of applying science and scientific methods to 

their nation's commerce and industry.61 Most successful had been Germany, 

working with industry through the great Physikalisc'h-Technische Reichsanstalt, organized in 1887. In a single decade she had achieved world mon- opoiy in the manufacture of aniline dyes and dye products, and her porcelain 

industry, artificial indigo industry, Jena optical glass, and scientific and 

precision instrument industries had no peers. Employing 13,600 people in 

760 firms, the instrument and optical glass industries alone had trebled the 

export of their products in the past decade, making no secret of their debt 

to the Reichsanstalt for their growth.62 

Great Britain, in an admittedly desperate effort "to retain her su- premacy in trade and in manufacture," established her National Physical 

Laboratory in 1899.63 The United States remained the only great commercial nation without a comparable standards laboratory. Our further development of the remarkable discoveries made in pure and applied science 

of the past century might well 'be forfeited, Scientific American warned, 

without sound and accepted commercial and industrial standards. A na- tional laboratory had become "a national need." 64 The initiative came from Lyman J. Gage, Secretary of the Treasury 

since 1897 and executive head of the Office of Weights and Measures. Gage, 

a solid, conservative Chicago banker, who had been brought to Washington 

by McKinley and possessed a talent for charming Congressmen with his dipk- 

°'Among the great powers, only France (and the United States) had lagged. The 

great service of France in fostering international standards of length and mass was widely recognized, "but her national bureau for this purpose [was] considered to be 

too limited in scope to solve * * * new problems * * s." H. S. Carhart, "The Imperial Physico-Technical Institution in Charlottenburg," Science, 12, 702—703 (1900). 62 Henry S. Carhart, "The Imperial Physico-Technical Institute in Charlottenburg," 

Annual Report, Smithsonian Institution, 1900, pp. 403—415. In an earlier (1892) account 

of the PTR, Prof. A. G. Webster had urged it as a model for an American standards 

laboratory. See Science, 56, 170 (1922). 

'3Richard Glazebrook, "The aims of the National Physical Laboratory of Great 

Britain," Annual Report, Smithsonian Institution, 1901, pp. 341—357. 

Editorial, Sci. Am., 82, 307 (1900); Science, 10, 342 (1899). 
40 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

Lyman I. Gage, Secretary of the 

and led the campaign for a Government. 

macy and wit, was to prove a the Bureau. wise and able mentor in the establishment of 

In the late summer of 1899 he asked his Assistant Secretary, Frank 

A. Vanderlip, subsequently president of the National City Bank of New York, 

who had come to Washington as Gage's private secretary, to suggest someone 

to prepare a report proposing legislation for a national standards laboratory. 

Vanderlip wrote to Samuel W. Stratton, a classmate when they were undergraduates at the University of Illinois and at that time a 38-year-old professor 

of physics at the University of Chicago. 

Stratton was invited to Washington. On October 28, 1899, the incumbent officer in immediate charge of weights and measures, "an expert 

leveler but without a glimmer of knowledge of physical principles," 65 was 

transferred and Gage appointed Stratton to the nominal position of Inspector 

of Standards. Before long Stratton was at work drafting the bill to be included in the Secretary's letter report to Congress and organizing the arguments for the congressional hearings to come. 

Securing endorsements for the proposed standards laboratory proved 

no difficulty. It had the overwhelming support of the National Academy of 

Speech, Dr. Frank A. Wolff, 25th anniversary of the NBS, Dec. 4, 1926 (NBS Blue 

Folder Box 3, APW—301c). 

Treasury under President McKinley, who initiated 

national standardizing laboratory in the Federal 
A NATiONAL NEED . . . A NATIONAL HUMILIATION 41 

Sciences; the American Philosophical Society, the American Association 

for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and 

other scientific institutions and associations. In personal testimony, letters, 

resolutions, and editorials, the leading scientists of the country, virtually 

every scientific agency in the Federal Government and in the States, leading 

manufacturers and commercial concerns, the railroad and iron and steel 

industries, manufacturers of electrical apparatus and appliances, and all scientific and technical journals and periodicals endorsed the proposed bill 

without reservation.66 As James H. Southard, Representative from Ohio 

and champion of the bill in the House, said: "Never has a bill come with 

such a number of endorsements." 

The arguments in the avalanche of endorsements were summed up in 

"the conditions which necessitate the establishment of a national standardizing bureau," set down in Secretary Gage's letter to Congress on April 18, 

1900, and here slightly abbreviated: 

The-establishment of uniform standards, their maintenance, and the 

solution of problems connected with them, has until recent years 

been confined to standards of length, mass, capacity, and tempera. 

ture; "but the increased order of accuracy demanded in scientific 

and commercial measurements and the exceedingly rapid progress 

of pure and applied science have increased the scope of such work 

until it includes many important branches of physical and chemical 

research, requiring * * * a complete laboratory, fitted for undertaking the most refined measurements known to modern science." 

An examination of the functions and sums of money devoted to the 

maintenance of the German, English, Austrian, Russian, and French 

institutions "is the most convincing evidence of the importance of 

problems pertaining to standards and standard-measuring 

apparatus." 

Institutions of learning, laboratories, observatories, technical institutions, and scientific societies in this country are proliferating 

and growing "at a rate never equaled in the history of any nation," 

their work "requiring accurate reliable standards, which in nearly 

every case must be procured from abroad, or cannot be procured 

at all." 

"The extension of scientific research into the realm of the extremes 

of length, mass, time, temperature, pressure, and other physical 

60se endorsements will be found in the congressional documents dated Apr. 18, 

May 3, and Dec. 28, 1900, cited in footnotes below. 
42 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

quantities necessitates standards of far greater range than can be 

obtained at present." 

"The introduction of accurate scientific methods into manufacturing and commercial processes involves the use of a great variety 

of standards of greater accuracy than formerly required." 

More and more, "commercial transactions are * * * 'based upon 

the reading of electrical measuring apparatus, inaccuracies of which 

involve great injustice and financial losses." It should be possible 

"to calibrate or test electrical standards of all kinds for commercial, as well as the most refined scientific work." 

"The scientific work carried on by the different departments of the 

Government involves the use of many standards and instruments 

of precision, which are too frequently procured from abroad" and 

regularly returned there for testing. 

The manufacture of scientific apparatus and instruments of pre. 

cision recently begun in this country is growing, and "to secure 

the requisite degree of uniformity and accuracy" in their products, 

"American manufacturers of such apparatus must have access to a standardizing bureau equivalent to that provided for the manufacturers of other countries, notably Germany and England." 

Not least, 

"The recent acquisition of territory by the United States increases 

the scope and importance of the proposed institution, since the 

establishment of a government in these possessions involves the 

system of weights and measures to be employed," and in the near 

future "large public inmprovernents * * * [such as] schools, 

factories, and other institutions will be established, all of which 

require the use of standards and standard-measuring apparatus." 

These were, for the most part, immediate and pressing considerations. 

They indicated clearly the degree of dependence of American science, in. 

dustry, and commerce upon European agencies, and made glaring the con- trast between the work possible in the little Office of Weights and Measures 

and in the German Reichsanstalt. 

Interestingly enough, except for the general reference to the scientific 

work of Government agencies, no mention was made in the "conditions" of 

better standards required in the collection of customs and internal revenue, 

in the purchase of supplies for the Government, or in establishing specifica. 

Letter, Secretary of the Treasury, Apr. 18, 1900, sub: National Standardizing Bureau 

(56th Cong., 1st sess., H. Doc. 625, serial 3997), p. 3. See also Annual Report, Secretary 

of the Treasury, 1900, p. lxvii. 
A NATIONAL NEED .. . A NATIONAL HUMILIATION 43 

tions for Government purchases, which were to occupy so much of the time 

of the Bureau in its early years. Nor did the conditions include better 

standards for the general public, whose every purchase and transaction is 

based on standards. Yet from the beginning the Bureau was to become 

involved in Government specifications, crusade for the consumer, and act 

to put better weights and measures in the hands of State and municipal 

authorities. 

The proposed bill contained in Gage's letter of April 18 recommended 

that the Office of Standard Weights and Measures be reorganized as a separate agency to be designated the National Standardizing Bureau, and that 

it remain under the Secretary of the Treasury. As stated in the letter, 

The functions of the bureau shall consist in the custody of the 

standards; 

the comparison of the standards used in scientific investigations, 

engineering, manufacturing, commerce, and educational iustitutions with the standards adopted or recognized by the Government; 

the construction when necessary of standards, their multiples and 

subdivisions; 

the testing and calibration of standard-measuring apparatus; 

the solution of problems which arise in connection with standards; 

the determining of physical constants, and the properties of materials when such data are of great importance to scientific or manufacturing interests and are not to be obtained of sufficient accuracy 

elsewhere. 

These six functions, subsequently enacted into law without change, 

made the Bureau the source of national standards and their custodian. The 

Bureau was to have no regulating or policing powers; enforcement of 

standards was left to the discretion of the States. On the other hand, the 

responsibility of the Bureau for the establishment of standards, standard 

instruments, tests, and analytic procedures, and for the determination of 

physical constants and the properties of materials, made its scope of research 

in the physical sciences virtually unlimited. And the delegation of responsibility to it for the investigation of any problem in• connection with 

standards was to, enable the Bureau to span the gap between standards 

of measurement and standards of performance in the coming age of mass production, and to leap thence to the age of atomic research and space 

physics. 

"Letter, Apr. 18, 1900, p. 1. The bill as enacted into law appears in app. C. 
44 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

The proposed bill made the services of the Bureau freely available 

to the Federal Government and to State and municipal governments, and, 

for a fee, to any scientific society, educational institution, firm, corporation, 

or individual within the United States engaged in manufacturng or other 

pursuits requiring the use of standards or standard-measuring instruments. 

All Bureau personnel, scientific, technical, clerical, and custodial, 

were to be under Civil Service appointment, and to insure that the Bureau 

served the best interests of science and commerce, a visiting committee of 

five members appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury from among the 

leading scientists and industrialists in the Nation was to visit the Bureau at 

least once a year and report to the Secretary upon the efficiency of its work 

and the condition of its facilities and equipment. 

The staff of the new agency recommended in Gage's proposed bill 

consisted of a director at $6,000 per year, a physicist at $3,500, a chemist 

at $3,500, two assistant physicists or chemists at $2,200 each, two laboratory 

assistants at $1,400 each, two others at $1,200, a secretary at $2,000, two 

clerks at $1,200 and $1,000 respectively, a messenger at $720, an engineer 

at $1,500, a fireman at $720, three mechanicians at $1,400, $1,000, and 

$840 respectively, a watchman at $720, and two laborers at $600 each, 

making a total of 21. 

The bill asked for appropriations of $34,900 for staff salaries, 

$10,000 for general expenses, $25,000 for the purchase of a laboratory 

site, $250,000 for a suitable laboratory, and $25,000 to equip the laboratory. 

These sums, Gage pointed out, were in no way excessive by comparison with 

those allowed the national laboratories abroad. The Normal Eichungskommission, established in 1868 in Berlin to regulate and inspect weights and 

measures, had been granted an appropriation equivalent to $250,000 in 1899 

for new buildings and equipment, and, its annual appropriation was $36,000. 

The Reichsanstalt at Charlottenburg had cost $1 million and had an annual 

appropriation of $80,000. Together the German bureaus were spending 

$116,000 a year. 

In England the testing bureau at the Kew Observatory (1871), the 

Standards Department (1879), the Electrical Standardizing Laboratory 

(1890), and the new National Physical Laboratory (1899) had total appropriations equivalent to $62,100. Austria's Normal Eichungskommission, 

established in 1871 in Vienna, currently spent $46,000 a year, and the 

Russian Central Chamber of Weights and Measures, established in 1878 

at St. Petersburg, with laboratories costing $175,000 and added structures 

built in 1895, spent $17,500 annually. By contrast, the appropriation for 

the U.S. Office of Weights and Measures for 1897—98 'had been $10,000.69 

Ibid., pp. 9—11. 
A NATIONAL NEED . . . A NATIONAL HUMILIATION 45 

Secretary Gage's letter was referred to the House Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures on April 23, 1900. At the first hearing, on May 3, several members of the committee wondered aloud at the willingness 

of the superintendent of the Coast Survey to lose an office of his agency, 

demurred at creating another bureau in the Federal Government, and, coming 

to the heart of the matter, expressed the opinion that both the salaries and 

construction costs for the new bureau seemed much too high. 

Dr. Henry S. Pritchett, superintendent of the Coast Survey but soon to become president of MIT, had been consulted by Stratton on the matter of 

salaries. Pritchett told the committee that he himself received $5,000, a!. 

though by law the position called for $6,000, the same salary proposed for 

the director of the new bureau. There was apt to be considerable difference 

between a $5,000 and a $6,000 a year man, he said, and if the right man was found he should have the higher figtire. As for the salaries of the other scientists, they were "about what they would get in college life"; a good, even a first 

class, chemist or physicist such as the bureau must have could probably be 

found for 

When someone questioned whether the head of the proposed bureau 

should receive a salary within $2,000 of that of the Secretary of the Treasury 

himself, Lyman Gage briskly replied: "Almost anybody will do for the Secretary of the Treasury * * * [but] it takes a very high.grade man to be chief 

of a bureau like this. There are plenty of patriotic citizens who are willing 

to be Secretary * * * at almost any salary they might get, but this * * * 

[man] must have and hold the esteem and confidence of all * * * scientific 

men everywhere, and unless he is as good or a better man than is found in 

private institutions and concerns he will not have the respect and confidence 

of the community." 71 To objections that the amount asked for the laboratory seemed too 

large, the committee was told that the structure would have to be erected 

outside the city proper, in an isolated place free from vibration, traffic disturbances, and interference from electric streetcar lines. It would have to 

be solidly built with at least twice as much material as in an ordinary building of the same size, with twice as complex heating, piping, and plumbing 

arrangements, and with four or five times more wiring. In addition, it 

must have a heating plant, engines, dynamos, motors, pumps, and other heavy 

machinery, as well as instrument shops, in a separate structure apart from 

the main laboratory.72 It was an impressive structure Stratton described, 

and he won his point. 

70 Hearing before the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, May 3, 1900 (56th 

Cong., 1st sess., H. Rept, no document or serial number), p. 14. 71 Ibid. 

Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 2d sess., Mar. 2, 1901, P. 3475. 
46 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

On May 5, 1900, after defeat of a motion to reduce the director's 

salary to $5,000, James H. Southard, Chairman of the Committee on Coin. 

age, Weights, and Measures, introduced the bill (H.R. 11350), essentially 

identical with that proposed in Gage's letter, in the House. His final argument, insuring the unanimous endorsement of his committee, was that under 

proper administration the expenses of the new agency would be "largely 

repaid by fees resulting from its work." On May 14, Jonathan Rose of 

Vermont introduced the bill in the Senate (S. 4680). Further hearings were 

delayed until after the summer recess of Congress. 

The hearing before the Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce opened on December 28, 1900. Once again the proposed salaries 

of the scientists came under fire. Secretary Gage admitted that they were 

"relatively high as compared with * * * the salaries the Government pays 

in a good many other directions," but in the new bureau the United States 

had to have "the best in the world." Stratton added that they were no higher 

than those for corresponding positions in the leading universities, and 

further,that an academic career was apt to be preferred as less likely subject 

to political weather changes. Moreover, bureau personnel would not have 

the 3 or 4 months of annual vacation available to academic faculty for study 

or travel. As for the salary proposed for the director, said Stratton, scientific 

directors in some of the large industrial corporations were able to command as much as $10,000 a year.74 

The Senate subcommittee nevertheless cut back the salary schedule 

from $34,900 to $27,140 by reducing the director's salary to $5,000 and 

eliminating 8 of the 21 positions, including 2 laboratory assistants, the sec- retary, a clerk, the fireman, 2 mechanicians, and a laborer. Other modifications in the Senate bill saw the sum for equipping the main laboratory re- duced from $25,000 to $10,000 and "the general expenses of said bureau, 

including books and periodicals, furniture, office expenses, stationery and 

printing, heating and lighting, expenses of the visiting committee, and con- tingencies of all kinds" reduced from $10,000 to $5,000. 

Returned to the House for full debate on March 2, 1901, the bill 

met with predictable mixed reactions. Upon its reading, Mr. John W. 

Although by the 1960's fees from calibrations, testing, and other services exceeded 

$6 million annually, the Bureau was never to be, as Congress seemed to think it should 

be, self-supporting. See Hearings before the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations * * * for 1906 (Dec. 2, 1904), p. 230 (L/C:HJ10.B33 and HF1O5.C55). 

House appropriations hearings will hereafter be cited as Hearings * * 

Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, Dec. 28, 1900 (56th 

Cong., 2d sess., S. Doc. 70, serial No. 4033), pp. 4—7. $10,000 was the salary of Albert 

Ladd Colby, chief metallurgical engineer of the Bethlehem Iron & Steel Co. and member 

of the first Visiting Committee, whose physical and chemical laboratory employed 36 

people. See also Congressional Record, March 2, 1901, p. 3476. 
A NATIONAL NEED . . . A NATIONAL HUMILIATION 47 

Maddox of Georgia rose to say: "I do not know anything about the bill. 

If I understood it, or if it was possible for me to understand it * * * might 

be in favor of it. I want to. know what it will cost." Southard explained. 

Mr. Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois, who as "Uncle Joe Cannon" was to be the 

long.time autocratic Speaker of the House (1903—11) but was then Chairman of the House Appropriations Comthittee, proved characteristically 

forthright: "I don't think there ought to be any [such) bureau organized." 

But Mr. John F. Shafroth of Colorado, who had objected earlier to the idea 

of another bureau in the Government, spoke up again, saying he had changed 

his mind. Perhaps moved by the reading in the House of a telegram from 

Carl Hering of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers ("National 

humiliation not to have own standards"), he declared: "There is a new creation * * * of measure and of standards in the world * * * [The bill) 

is a measure which this Government should have passed long ago." 76 He was for it, and he was in the majority. 

"To meet all possible objections in the amended bill," the House 

accepted the Senate salary and expense changes and on March 3, 1901, the 

bill was enacted into law (31 Stat. 1449), to take effect on July 1. The 

functions and responsibilities of the bureau as originally described in Secretary Gage's letter remained unchanged, but instead of "National Standardizing Bureau," the name by law became the "National Bureau of 

Standards." 

In 1903 when the Bureau was transferred from the Treasury to the new Department of Commerce and Labor, the word "National" was eliminated from the name at the direction of the new department chief. No reason was given but it was said the change was made because the word "National" was inconsistent with the titles of such similar bureaus as the Coast and Geodetic Survey and the Geological Survey. Thirty years later, in 1934, as the 

proliferation of "bureaus of standards" in State governments, chambers of 

commerce, and even department stores threatened total ioss of identity of the 

Federal agency, the original name was restored.78 

Dr. Frank A. Wolff remembered it, "Speaker Cannon, the then watchdog of the 

Treasury, though [later] a friend of the Bureau, HAD to oppose it. In his speech he 

ridiculed the idea of a $250,000 building to house 14 men." Speech, 25th anniversary of 

the NBS, Dec. 4, 1926. 

Congressional Record, Mar. 2, 1901, pp. 3476—3477. 

Ibid., pp. 3472—3473. 

Memo, Secretary of Commerce for Director, NBS, Apr. 27, 1934 (NBS Box 370, 

AG) ; Science, 78, 453 (1934); interview with Dr. Lyman J. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1961. 
48 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 

A 16th century measuring rod, for measuring pastures, fields, vineyards, meadows, and 

fruit gardens. "To find the length of a measuring rod the right way and as it is com- mon in the craft . . - Take sixteen men, short men and tall ones as they leave church 

and let each of them put one shoe after the other and the length thus obtained shall 

be a just and common measuring rod to survey the land with." Jacob Köbel, Ceometrei, von Kiinstlichen Messen und absehen . - . (1536), Dii—Diii. 
FOUNDING 

THE NATIONAL BUREAU 

OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

CHAPTER II 

SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON 

For much of its first decade and a half, until shortly before America's 

entry into World War I, the Bureau's energies were almost wholly engaged 

in developing its staff and organization, establishing new and much needed 

standards for science and industry, and proving itself as a valuable adjunct 

of Government and industry. It assumed responsibilities as readily as it 

accepted those thrust upon it, and found them proliferating at a rate faster 

than the Bureau could grow. In 1914, making its first pause to take stock, 

the Bureau discovered that it had virtually to rewrite the functions of the 

organic act that had created it. This is the story told in the next two chapters. 

From the day he arrived in Washington, Samuel Wesley Stratton 

(1861—1931) was the driving force behind the shaping of the National 

Bureau of Standards. Louis A. Fischer and Dr. Frank A. Wolff, Jr., who 

had been with the Office of Weights and Measures since 1880 and 1897, 

respectively, and had friends and acquaintances who knew many members of 

Congress, did much of the work of bringing the proposed bill to the favorable 

attention of members in both Houses. But it was Stratton, enlisting the aid 

of other scientists and officials in the Government, who drafted the text of Sec. 

retary Gage's letter, prepared the arguments that were to persuade Congress, 

and secured the imposing and unprecedented array of endorsements for the 

proposed laboratory.' 

At his very first meeting on Capitol Hill, Stratton "mesmerized the 

House Committee," Wolff recalled, "and splendid hearings were held which were printed for distribution without stint." 2 He was to be the director of 

the Bureau for the next 21 years. 

As a youth, Stratton's interest in machines and mechanical processes 

led him to major in mechanical engineering when he entered the University 

of Illinois in 1880. With his bachelor of science degree and a summer of 

intensive reading in Ganot's Physics—the training text of so many 19thcentury American physicists—he was appointed instructor of mathematics 

and physics in the fall of 1884. In 1889 he was promoted to assistant pro. 

1 Stratton's correspondence on behalf of the bill may be found in Box 1 of the Stratton 

Papers in the Archives Library of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

'Speech, Dr. Frank A. Wolff, 25th anniversary of the NBS, Dec. 4, 1926. 

49 
Dr. Stratton at his desk in South building, 1905. The Bureau was still in its infancy, but already, according to Rosa, second only to the great German 

Reichsanstalt among government standardc laboratories. The portrait of Michael Faraday on the wall, symbolizing the age of electricty, did not 

come down until 1950. 
SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON 51 

fessor of physics and electrical engineering, another subject he acquired on his own. In 1892 the University of Chicago opened its doors, startling the aca- demic world by paying its head professors "the princely salaries, for those 

days, of $7,000 each." At the invitation of the renowned experimental 

physicist, Albert A. Michelson, then organizing his department at Chicago, 

Stratton came as assistant professor of physics, his salary of $2,000 as great a persuasion as the opportunity to work with Michelson. 

Although Stratton, in addition to his teaching, worked on numerous 

experiments with Michelson or at his direction, and was promoted to associate 

professor in 1895 and to full professor in 1900, the association was not a happy one. According to Robert A. Millikan, who came to the university in 

1896 as a $900 instructor in physics, Michelson was an intense individualist 

and did not like cooperative ventures in the laboratory. His absorption in 

his scientific work made him wholly indifferent to people in general and 

almost impossible to work with. As he once told Millikan, he wanted only a hired assistant who would do just as he was told, not expect any credit for 

himself, or make any demands other than to ask for his pay check. For 

Stratton who was outgoing, accessible, and without a trace of affectation, it 

must have been difficult, and as director of the National Bureau of Standards 

he was never to forget the Chicago lesson.4 

How much of Stratton's work at Chicago came out in the stream of 

papers Michelson published is impossible to say, but at least two bore both 

their names, one on a new form of harmonic analyzer, a device for highprecision measurement of electrical frequencies, the other a note on the 

sources of X rays.5 Millikan, a supreme egoist himself, was to say that he— 

never collaborated with Professor Michelson in any of his re- searches as both of my predecessors, Professors Wadsworth and 

Stratton, had done with somewhat unfortunate results in •both cases. He never used me as an assistant, as he did some of the 

younger members of the staff. When Professor Stratton left about 

1900 to assume directorship of the Bureau of Standards he warned me •that my "turn would come next," meaning, of course, 'that 

friction would develop.6 

Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan, p. 224. 

Ibid., pp. 87—88; s.v., S. C. Prescott, "Stratton," DAB. 

'Michelson and Stratton, "Harmonic analyzer," Am. J. Sci., 5, 1—12 (1898); "Source 

of X.rays," Science, 3, 694—696 (1896). 

Stratton's principal research efforts in Michelson's laboratory were in interferometry, 

he said later, "the field of measurement in which I am personally interested and in which 

I was engaged when called to take charge of the bureau" (Hearings * * 1923, Nov. 

16, 1922, p. 191). 

'Millikan, Autobiography, p. 86. 
52 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

Commissioned in the Illinois naval militia unit that Michelson or- ganized in 1895, Stratton first left the University of Chicago in the spring of 

1898 to serve as a Navy lieutenant in the Spanish-American War. He re- turned to the University that fall. Soon after, Arthur E. Kennelly, the 

Harvard dean of electrical engineering, said in his memoir of Stratton, he 

was asked to go to Washington to invite Admiral Dewey and Secretary Gage 

of the Treasury to give addresses at Chicago, and on that occasion fell into a discussion with Gage about weights and measures and the scientific work 

being done on them in the national laboratories abroad.7 Lyman Gage 

therefore knew Stratton when the Assistant Secretary, Frank Vanderlip, in the 

summer of 1899 brought up his name as the man to take charge of the faltering Office of Weights and Measures, and invited him to Washington. As 

Stratton recalled it: 

While on a visit to Washington in 1899, the Secretary of the 

Treasury asked me to accept a position as head of the Office of 

Weights and Measures in the Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was declined. However, I pointed out to the Secretary, the Assistant Secretary, and the Superintendent of the Coast Survey the 

necessity for a government bureau having to do with standards and 

methods of measurement in the broad sense, and at the request of 

the Secretary of the Treasury drew up a plan for the establishment 

of such an institution. I agreed to devote a year's vacation 

[sabbatical], upon which I was just entering, to the preliminary 

steps for the establishment of the institution, the first of which was 

the securing of the necessary legislation.8 

In later years •both Dr. Henry S. Pritchett, superintendent of the 

Coast Survey, and Frank A. Vanderlip, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, 

claimed credit for bringing Stratton to Washington. Pritchett said that 

shortly after coming to the Coast Survey in 1897 he had— 

asked Congress to appropriate a salary sufficiently large to induce a physicist of high standing to take charge of the office, under direction of the superintendent. An appropriation of $3,000 was made. 

With this sum some difficulty was found in inducing any physicist 

of standing and reputation to accept the place, and only after many 

interviews and considerable correspondence I succeeded in persuad. 

'Nat!. Acad. Sci., Biographical Memoirs, XVII, 254 (1935). See also personal letter, L. J. 

Briggs to Prof. E. Merritt, Cornell University, Oct. 31, 1933 (NBS Box 359, 1G.). 8 Letter, S. W. Stratton (hereafter SWS) to R. S. Woodward, president, NAS, Feb. 10, 

1914 (Stratton Papers at MIT, Box 12; copy in NBS Historical File). 
SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON 53 

ing Professor S. W. Stratton * * * to become a candidate. The appointment to the position was made after competitive examination.9 

With this account Stratton agreed, in part at least: 

When I first came to Washington and met the Superintendent of the 

Survey, he asked me to join his force temporarily and make a re- port as to what could be done to place the weights and measures 

work upon the basis necessary in the present day of precision 

measurement of all kinds. 

Although he at first declined the offer, Stratton said that on the train back 

to Chicago he made notes for a plan to revitalize the weights and measures 

work at the Coast Survey. Persuaded by his note-making, he gave up his 

planned trip to Europe and agreed to work in Washington during his sabbatical year. 

In October 1899 he was formally appointed Inspector of Standard 

Weights and Measures and began preparation, says Stratton, of— 

two reports, one based upon the enlargement of that work [in the 

Survey office] to the extent possible in its present quarters, and 

dealing solely with weights and measures * * The other suggested the establishment of an institution having weights and meas- ures functions in the broadest sense, covering measurements in the 

various lines of physics, the properties of materials and physical 

constants, etc. * * 

It was the Superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, Doctor 

Pritchett, who saw that the second plan was the preferable one. He 

recommended it to the Treasury Department, and the Secretary of 

the Treasury directed that a bill be drawn looking toward the establishment of such an institution'° 

Pritchett, "The story of the establishment of the NBS," Science, 15, 281 (1902). This 

account also appears in letter, Pritchett to Dr. Wolff, Nov. 16, 1926 (NBS Blue Folder 

Box 4, APW—301c), and Abraham Flexner, Henry S. Pritchett: A Biography (New 

York: Columbia University Press, 1943). 

10 Stratton, "The Bureau of Standards and its relation to the U.S. C. & G.S." Centennial 

Celebration of the U.S. C. & G.S., April 5—6 1916 (Washington, D.C., 1916), p. 34. Stratton's reports, both dated Dec. 15, 1899, are in NBS Box 22, PRA. See also Science, 10, 

941 (1899). 

Stratton's civil service appointment as "Inspector of Standards" is dated Dec. 12, 1899 

(Stratton Papers, Box 12). Another who took the examination for Inspector of Standards 

(in July 1899) was Charles S. Peirce, member of the Coast Survey from 1871—91, who had 

been in charge of weights and measures in 1884—85 and was then in his 60th year. 

Although strongly endorsed by Henry Cabot Lodge and others, Peirce was not considered, 

and later protested to Pritchett at the outcome of the inspectorship (communications 

from Dr. Max H. Fisch, University of Illinois, Sept. 13, 1962 and Mar. 23, 1965, at work on a biography of Peirce). 
54 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

In his autobiography, written more than 30 years later, Frank Vanderlip recalled the event: 

In the Coast and Geodetic Survey there was a little sprout of an 

organization called the Bureau of Standards [sic]. Previously its 

function had been chiefly to serve as the depository of the nation's 

standards of weights and measures; although some other things were done there, the bureau was a puny affair. We wanted a new head for it and I found myself thinking of one who had been a close friend of mine at the University of Illinois, a boy named Sam 

Stratton. He had become a physicist, and at the University of 

Chicago Professor Stratton had come to rank next to Michelson, 

the measurer of light. On my recommendation the place was offered to Sam with the idea that he could develop the bureau into 

larger purposes. He was a thorough scientist with a great deal of 

imagination and not narrow in any part of him. It is satisfying 

even so many years afterward to realize that I had a hand in bring. 

ing such a valuable servant into the employ of the government. 

That Bureau of Standards grew to its present vast importance 

nourished chiefly in its growth by the intelligence of my old col. 

lege friend.11 

Vanderlip may have called him "Sam," but no one at the Bureau was 

ever to approach that degree of familiarity. As a full professor, even without his doctorate, he had the courtesy title of "Doctor," as was customary 

then. Later he was awarded six honorary doctorates, the doctor of engineering from Illinois and doctor of science from Pittsburgh in 1903, two more 

doctorates of science from Cambridge in 1908 and Yale in 1918; Harvard in 

1923 gave him an LL.D., and Rensselaer in 1924 the Ph. D. At the Bureau 

he was "Dr. Stratton" to his friends and colleagues, or the "Old Man," among 

the frivolous youngsters on the staff, behind his back. 

In appearance, Dr. Stratton at 40 was of medium height, mature, 

his' sturdy frame and resonant voice commanding authority. He was a storehouse of specialized knowledge of industrial materials and mechanical 

devices of every sort and of 'the latest technical advances in physics and 

engineering. He delighted in constructing instruments and apparatus, and 

until his administrative duties became all consuming, maintained a private 

shop and laboratory near his office. Dr. Stratton never married, and he had as strong opinions about women in authority at the Bureau as in his home.'2 

"Frank A. Vanderlip, with Boyden Sparkes, From Farm Boy to Financier (New York: 

D. Appleton-Century, 1935), p. 77. 12 He would not even accept women as clerks and secretaries at the Bureau until forced 

by the manpower shortage of World War I. 
SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON 55 

For over 20 years Samuel Stratton dominated the National Bureau of 

Standards, shaping it to serve the Nation and to hold its own or even surpass 

the national standards laboratories abroad. Like all good administrators, 

he recognized potential ability in young scientists he met or who applied to 

him. And as Kennelly says, he knew how "to organize them into cooperative 

effort for the purposes of applied science, without any consideration of his own personal advantage. His mind was dominated by the ideals of improving all engineering enterprise through scientific study and research." 

While it is true, as Kennelly implies, that his interest in technology was 

strong, Stratton knew that the Bureau must establish a solid basic research 

program and keep it at a high level if the Bureau was to fulfill its promise. 

Fundamental research was often difficult to justify to a cost-conscious 

Congress, but as he told a House committee in 1902, "H we are to advance we have to create original things." More often than not he got his funds for 

basic research. 

Stratton's office was to have its share of bureaucratic troubles, within 

the organization itself, with other government agencies, with members of 

the public, and with politicians. When differences arose, Dr. Stratton could 

be stern with the members of his staff—his flaming temper was famous—but 

he would defend them with all his might against the slightest interference or 

criticism that he believed unjustified. By its very nature, as impartial ruler 

and arbiter of standards, the Bureau could not escape controversy, but Stratton spoke with facts and a firm voice that kept controversy within bounds. 

He never allowed anyone to forget that the Bureau's mission was to 

serve science and industry in the Nation, and he himself became filled with 

concern when a commercial chemist wrote of his difficulties with a product, 

an engineer with his materials, or an enquiring citizen sought technical 

help or information. He would scrawl in the margin of their letters: "Can't 

we do something about this?" "Why can't we do this?" "This deserves 

answering." But he was impatient with armchair inventors who thought 

the Bureau ought to construct working models for them from vague descriptions of vague ideas. Incoming mail at the Bureau, particularly in 1918, was freighted with suggested weapons and materials for winning the war, 

many of them, as Stratton said of a flux of letters proposing new alloys, 

"products which, although found excellent enough, are not in any way 

unusual, except in the secrecy about the composition which is observed by the 

inventor." 14 And he could be withering when a colleague was vilified for 

trying to let a crank down gently: "It is perfectly evident that you are more 

"Hearings * * 1904 (Dec. 4, 1902), p. 70. 

"Letter, SWS to Dir, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Jan. 21, 1918 (NBS 

Box 11, IM). 
56 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

interested in giving information about a subject which, judging from your 

correspondence, you know little or nothing about, than you are in securing 

such information." 15 But that was years later. When in the summer of 1899 Stratton 

arrived at the Office of Standard Weights and Measures, in the Coast and 

Geodetic Survey building at New Jersey Avenue and B Street, S.E., where the 

present House Office Building stands, its staff consisted of Andrew Braid, 

officially Assistant-in-Charge; Louis A. Fischer, adjuster of weights and 

measures; Dr. Frank A. Wolff, Jr., verifier of weights and measures (but then 

spending most of his time on problems of electrical measurement), and four 

others, a mechanician, an adjuster's helper, a messenger, and a watchman. 

On October 28, 1899, Stratton replaced Braid, with the temporary title of 

Inspector of Standards, at $3,000 per year. 

Less than an hour was sufficient to tour the Office, see all its equip. 

nlent, and comprehend its work. In Mr. Fischer's section "most of the apparatus * * * on hand [had been] designed many years ago." There was no "suitable instrument for the comparison of standards of length of 

13 Letter, SWS, Dec. 27, 1920 (NBS Box 14, IPR). 

The Coast and Geodetic Survey building, home of the Office of Weights and Measures, 

in the 200 block of New Jersey Avenue, S.E., as Dr. Stratton saw it in 1900. The 

Butler building, into which the new Bureau of Standards expanded, is probably the 

structure next door. "Bushey House," at 23.5 New Jersey Avenue, is out of the picture, 

down the street. 
57 

Mr. Louis A. Fischer, verifier of weights and meas- ures, who came to the 

office in the Coast and 

Geodetic Survey in 1880 

at the age of 16, when 

there were still men there who had worked 

with Hassler. This picture may have been 

taken shortly after the 

Bureau was founded, 

but no laser than 1910, 

the year Mr. Fischer 

began his weights and 

measures crusade across the Nation. 

Dr. Frank A. Wolff, Jr., 

who was able to certify 

standards of electromotive force bus continued 

to send his other electri. 

cal measuring equipment 

to England and Germany 

for verification at the 

time this portrait was made. 
58 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

1 metre or less," nor was the Office "prepared to make comparison of thermometers at temperatures lower than zero or higher than 50 degrees Centigrade." 16 Nevertheless, Fischer that year was to verify a number of 

thermometers, flasks, weights, and polariscopic apparatus used by the customs 

service in levying duties on imported sugar, adjust and verify the set of 

standards used in the State of Maine, and work on three sets of standards 

for States not yet supplied. He also prepared a set of metric standards for 

Puerto Rico, and graduated and verified 100-foot and 30-meter bench stand. 

ards for the city surveyor of Boston, to be used in reverifying tapes and chains 

submitted to him.'7 

In the intervals free from pressing routine work, Dr. Wolff had set 

up a number of Clark standard cells for measuring standards of electro. 

motive force and verifying direct.current voltmeters and millivoitmeters, had 

acquired equipment for testing resistance standards, and was at work on alternating-current testing apparatus, preparatory to answering some of the 

problems recently raised by long-distance transmission of power. But as 

Dr. Wolff said, "No claim to originality is made for what has been accom- plished." The Office was still "obliged, as heretofore, to send to the national 

standardizing laboratories of Germany and England for verification [of] the 

large class of alternating current measuring instruments, condensers, and 

photometric standards." 18 On June 30, 1900, the Office reported that in the past year it had com- pared 65 thermometers and 69 surveyors' tapes, had graduated and verified 

772 sugar flasks, replied to 75 requests for information, and with routine 

weights, measures, and balance tests, had answered a total of 1,037 "calls" on it. Its appropriations amounted to $9,410.00, of which $8,237.44 was for 

salaries and $944.18 for contingent expenses.19 

The law establishing the National Bureau of Standards, passed in 

March 1901, did not become effective until July 1, but within a week of its 

passage Stratton received his appointment as Director of the new Bureau 

from President McKinley.'0 During the interim 4 months he was to find a site for the new laboratory, plan its equipment, find the additional personnel 

"Annual Report, Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1899, p. 49. 

1Z Annual Report, Secretary of the Treasury, 1900, p. lxviii. 

IS Annual Report, Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1900, p. 68; Annual Report, Secretary 

of the Treasury, 1900, p. lxviii. Also, Wolff, "The facilities afforded by the Office of 

Standard Weights and Measures for verification of electrical standards and electrical 

measuring apparatus," Sci. Am. Suppi. 49, 20304 (1900). 

" Annual Report, Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1900, pp. 58—59, 69. Appropriations 

for 1899 had been $5,690 for salaries and $2,475 for expenses. 

22 The Presidents and executive secretaries under whom Bureau directors have served 

appear in app. D. 
SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON 59 

TIlE EVENING MONDAY, MARCH 11, 1901 

CORRECT MEASURES 

Function of the New Bureau of 

LABORATORY TO BE ERECTED - Prof. Stratton, the Director, Details Need of Establishment. 

A HANDICAP REMOVED 

A new bureau of the government, authorized by the last Congress. will be established 

in this city in the near future and will give employment to a number of persons. It Is to be known as the national bureau of 

standards and is to be under the control of 

the Treasury Department A separate buildleg for a laboratory, to cost not to exceed 

is to be erected on a site be pur- chased at a cost of 

Mr. W. Stratton of ChIcago has 

been appointed by the President to be chief 

of the bureau at an salary of $3,000. 

Prof. Strattoo is to have the following as- One of the first newspaper notices of the new Bureau in the Federal Establishment 

appeared in the Washington Evening Star. A half page feature in the Sunday Washington Times of August 23, 1903, included a picture of Secretary Cortelyou of the 

Department of Commerce and Labor laying the cornerstone of the main (South) build' 

ing the day before, and described the ceremony as "a memorable event in the history 

of the country." 

the Bureau would need, visit the more important laboratories here and abroad 

to see their construction, equipment, and the work they were doing, and set 

in motion, in the present Office, some of the more important lines of investigation to be pursued by the new Bureau. 

It is not known in what order these tasks were taken up, but it seems probable that Stratton first secured additional laboratory space, in the Butler 

building, adjacent to the Coast Survey, hired a typist, which the Office had 

formerly lacked, and set the staff to work planning an expanded program. 

This included setting up an investigation of photometric measurements; 

developing means for testing high and low temperature instruments, clinical 

DIreet.r Sirait.a. 

sistants, to be appoInted by the Secretary 

of the Trearury: One physicist, at an an- nual salary of $3,TitiI; one chemist, at $3,500; two assistant physicists or chemists, each 

at an annual salary of one laboratory assistant, at $1,100; one laboratory assistant, 

at one secretary, at one clerk, at $19151; one messenger, at $1; one en- 
60 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

thermometers, and chemical glass measuring apparatus; developing electrical apparatus for measuring alternating currents, and equipment for testing pressure gauges and meteorological instruments.21 

With his staff busy, Stratton may have begun visiting some of the 

larger Government laboratories in and near Washington, to see their work 

and learn what the Bureau might do for them. In April he sailed for Europe, 

to place orders for apparatus and equipment in Paris and Berlin, and to 

visit the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sèvres, the Reichsanstalt at Charlottenburg, the new National Physical Laboratory being 

organized at Teddington, and the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge.22 

If the recent establishment of Britain's physical laboratory at Teddington helped prompt the creation of the National Bureau of Standards, the 

Reichsanstalt as the finest laboratory of. its kind in the world was unquestionably to serve as the model for Stratton's organization of the Bureau. It seems probable that from the beginning Secretary Gage intended the Bureau 

to be a second Reichsanstalt. Early in 1899 he had corresponded with 

Henry S. Carhart, professor of physics at the University of Michigan, con- cerning American representation at the electrical congress to be held at the 

Paris Exposition in 1900. Further correspondence is missing, but it is 

possible that Gage was instrumental in sending Carhart to Berlin in the 

fall of 1899, where he secured permission to work at the Reichsanstalt as a scientific guest for several months. While there he "learned rather intimately 

the methods employed and the results accomplished in this famous institution 

for the conduct of physical research, the supply of standards, and the verification of instruments of precision for scientific and technical purposes." 23 Carhart's detailed report on the organization and operation of the 

German institute, complete with architectural plans of the grounds and floor 

plans of the laboratories, was probably seen by Gage and Stratton before 

Carhart presented it as a paper to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on September 26, 1900. It was published later that year in the Trans. 

actions of the Institute and also in Science magazine, and the next year 

21 Annual Report, Secretary of the Treasury, 1901, p. 59. 22 Notice in Science, 13, 515 (1901). In September 1902, Stratton was again in Germany 

"studying the Reichsanstalt with a view to the buildings to be erected in Washington" 

(Science, 16, 437, 1902). 23 Carhart, "The Imperial Physico.Technical Institution in Charlottenburg," Report 

of the Committee on Commerce, to accompany S. 4680 (1901), p. 6 (L/C:QC100.U58— 

1901b). 

The first description, in English, of this institution appeared in Arthur G. Webster's ar- ticle, "A national physical laboratory," The Pedagogical Seminary (Worcester, Mass.), 

ir, 90—101 (1892). The article, Webster later recalled (Science, 56, 170, 1922), had 

been refused by a number of scientific periodicals, their editors rejecting his plea for a similar laboratory in this country as an improper function of the Federal Government. 
SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON 61 

appeared as an appendix to a congressional report of the Committee on Commerce, in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1901, in the 

Western Electrician, and, for a seventh time, in the London Electrical Review. 

There seems little doubt that the report was regarded as a blueprint. 

With modifications, the Bureau was to organize its work, like the 

Reichsanstalt, in two spheres, scientific and technical, including "a division 

for pure scientific research, mechanical measurements of precision, electrical 

measurements and instruments, the measurement of large direct and alternating currents and electromotive forces, an optical department, a department 

of thermometry, a department of pyrometry, and a department of chemistry. 

To these as auxiliaries should be added the power plant and the workshop." 24 Their re-creation in Washington was only a matter of time. 

On his return from abroad, Stratton met with Lyman Gage to recommend members for the Secretary's Visiting Committee, a liaison group 

composed of prominent men of science and industry who were to keep Gage 

informed of such national interests as were within the Bureau's domain, and 

report annually to the Secretary on the work of the Bureau. Thoughtfully, 

Stratton suggested his former superior at Chicago, Professor Michelson, for 

membership on the Committee. Although Michelson was greatly interested 

in standards, had worked at the Bureau International des Poids et Mésures 

in 1892—93, and served on the International Committee of Weights and Measures since 1897, he declined the invitation.25 Letters were then sent by Gage 

to Albert Ladd Colby, chief metallurgical engineer at Bethlehem Steel and 

secretary of the Association of American Steel Manufacturers, as representative of manufacturing interests in the country; to Dr. Elihu Thomson, 

chief electrical engineer at General Electric, who held almost 500 patents 

for electrical inventions and improvements, and would represent electrical 

interests; to Dr. Ira Remsen, professor of chemistry and president of the 

Johns Hopkins University, representing chemical interests; to Dr. Henry S. 

Pritchett, now president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, representing technical education institutions; and to Dr. Edward L. Nichols, 

professor of physics at Cornell University, as representative of physical 

interests.26 

'4lbid., p. 7. 

"While at the International Bureau, Michelson with a new interferometer he had designed carried out a pioneer study in standards measurement, relating the cadmium 

red line to the meter, the first significant beginning of a wavelength definition of the 

meter. 

"Letter, Gage to Michelson, June 6, 1901, and letters, June 18, 1901 (Correspondence 

of the Secretary of the Treasury, 1900—1901, V series, vol. 6, NARG 56). A complete 

list of members of the Visiting Committee to the NBS from 1901 to 1960 appears in 

app. E. 
62 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

Little is known of the Visiting Committee's assistance to Dr. Stratton 

in the early months of the Bureau except that it met for the first time in the 

summer of 1901 "to pass on proposed sites for the laboratory." 27 Stratton 

had already toured the Washington area looking at possible sites and had 

tentatively settled on a location out on Connecticut Avenue, almost 31⁄2 miles 

from the White House and within 2 miles of Chevy Chase, Md. Just inside 

the site of the line of forts built to the North to protect the city during the Civil 

War, the heavily wooded height comprising nearly 8 acres rose more than 

75 feet, the highest ground in the vicinity, overlooking Connecticut Avenue. 

A laboratory up there would be well away from the street noise and interference from the electric cars running out Connecticut Avenue to Chevy Chase. 

The site, "one of the most beautiful in the District of Columbia," 

Stratton thought, was for sale, and its owner, the Chevy Chase Land Co., was persuaded to let it go for $25,000, the sum available.28 

By July 1, 1901, when with minor ceremonies the old Office of Stand. 

ard Weights and Measures became the new National Bureau of Standards, 

two contracts had been let. One was for a mechanical laboratory, to house 

the power and service plant and shops of the main laboratory, scheduled to 

be completed by July 1902. The second, for the physical laboratory itself, was to be completed by January 1903. That same day, July 1st, Dr. 

Edward B. Rosa arrived at the Bureau. 

EDWARD B. ROSA 

Dr. Stratton's most pressing need upon his appointment as Director of 

the Bureau was to find an outstanding man to plan and direct the electrical 

research that had dominated the arguments for the creation of the Bureau. 

Demands for routine electrical testing now took all of Dr. Wolff's time, and 

original research or even planning such research was out of the question. 

Stratton's attention was drawn to a. professor of physics at Wesleyan 

University who in the past decade had published a dozen papers on electricity. 

With Prof. Wilbur 0. Atwater, he had recently devised an ingenious respiration calorimeter that was to prove highly useful in subsequent pioneer investigations of food values and problems of nutrition in this country.29 His 

2TNotice in Science, 14, 340 (1901) ;.Visiting Committee correspondence, 1902, in 

"General Correspondence Files of the Director, 1945—55," Box 6 (in process in NBS 

Records Management Office for NARG 167) (see Bibliographic Note). 

28 NBS Annual Report 1905, p. 4; Remarks of SWS at the laying of the cornerstone of 

the Chemical Laboratory, March 23, 1916 (NBS Historical File); Remarks of SWS on the 30th Anniversary of the NBS, March 7, 1931 (Stratton Papers, Box 12). 

29 See Atwater and Rosa, "A new respirator calorimeter * * s," Phys. Rev. 9, 129, 

214 (1899), and the special notice of it in William North Rice's article, "Scientific 

thought in the nineteenth century," Annual Report, Smithsonian Institution, 1899, p. 399. 
EDWARD B. ROSA 63 

Dr. Edward B. Rosa, 

who set the pace for 

the high level of re- search at the Bureau 

in its first two dec. 

ades. Rosa probably 

sat for this portrait 

about 1915, but ac- cording to Dr. Sils. 

bee, who knew him, 

it could have been 

made at almost any 

time, for Dr. Rosa 

did not change muck 

in all his years at the 

Bureau. 

name was Rosa (pronounced Ro-zay), and meeting him, Stratton knew he 

was the man he sought. 

Edward Bennett Rosa (1861—1921), of Dutch ancestry, had taught 

physics and chemistry after getting his B.S. degree at Wesleyan University in 

Connecticut and then entered the Johns Hopkins University as a graduate 

student in physics under Henry A. Rowland. Receiving his doctorate in 

1891, he returned to Wesleyan as associate professor of physics, becoming 

full professor the next year. He came to the Bureau as a physicist at $3,500 

and a decade later, his electrical group firmly established as the premier 

division of the Bureau, he was made chief physicist. 

Like Stratton, Rosa was of distinguished appearance. He was not as outgoing in temperament as the Director, yet he made a strong impression on scientific and administrative visitors to the Bureau and before long became 

its stellar ambassador at home and abroad. If Stratton was the autocratic 

paterfamilias of the Bureau, interested in every laboratory and its occupants 

and the source of intense staff loyalties, it was Rosa, the autocrat of research, 

who set the pace for the high level of achievement in the early years of the 

Bureau. The names of Stratton and Rosa are inseparable in any consideration of the period. 

It is a tribute to Rosa's character, as those with long memories recall, 

that his own forceful personality rarely clashed with that of Stratton. The 

Director fully agreed with Rosa's concept of the importance of the electrical 
64 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

work of the Bureau and saw that he had the best of equipment and the best 

of assistance to conduct his program. Where the Bureau was concerned, 

they acted as one, and during Stratton's frequent absences on official business, 

Rosa's decisions were final. 

A diligent investigator—he published over 75 papers while at the 

Bureau—Rosa demanded the same industry from his staff. But while their 

minds were kept firmly on electrical matters, his increasing administrative 

responsibilities, as well as his peripheral interests and zest for public affairs, 

drew him repeatedly out of the laboratory. Unlike Stratton, he enjoyed 

talking to groups of people and gave many lectures, later published, on the 

work of the Bureau, the progress of electrical research, and the range of 

scientific work being done in the Government. His most ambitious effort 

late in his career was an exhaustive study of Government research and its 

relation to the Federal budget, which was to lead indirectly to the establishment of the present Bureau of the Budget. 

It was said of Dr. Stratton that he was "continually on the lookout 

for worthy research and testing work, and so the staff always seemed overburdened." 30 It was equally true of Rosa, who followed closely each new 

development in the field of electricity, saw research projects everywhere, and 

brought in a stream of bright young men to investigate them. 

In its early years the Bureau regularly hired young men who were 

potential specialists in their fields, only to win them to the ever-increasing 

range of interests spanned by the Bureau. Before midcentury the advance 

of science would demand many at the Bureau working at the extremity of 

specialization. But Dr. Rosa, with wide interests himself, was wary of the 

possible narrowing influence of high specialization—that should be left to 

the universities, he said—and warned his division of its inevitable conse- quences, that "we grow taller and thinner." 31 The justification for the 

Bureau's ranging research was the clause in its enabling act making it responsible for the "solution of problems which arise in connection with standards." 

Since almost every aspect of science, technology, industry, and commerce 

is rooted in standards of some kind, all knowledge in these fields was by 

definition within the Bureau's province. So Stratton, who had written the 

clause, interpreted it, and under the guidance of Stratton and Rosa, the 

Bureau acted upon it.32 

'° Fay C. Brown, "Samuel Wesley Stratton," Science, 74, 428 (1931). 

W. W. Coblentz, "Edward Bennett Rosa," Nati. Acad. Sci., Biographical Memoirs, 

xvi, 356 (1934). 

32 Years later Stratton was to say that he thought an enumeration of the organic 

functions of the Bureau covered "about 99 percent of the field of research." Only food, 

drugs, and materia medica were exempt. SWS address on the 25th anniversary of the 

NBS, 1926 (Stratton Papers). 
EDWARD B. ROSA 65 

Free exercise of the clause, as we shall see, enabled the Bureau to 

conduct an abundance of original research, some of it only vaguely connected with standards. At the same time, it subjected the Bureau to. a plethora of investigations for Federal agencies and the public that at times 

tended more to dissipate its energies than to increase its knowledge. The 

legacy of accommodation left by Stratton and Rosa created occasional difficulties in later years. Periodically, as its investigations became too far 

ranging, the Bureau found it necessary to stop, reassess its scope and functions, and shift course. But it never lost sight of its primary responsibility, 

and the whole focus of its early research, the pursuit of standards. 

During the 31/2 years in its temporary quarters in downtown Washington, the Bureau was completely taken up with planning new work on standards, searching for personnel, acquiring or designing new equipment, 

and overseeing the construction of its new laboratories. in September 1901 

Henry D. Hubbard, who had been private secretary to President Harper at 

the University of Chicago, came as secretary to the Bureau, his desk in Dr. 

Stratton's office in the Butler building. He was to serve the Bureau for 

almost four decades.u That same month Dr. Charles W. Waidner, a young 

physics instructor trained at Johns Hopkins, who had taught there and at 

Williams College, arrived to organize the Bureau program in heat and thermometry. In the laboratories over in the Coast Survey building, Rosa, 

Wolff, and their assistants continued to acquire equipment and carried out 

electrical tests, while Fischer, with his new assistant, Roy Y. Ferner, looked 

after the weights and measures work. 

Orienting a growing staff and organizing its work permitted little 

forward motion. One new member was later to say that while he did some testing of instruments, the major part of his time in his first year at the 

Bureau "was spent in library work. * * * Only the functions of the old 

Office of Standard Weights and Measures were operating normally." In 

December 1901 Dr. Stratton announced in Science, apparently in answer 

to inquiries, that the range of Bureau services was as yet limited. More 

exact determination of values for certain of the fundamental electrical con- stants, better photometric measurements, and calibration services such as 

those requested for clinical thermometers, pressure gages, and many other 

instruments, while urgently needed, were simply not yet possible. For the 

time being the work of the Bureau was confined to the comparison of a few 

standards and measuring instruments, that is, to length, weight, and capacity 

"A contribution to scientific literature, Hubbard's modernization of Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements, first printed in 1924, is currently published by the Welch 

Scientific Co. of Skokie, Ill. 

MS, N. Ernest Dorsey, "Some memories of the early days of the NBS," Oct. 28. 

1943 (NBS Historical File). 
t 

Henry D. Hubbard, secretary to Dr. a contribution to instruction in physics that is still in use today, his modernization of Mendeleev's periodic chart of the atoms. First constructed in the 1920's, it has been frequently revised and reprinted. It now includes 

the isotopes of the elements, unknown to the twenties. 
EDWARD B. ROSA 67 

Dr. Charles W. Waidner, 

a decade after he came to the Bureau, who 

with Dr. Burgess in the 

heat and thermometry 

division attempted to construct an absolute 

standard of light, not 

to be experimentally 

realized until 1931, 20 

years later. 

measurements, testing of ordinary commercial thermometers, polariscopic 

apparatus, hydrometers, resistance instruments, standards of electromotive 

force, and direct current apparatus.35 

By July 1902 the original staff of 12 had increased to 22, and the 15 

offices and laboratories of the Bureau were crammed with crated and un- crated apparatus and machinery. To get elbow room, Stratton rented a four-story house at 235 New Jersey Avenue, not far from the Coast Survey 

building, converting its space into an instrument shop, dynamo, and storage 

battery rooms, and additional laboratories. Approximately equivalent only 

in their antiquity, the high, narrow residence at 235 was promptly christened 

"Bushey House," after the stately mansion in England that had recently 

become the home of the National Physical Laboratory. Much of the new apparatus was moved there to be set up and tested, while on the upper floors 

preliminary studies began in alternating current measurement and in 

pyrometry.36 

During the summer of 1902 Wolff and Waidner went abroad to visit 

the principal government laboratories and instrument makers in Europe, 

taking with them a number of electrical and pyrometric standards to verify 

while in Berlin. The next summer Fischer visited Paris with his copies of 

"Circular of information on the NBS, No. 1," Science, 14, 1019 (1901). 

MS, Dorsey, "Some memories of the early days"; NBS Annual Report 1902, pp. 4-5. 
68 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

the international meter and kilogram, but like Wolff and Waidner he spent 

most of his time in Germany, securing new instruments and apparatus and 

ordering equipment for the laboratories under construction at home. In 

Washington a change of departmental administration was in the making 

that was to have important consequences for the development of the Bureau. 

ThE NEW BUREAU LABORATORIES 

Dr. Stratton and his staff were still in downtown Washington when 

the Bureau was transferred from its original home in the Treasury Department to the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor. For more 

than a hundred years the head of the Treasury had been in fact "secretary 

of commerce and finance," but with increasing fiscal responsibilities and 

the growth of agencies required by the commercial expansion of the Nation, 

his Department had become unwieldy. In December 1901. a bill was introduced in the Senate to transfer some of his functions to a separate Department 

of Commerce. 

The Commissioner of Labor (first appointed in 1888) was seeking 

cabinet rank at the time, but loath to expand the President's Cabinet by two, 

Congress compromised by merging a number of bureaus in the Departments 

of the Treasury and Interior with those in the Office of the Commissioner of 

Labor. On February 14, 1903, the new Department of Commerce and 

Labor came into being, its Secretary, George B. Cortelyou.37 

With 13 subdivisions, the new Department was at once one of the 

largest and most complicated branches in the Federal Government. Curiously enough, the transfer of the Bureau of Standards to Commerce and 

Labor was an 11th-hour decision. Like the Coast and Geodetic Survey, 

whose transfer had occasioned some discussion before it was included in 

the new Department, the Bureau was apparently considered by Congress to 

be a purely scientific agency, with only a remote relation to commerce. 

A member of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, aware late in the proceedings that the Bureau was likely to be left 

out, rose to urge its transfer: "The newly created National Bureau of Standards is a bureau which necessarily goes into a department primarily devoted 

to manufacturing and commercial interests. This Bureau is destined to 

Organization and Law of the Department of Commerce and Labor, Doc. No. 13 

(Washington, D.C., 1904), pp. 7, 12, 450. 

A genius of managerial efficiency, Cortelyou had been stenographer to Cleveland, assistant 

secretary to McKinley, and secretary to Roosevelt before his appointment to the new Department. Two years later he was appointed Postmaster General, and in 1907 became 

Secretary of the Treasury. In 1909 he left Government service to head the Consolidated 

Gas Co. in New York. 
THE NEW BUREAU LABORATORIES 69 

exercise great influence upon the development of business and commerce of 

our country." Commerce and Labor was already outsize, but the Bureau was voted in.38 

Had it remained in the Treasury, the Bureau might well have become a giant in precision measurement alone, its research almost certainly more 

narrowly confined to the functions of its enabling act. But under a succes- sion of strong Secretaries of Commerce, vigorously promoting business and 

industry, the Bureau was to be used unsparingly to introduce scientific 

methods more rapidly in industry, to urge the standardization of parts and 

products, and the use of new and improved materials, and even do the spadework to encourage the manufacture of products previously imported. The 

wonder is that the Bureau accomplished as much basic research as it did in 

the years that followed. 

Except for the change of name to "Bureau of Standards," omitting 

the word "National," the transfer to the new Department was without incident. Relations between the new Secretary and "Prof. S. W. Stratton," as Cortelyou addressed him in correspondence, were cordial, and Cortelyou willingly approved a Bureau request for an increase in its staff from 28, authorized 

by a previous appropriation act, to 58, authorized on February 25, 

Finding room for the growing staff in the downtown quarters of the 

Bureau was another thing. Construction of both buildings out on Connecticut Avenue was behind schedule. The smaller mechanical laboratory, well 

under way, was now promised for September of 1903, but work on the main 

building, the physical laboratory, had just begun that March. It would not 

be ready for occupancy before October 1904, almost 2 years later than 

originally planned. 

Some of the delay was understandable, for the site was distant and 

transportation of materials was siow. The teams of horses under their heavy 

loads had to rest frequently on the long grade uptown and more often still as they struggled up the steep of Pierce Mill Road, the dirt track through 

the woods, to the top of the hill. Four. and eight-horse teams were frequently needed to haul building materials up tEe height, and it is possible 

that some of the big equipment for the mechanical building may even have 

required a 16-horse hitch. 

The Bureau site was, for that time, truly remote. In the 21⁄2 mile 

stretch of Connecticut Avenue between Cleveland Park, then a sparse residential section to the north of the business center of Washington, and Chevy 

James R. Mann (Ill.), Chainnan of the Committee, Jan. 30, 1902, quoted in Organization and Law of the Department of Commerce and Labor, pp. 529, 539. 

Ibid., pp. 415—417, 417n. Graphs and charts of congressional appropriations and 

other working funds of the Bureau, of special appropriations, of the rise in the Bureau 

staff, and its output of publications appear in apps. F, G, H, and I. 
70 

— 3 /2 th, Whu, yth,,,s, yf h, - tht syyttyy yf .f. by 

The remoteness of the Bureau made it necessary to send vest-pocket transit maps to early 

visitors to show them the way out. When they arrived they were to look for the boardwalk that led up the hill to the Bureau grounds, since the first buildings were invisible 

from Connecticut Avenue. 
THE NEW BUREAU LABORATORIES 71 

Chase, the small Maryland community on the border of the District of Columbia, there were but two buildings, occupied by a preparatory school. The 

Bureau up on the hill was invisible from the avenue, and these lone school 

buildings, just north of what is now Upton Street, served to show staffers 

and strangers alike on the way to the laboratories where to leave the electric 

cars.4° 

The mechanical building was above ground but excavation for the 

physical laboratory had not begun when Dr. Rosa, with the architect's plans 

before him, described for Science magazine the Bureau plant as it would 

appear when completed. Both buildings were to be constructed of dark red 

brick with Indiana limestone trim, the smaller mechanical laboratory two 

stories tall but with its basement at ground level on the north slope of the 

hill. The physical laboratory, four stories tall, would be supported solidly on concrete piers in a largely unexcavated basement. 

Since the principal experimental work of the Bureau was to be carried on in the physical laboratory, later called South building, it had to be 

free from mechanical and magnetic disturbances and therefore housed 

scarcely any machinery. All heavy equipment was located in the mechanical laboratory or North building, its basement and partial sub.basement 

taming the boiler room, engine and dynamo room, storage battery room, 

and a refrigeration plant with a capacity equivalent to melting 30 tons of 

ice a phenomenal for that time. Through a spacious tunnel 170 feet 

long leading out of North building's sub-basement, a maze of air ducts, steam, 

gas, and water pipes, and electrical circuits supplied the major facilities of 

the laboratories in South building. 

On the first floor of North building were the heavy current and alternating-current instrument testing laboratories, the instrument shop, and stock 

and shipping rooms. High potential laboratories and magnetic and photo. 

metric laboratories occupied the second floor, with a proposed hydraulic 

laboratory on that floor extending through the ceiling into the attic. Another 

photometric laboratory and storage rooms occupied the other half of the 

attic. With its heating and ventilating plants, machinery, and special facili. 

ties, North building was to cost $125,000. Additional laboratory space 

was created in 1931 when the roof was raised and a third story added to the 

building.41 

In the huge physical building, facing south overlooking the city of 

Washington, all the laboratories were to be provided with gas, compressed 

air, vacuum, hot and cold water, ice water, and distilled water. All windows 

'° MS, Dorsey, "Some memories of the early days." 

41 Ostensibly added to make North building conform architecturally with the other buildings in the quadrangle. NBS Annual Report 1928, p. 42. 
72 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

in the first and second floor laboratories were double-paned and sealed tight, 

and each room could be darkened completely. Filtered air, artificially cooled 

in summer, circulated in the building, and each laboratory was equipped with 

controls to regulate room temperature and humidity .precisely. Special f a. cilities available in certain of the laboratories included cold brine, carbon 

dioxide, and liquid air for iow temperature work; gas and electric furnaces 

for high temperature studies; direct electric currents at potentials up to 

20,000 volts and currents up to 20,000 amperes. 

Weights and measures, optical research, high and low temperature 

laboratories, and electrical standards laboratories occupied the ground 

floor. On the second floor were additional weights, measures, and optical 

laboratories, the inductance and capacity laboratories, and electrical measurements rooms. The director's office, a reception room, the library, a publication and mailing room, and Dr. Stratton's private laboratory occupied the 

third floor, and on the fourth were to be the thermometer laboratories. A 

large lecture room (subsequently diverted to storage) and apparatus space 

utilized the attic. With its connecting tunnel, but exclusive of equipment, 

South building cost $200,000. 

In this initial complex, based on Bureau specifications and designed 

by the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department, said Rosa, the 

Bureau intended "an intimate association between research and testing in 

the domain of physics, extending into the field of chemistry on the one hand, 

of engineering on the other." 42 The program of work then planned by no means utilized all the laboratories provided in the two buildings. But Congress had said that the building appropriations must cover the first 5 years of the Bureau, and it took 

little imagination to see that as its resources and range of skills were recognized, the demands on the Bureau would increase. Even then Stratton and 

Rosa foresaw the necessity of East and West buildings, to complete the 

quadrangle, although their purpose, except to provide additional laboratory 

space, was not yet plain. 

Startlingly plain, once spotted, however, was something entirely omitted in the original architectural plans of the two buildings. There was no 

place to eat. The "thermometer and photometric standards laboratories" on the fourth floor of South building had to give way to a council lunch room 

(later the senior lunch room) and a junior lunch room, with a kitchen between. By the time the staff moved in, these were equipped with tables 

Rosa, "Plans for the new buildings for the NBS," Science, 17, 129 (1903). For 

later modifications in the interior planning and details of facilities and equipment, all more or less minor, see Stratton and Rosa, "The National Bureau of Standards," Proc. 

AIEE, 24, 1039 (1905). 
ACQUIRING NATIONAL STANDARDS 73 

made in the Bureau workshop and furnished with chairs, dishes, and kitchen 

equipment carted out from the city. Discussions about providing a more 

expensive lunch for the seniors and a less expensive one for the juniors foundered on the single kitchen they shared, and the staff was not yet large enough 

to afford a cafeteria. It became the great insoluble problem of the first 

decade.45 

But that problem was not in sight when, during the winter of 1903—4, 

the instrument shop downtown was moved out to the North building and its 

great dynamos, motor generators, refrigeration plant, storage batteries, gasmaking machine, air compressor and other apparatus were installed. In the 

spring, Dr. Rosa and his group, bringing their lunches with them each day, 

moved into North building as the remainder of the staff spread out in the 

vacated rooms downtown. 

ACQUIRING NATIONAL STANDARDS 

No one knew better than Dr. Stratton that the Bureau had started 

from scratch and that for a long time it would have nothing spectacular or even noteworthy to show for its efforts. The Bureau would have to live on borrowed time, borrowed standards, and borrowed instruments while it 

acquired the materials and methodology for research. Members of the 

Bureau visiting abroad had found the standards laboratories of France, 

Germany, and England openhanded, the instrument.makers of those countries helpful in the extreme, and they came home laden with the best equipment and knowledge of standards then available. 

At the end of its third year the Bureau had achieved a sense of unity 

and purpose, and sufficient personnel to do something more than make com- parison of a limited number of standards. It was ready, as Rosa said, to 

"do in its field what the Coast Survey and the Geological Survey and the 

Department of Agriculture are doing in theirs." It had acquired almost 

$225,000 worth of apparatus and equipment, much of it abroad, some bought 

from instrument-makers and manufacturers in this country, and not a little 

constructed in its own shops. Two of the three divisions were well advanced 

in their organization (see below), although with the limited staff Dr. Stratton 

not only directed the Bureau but was in personal charge of a division and 

of one of its sections, while Dr. Rosa in his division also supervised two of 

its sections. For the first time it was possible to see just what had been ac- MS, Dorsey, "Some memories of the early days." 

Rosa, "The organization and work of the Bureau of Standards," Science, 19, 937 

(1904). Much of the material of this chapter is based on this article. 
74 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

complished, what the Bureau was prepared to do, and what were the immediate tasks before it. 

The Staff of the Bureau of Standards, June 24, 19041 

Director—Dr. Samuel W. Stratton (University of Illinois, University of Chicago) 

Division I—Dr. Samuel W. Stratton 

1. Weights and measures: 

Louis A. Fischer (Columbia University) 

Liewelyn G. Hoxton (University of 

Virginia) 

Roy Y. Ferner (University of Wisconsin) 

Nathan S. Osborne (Michigan School 

of Mines) 

Lloyd L. Smith 

2. Heat and thermometry: 

Dr. Charles W. Waidner (Johns Hopkins University) 

Dr. George K. Burgess (MIT, University of Paris) 

Dr. Hobart C. Dickinson (Williams 

College, Clark University) 

3. Light and optical instruments: 

Dr. Samuel W. Stratton 

Dr. Perley G. Nutting (University of 

California, Cornell University) 

Dr. Frederick J. Bates (University 

of Nebraska) 

4. Engineering instruments: Albert S. 

Merrill (MIT) 

5. Office: Henry D. Hubbard 

6. Instrument shop: Oscar G. Lange 

Division II (Electricity) —Dr. Edward B. Rosa (Wesleyan University) 1. Resistance and Emf: 

Dr. Frank A. Wolff, Jr. (Johns Hopkins University) 

Francis E. (MIT) 

Dr. George W. Middlekauf (Johns 

Hopkins University) 

2. Magnetism and absolute measurement 

of current: Dr. Karl E. Guthe, (University of Marburg, University of Michigan) 

3. Inductance and capacity: 

Dr. Edward B. Rosa 

Dr. N. Ernest Dorsey (Johns Hopkins 

University) 

Frederick W. Grover (MIT, Wesleyan 

University) 

1Source: Science, 19, 937 (1904). 

4. Electrical measuring instruments: 

Dr. Edward B. Rosa 

Dr. Morton C. Lloyd (University of 

Pennsylvania) 

Herbert B. Brooks (Ohio State University) 

C. E. Reid (Purdue University) 

Franklin S. Durston (Wesleyan University) 

5. Photometry: Edward P. Hyde (Johns 

Hopkins University) 

6. Engineering plant: Charles E. Sponsler 

(Pennsylvania State College) 

Details of the education and experience of the 

original Bureau staff and a résumé of current activities appear in Report of the Dir, 

NBS, to the Visiting Committee, June 12, 1903 ("Gen Corresp Files of the Director, 

1945—1955," Box 6). 

Charts of the organization of the Bureau and its supervising personnel, at 5-year intervals from 1901 to 1960, appear in app. J. 
ACQUIRING NATIONAL STANDARDS 75 

Division III (Chemistry) —Dr. William A. Noyes (Johns Hopkins University) 

Dr. Henry N. Stokes (Johns Hopkins University) 

[Additional personnel included 1 librarian, 1 computer, 1 draftsman, 4 clerks, 2 messen- gers, 1 storekeeper, 4 mechanicians, 2 woodworkers, 3 apprentices, 2 laborers, 1 assistant 

engineer, 1 electrician, 2 firemen, 2 watchmen, 1 janitor, 1 charwoman—a total of 58 at 

the Bureau.] 

But first a word about the hierarchy of standards with which the 

Bureau was, as it still is, concerned.45 At the apex are the prototype standards, those of length, now defined in terms of the red radiation from krypton 

86, and mass, the platinum-iridium kilogram cylinder maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sèvres; and of time and temperature, based on the revolution of the earth around the sun and the freezing 

and boiling points of water (now, the triple point of water) 46 These are the 

standards which, 'with certain defining relationships, fix the size of all units in a measuring system and are absolute in the sense that they do not depend on 

any other standards. 

National standards are those which fix the prototype or international 

value on a national basis, as in the instance of the copies of the prototype 

meter and kilogram maintained at the Bureau; or are derived standards, 

such as the standards of frequency, volume, or electricity, depending by 

definition upon natural or material standards of the prototype category.47 / 

Thus until the establishment of the absolute ohm in 1948, the ohm was 

defined by an act of Congress of 1894 as "the resistance offered to an unvarying electric current by a column of mercury at the temperature of melting 

ice, 14.4521 grams in mass, of a constant cross-sectional area, and of the 

length of 106.3 cm." 48 The nomenclature for standards of measurement has itself never been entirely standardized. What are called prototype standards are also known as international standards. Primary (now, reference) standards were those either maintained at the PTR or constructed as such by the Bureau and intercompared with the standards abroad. 

Secondary and working (now, derived and calibration) standards were lower orders of 

primary standards. 

The hierarchy of standards described here is largely based on A. G. McNish, "Classification and nomenclature for standards of measurement," IRE Trans. Instru. 1—7, 371 

(1958), and "Measurement standards report," ISA J., February 1961, pp. 1—40. 46 As the standard of length, long based, as Stratton knew it, on the international meter 

bar at Sèvres, gave way to the wavelength of krypton 86 light, with superior standards 

possible in mercury 198 and later sources, so the standard of time, long based on the 

ephemeris second, is now provisionally based on the resonance frequency of the cesium 

atoms in the atomic clock. See ch. VIII, pp. 462—463, 477. 

See flow chart in NBS C531 (1952), p. 2, for the Bureau's experimental establishment 

of the eletrical units by absolute measurement. 

For the absolute ohm, see ch. VI, p. 337. 
76 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

Since national standards, whether defin'itions or materials made of 

precious metal or of delicate construction and necessarily preserved under 

special conditions, may be impractical, or frequent use may impair their 

accuracy, the Bureau maintains national reference standards, often of its own construction, the values of which are derived directly from the national 

standards, but of suitable material or form for more frequent service. 

Next are the working or calibration standards, those which are ordinarily used in calibration and which are themselves calibrated in terms of 

the corresponding reference standards. They are compared as frequently as necessary with the reference standards and sometimes even with the 

national standards. 

In most instances it is the Bureau's reference or calibration standards that are the immediate source of industrial and commercial standards 

and of the precision measurements of science. Against these are calibrated 

the laboratory reference standards of science and industry. Whether a precision thermometer, a kilowatt hour meter, or a standard of length, weight, 

or mass, it is brought to the Bureau periodically and carefully calibrated 

against the Bureau's reference standard. Returned to the factory or plant, 

the laboratory reference standard then becomes the basis for calibration and 

adjustment of the laboratory working standards, by which shop instruments 

and measuring apparatus in daily use by technicians and inspectors are 

calibrated.49 

This sequence of standards is of course meaningless without special 

comparison equipment—longitudinal and geodetic comparators for length 

standards, the balances used in comparing masses or weights, the potentiometers, bridges, and consoles used in electrical measurements—by means of 

which all standards of a given type are intercompared in order to determine 

the order of agreement among them. Differences naturally exist between the 

nominal value of any standard (except a prototype) and the value it is found 

to have when compared with a known standard, by reason of differences in 

their composition or construction, circumstances of measurement, or other irreducible factors, but the discrepancy as an observable quantity, can be adusted or compensated for, or even within certain limits may be accepted as a permissible tolerance. 

In the relatively uncomplicated world of 1904, scientifically speaking, 

American industry had need for stability and accuracy of measurement 

rather than high precision. Industry had little requirement as yet for working measurements closer than a thousandth of an inch, but to achieve that 

with a milling machine, for example, the accuracy of the company master 

standard had to be on the order of a ten-thousandth of an inch, the Bureau's 

"For the operation of laboratory standards, see NBS C578, "Suggested practices for 

electrical standardizing laboratories" (1956), p. 1. 
ACQUIRING NATIONAL STANDARDS 77 

reference standard a hundred-thousandth of an indh, and its primary standard a millionth of an inch.50 A time would come when industry would have 

need for that millionth of an inch, and science for the ten-millionth. Continual research looking toward more precise standards, instruments, and techniques was to narrow the gap everywhere in the hierarchy of standards. 

Apart from length and mass and certain electrical units, few standards 

were inherited by the Bureau from the old Office of Weights and Measures. 

The major part of the Bureau's activities in its early years was thus spent in 

establishing the discipline of standards for this country, such as other nations 

already possessed, and obtaining or making the measuring apparatus and 

instruments to carry out the calibrations required by science and industry. 

Besides new measurements of length and mass, there was need for new standards of electrical quantities, standards of heat and temperature, of light and 

radiant energy, density and pressure, and even new values for the factor of 

gravity. Only the most immediate of these had been accomplished by 1904. 

Not all of them were wholly satisfactory as yet but an impressive beginning 

had been made. 

In the weights and measures section (see above), soon to become an independent division, as were the heat, optical, and engineering groups, the 

Bureau had the two platinum-iridium copies of the international meter bar, 

to which all length measurements, both customary and metric, were reduced. 

Fischer had taken one of the platinum-iridium bars to Paris the previous 

year and with new apparatus acquired there recompared it with that at the 

International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sèvres and found it 

satisfactory. 

The Bureau was now prepared to determine any standard of length 

from 1 decimeter to 50 meters, to calibrate the subdivisions of such standards, and to determine their coefficients of expansion, that is, the slight 

changes in dimensions when in use at ordinary ranges of temperature. Working standards derived from the Bureau's two platinum-iridium copies of the 

international kilogram made it possible to verify masses from 0.1 milligram 

to 20 kilograms. For their comparison, a number of precision balances 

were under construction to give the Bureau a complete series of the very best 

balances possessed anywhere. 

For determining the density of solids and liquids, the section had 

secured two sets of Jena glass hydrometers and verified them at the Normal 

Eichungskommission in Berlin. The section was working on means for 

standardizing capacity measures from 1 milliliter to 40 liters and also on 

* * where ordinary reading of micrometers to thousandths of an inch is pretty 

generally understood, reading to 10-thousandths is not." Joseph V. Woodworth, American Tool Making and Interchangeable Manufacturing (New York: Norman W. Henley. 

1911), p. 270. 
78 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

methods for testing a variety of chemical measuring apparatus in large quantities, for which there had been insistent demands. Apparatus designed at 

the Reichsanstalt for testing aneroid barometers had been secured, and in 

the planning stage was a new program, the testing of watches and other timemeasuring apparatus. 

As primary standards, the heat and thermometry section had acquired a number of specially constructed mercury thermometers in Paris, verified 

at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in the range —30 to 

550 °C. Gas-filled thermometers and copper-constantan thermocouples, also 

at Sèvres, were available for low temperature work down to — 200 

°C. In addition, Dr. Waidner had himself constructed as further primary 

standards several platinum resistance thermometers in the interval between 

100 and 600 °C, as well as the necessary apparatus for their comparison. 

As working standards in this same interval were special mercury thermometers of both French and German make, and these were intercompared from 

time to time with the platinum resistance thermometers. 

The Bureau was therefore prepared to certify almost any precision 

thermometer used in scientific work, most low-temperature engineering and 

industrial thermometers, and all ordinary commercial thermometers. In 

addition, special apparatus had recently been designed and constructed for 

testing clinical thermometers on a large scale, permitting 600 of them to be 

read at any given temperature in half an hour. 

For high-temperature measurements between 600 and 1,600 °C, 

the Bureau had as primary standards a number of thermocouples acquired 

in Berlin, their scale that used at the Reichsanstalt. (Here it might be 

mentioned that America's dependence upon German science and technology 

before World War I was never more clearly demonstrated than in the circumstances of the Bureau's acquisition of its initial basic instrumentation.) 

With its German instruments, the Bureau was ready to test and calibrate 

extreme range thermocouples, platinum resistance thermometers, and ex- pansion and optical pyrometers; determine the melting points of metals and 

alloys, as well as their specific heats and coefficients of expansion at high 

temperatures; and to determine the calorific value of any fuel in common use. 

Establishment of these standard scales and the development of the 

necessary testing apparatus had taken most of the effort of this section since 

1901. Now with much of the basic work completed, Waidner and Burgess were beginning exploratory research in some of the problems raised by 

these scales. 

Work in the light and optical instruments section had thus far been 

chiefly confined to preliminary investigations in spectroscopic methods of 

analysis •and the determination of standard wavelengths and their use in 

optical methods of measurement. While waiting on facilities to be provided 
ACQUIRING NATIONAL STANDARDS 79 

in the new physical laboratory, Nutting was in the midst of an investigation 

of electrical discharges in gases in connection with spectrum analysis, and 

Bates was at work on new methods and apparatus looking toward improved 

polariscopic standards. At the request of the Treasury, Noyes and Bates 

had already begun supervision of the polariscopic analysis of sugar at the 

customhouses. 

The engineering instruments section was currently occupied with 

planning tests of gas meters, water meters, pressure gages, and other instruments used in large numbers by public utilities for production control and 

for determining consumer rates. By far the largest piece of equipment 

destined for this section was a 100,000-pound machine for testing the strength 

of building materials. It seems possible this was acquired not long after 

the Bureau learned that the Reichsanstalt had under construction a new laboratory structure, the Material Prufungs Amt, for testing engineering and 

building materials.51 The Bureau similarly planned studies in the behavior 

of structural and building materials when this crushing machine and other 

equipment on order were properly set up in North building. 

In the resistance and electromotive force section of the electrical 

division, Dr. Wolff and his assistants had been kept busy making tests for 

Government agencies and for the electrical industry, verifying resistance 

standards for current measurements, testing standard cells, and determining 

the temperature coefficients and thermoelectric properties of resistance ma- terials. Every calibration of an electrical instrument, all ratings of electric 

light bulbs, and practically every meter by which electricity was sold to 

home or factory started with a measurement of the device against a 1-ohm 

standard of resistance and a standard cell, by which the electrical pressure 

(electromotive force), and the current were determined. The Bureau had a number of 1-ohm manganin standards acquired at the Reichsanstalt and 

reverified there from time to time, using the primary mercury standards 

maintained in that laboratory. Wolff intended soon to construct a number 

of his own primary mercury standards in the Bureau shops. 

No such effort at independence was necessary in the case of the Clark 

standard cell, the legal standard of electromotive force. At the electrical 

congress held during the Columbian Exposition in 1893, its value had been 

established as 1.434 international volts at 15 °C. Since then the Reichsanstalt, using the same cell as its standard, had determined a new value, 1.4328, 

nearly 0.1 percent smaller, and the Bureau hoped to settle this discrepancy at 

the next international electrical congress. 

Work had just begun in the magnetism and absolute measurement of 

current section, where Guthe and Rosa were in the midst of two important Si See Hearings * * * 1906 (December 2, 1904), p. 233. 
80 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

researches. One was a study of the silver voltameter, used in measuring 

current; the other comprised two closely related 'studies, a redetermination 

of the electrochemical equivalent of silver and of the absolute value of the 

Clark standard cell and its rival, the Weston cell.'52 

Dr. Rosa's account of the inductance and capacity section suggests 

that he thought it probably one of the best and most completely equipped at 

the Bureau. As section chief, with Dorsey and Grover running the research, 

he had high hopes for the work it had begun. Hundreds of mica and paper 

condensers had been purchased from German, English, French, and American 

firms and studies made to find the best performance among 'them as standards 

of capacity. Two large air condensers had been constructed as loss.free 

working standards against which commercial condensers sent to the Bureau 

were compared. In conjunction with new apparatus under construction, 

these air condensers were to make possible absolute measurement of currents 

and electrical pressures up to 1,000 volts. 

With a carefully constructed absolute standard of inductance (an 

electrical quantity analogous to mechanical inertia), the section planned, 

"by a method never before used," a new determination of the ohm, preliminary to an extended investigation in the absolute measurement of the fundamental electrical units, the ohm, volt, and ampere.5'8 Establishment of the 

Bureau's standard of inductance would also make possible a thorough study 

of common sources of error in inductance measurements, of considerable 

concern to new developments in the communications industry. 

The electrical measuring instruments section, also under Rosa's fervent 

eye, possessed a wonderful array of precision instruments for measuring 

electric current, voltage, and power, both direct and alternating, acquired 

from the best instrumentmakers at home and abroad or designed and built in 

the Bureau shops. The section was prepared to test and calibrate any laboratory or commercial instrument then in use. Its heavy equipment included 

powerful direct.current as well as alternating.current generators and allied 

equipment, and in testing direct.current instruments the section was prepared to handle capacities up to 1,000 amperes and 1,000 volts. The first 

high-voltage studies would begin with the installation of a giant storage 

battery with a potential of several thousand volts, then under construction for 

the Bureau. 

The Clark cell, invented in England, had been in use since 1872. The American 

Weston cell, using cadmium instead of zinc, appeared in 1893, and at the turn of the 

century, because of the availability of better chemical components, was being made in 

Berlin. The superiority of the Weston cell had led to its adoption as a working standard 

by the PTR. In 1908, by international agreement, it displaced the Clark cell as the 

standard of electromotive force. 

Stratton and Rosa, "The National Bureau of Standards," Proc. AIEE, 24, 1075 (1905). 
ACQUIRiNG NATIONAL STANDARDS 81 

The work begun by Dr. Wolff in photometry had been turned over to 

Mr. Edward Hyde, who was studying a number of photometric standards 

acquired from the Reichsanstalt. Among his problems was the ratio of the 

candle to the Hefner amylacetate lamp which he had determined as 1 to 0.88. 

In preliminary tests the Hefner lamp, generally accepted abroad as a primary photometric standard, proved to have so many defects as to be unfit for 

measurements of the accuracy he hoped to attain. The Bureau had there. 

fore established a temporary standard by arbitrarily assigning a mean value 

for a number of ordinary 16.candle commercial carbon filament lamps. By 

means of potentiometers, current and voltage to the lamps could be kept 

constant to within one-hundredth of 1 percent while making comparisons. 

Thus very accurate comparisons and very exact copies of standards were 

possible. 

The Bureau had recently requested a number of lamp manufacturers 

in this country to submit carefully rated samples of their 16.candlepower 

lamps for comparison with the Bureau standards. They were found to vary 

from 15.4 to 17.6 candlepower, averaging 16.48 candlepower or about 3 

percent high. This fairly close agreement resulted, the Bureau learned, from 

the manufacturers' use, as standards, of incandescent lamps rated at the 

Reichsanstalt. 

But these were "model" lamps that had been sent to the Bureau. Subsequent testing of the commercial product was to reveal wide variations in 

their performance. Meanwhile, until the Bureau had devised methods for 

testing commercial lamps on a large scale, it could only verify those used as industrial standards or make special investigation of any particular lamps 

submitted to it. Better lamp and light standards and many other aspects 

of photometry remained to be explored, and this work would be pressed when 

the section moved into its new quarters. 

The chemistry division, not yet organized, was to be headed by Dr. 

William A. Noyes, who had come to the Bureau from Rose Polytechnic Institute, where his starting salary had been the highest ever offered to a 

professor there. Through the courtesy of Professor Remsen, he was now 

at the Johns Hopkins University making a study of chemical standards needed 

in research laboratories, his quest interrupted by occasional trips away to 

supervise sugar analyses at the customhouses. His associate, Dr. Stokes, 

appointed from the Geological Survey, was at Dr. Wiley's Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture, investigating equipment and measurement problems of its chemists with which the National Bureau of Standards 

might assist. As soon as Noyes and Stokes moved into their new laboratories 

and acquired assistants, they would begin much needed work on the standard- 
82 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

ization of some of the more important chemical reagents. They would be 

busy, too, assisting the other sections of the Bureau in the chemical analysis 

of materials going into the construction of standards." 

In addition to all the work on standards, instrumentation, and planning of research in that period, the number of tests made for universities, 

industry, and Government agencies had increased eight times over that possible in the former Office and would more than double again within the year. 

Surveying this program, Dr. Stratton had cause to be proud of the bureau he 

had constructed. In a little more than 3 years he had put together the men and materials for an organization that, "judged by the magnitude and importance of the output of testing and investigation," said Rosa, "ranked 

second only to the great German Reichsanstalt among the government lab. 

oratories of the world doing this kind of work." 

A sound beginning had been made in the formulation of standards 

and the main lines of their further investigation were laid out. The Bureau was humming. Fresh from a tour of the highly complex laboratories nearing completion on Connecticut Avenue, Stratton reported to a subcommittee 

of Congress: "You will not find the same combination of apparatus nor as complicated machinery except in . - . a battleship." 56 It was a neat thrust, 

considering that the entire cost of the Bureau to date came to less than a of the price of just one of the great fleet of battleships President Roosevelt was currently building. 

AN AUTUMN FIRE AND A CONSUMERS' CRUSADE 

As the Bureau announced itself ready to expand its testing program 

in the late spring of 1904, the electrical division, with the help or advice of 

practically everyone else at the Bureau, was building a special electrical 

testing laboratory to take out to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The 

fair, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the purchase of the territory, 

and the first of countless occasions for exhibiting Bureau activities, opened 

in St. Louis that summer.57 

" For additional notes on the early chemistry division, see letter, Campbell E. Waters 

to John F. Waidron, Jr., Aug. 15, 1940 (NBS Box 442, IC). 

Rosa, "The National Bureau of Standards and its relation to scientific and technical 

laboratories," Science, 21, 162 (1905). Based on an address given at Wesleyan University, Dec. 7, 1904. 

"Hearings * * 1906 (Dec. 2, 1904), p 230. 

Details of this and other NBS exhibitions from 1904 to 1922 will be found in NBS 

Box 21, PE. 
AN AUTUMN FIRE AND A CONSUMERS' CRUSADE 83 

Once there,' several members from Dr. Stratton's division presided 

over an historical exhibit of weights, measures, and instruments located in 

the Government building, while 10 from Rosa's division, at the request of 

the Exposition authorities, were kept busy in the great Palace of Electricity 

verifying the measuring instruments used by the jury of awards in testing 

electrical machinery, instruments, and apparatus submitted by exhibitors 

in competition. The German exhibits, as might be expected, won hands 

down. But for its design as a working exhibit and for its service to the 

many electrical interests at the fair, the Exposition authorities awarded the 

Bureau's laboratory one of the grand prizes.58 

When free from Exposition commitments, the electrical staff carried 

out considerable routine testing and even some research in its Palace lab. 

oratory. More a novelty resulting from Nutting's gas spectra work than a piece of serious research, however, were the luminous script signs in glass 

tubing exhibited by the staff at the fair. When excited by electric discharges, the noble (inert) gas in the tubes—it was neon—lit up with a reddish glow.59 Its commercial application came 26 years later. 

The Bureau's self-contained electrical exhibit, cooled all that hot 

humid summer by a 10-ton refrigerating machine, "was a favorite retreat for 

the electrical jury," and its wizard equipment remained a special attraction 

until the end of October. Elsewhere on the fair grounds was another kind of 

"cooler," the first liquid hydrogen plant seen in this country, designed by 

James Dewar of the Royal Institution in London and exhibited at the fair 

by the British Oxygen Co. As an instrument of research, particularly in 

low-temperature thermometry, it was a prize, and Rosa at once began negotiations to acquire it. In Washington, Dr. Stratton approached Congress and 

obtained not only the asking price for the plant, £500 ($2,400), but 'an additional $12,000 for the construction of a low-temperature laboratory to house 

MS, Dorsey, "Some memories of the early days"; Stratton and Rosa, Proc. AIEE, 

24, 1084—1090 (1905). 

Dr. Nutting's neon signs—two special glass tubes blown by Mr. Sperling in the Bureau 

shops, one reading "HELIUM," the other "NBS"—resulted from a modification he made 

in the laboratory instrument known as the Plucker tube and reported in NBS Scientific 

Paper No. 6, "Some new rectifying effects in conducting gases" (1904). The Plucker 

tube, like the earlier Geissler tube, was used in the study of spectra of gases and metals. 

By substituting or disk aluminum electrodes for the thin platinum wire in the tube, 

Nutting obtained a much steadier and brighter light. Although never made public, the neon phenomenon has long been considered the Bureau's first notable laboratory accom- plishment, and the forerunner of modern neon signs and fluorescent lamps. Interview 

with Dr. William F, Meggers, Aug. 4, 1964. ' A series of charts of significant scientific and technologic achievements of the Bureau. 

for each of the decades covered by the chapters of this history, will be found in app. K. 
84 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

it, adj acent and connected by tunnel to the North building.60 The first 

cryogenic (low-temperature) investigations at the Bureau were begun by 

Franklin Durston that same year. The new building was not completed 

until the spring of 1906. 

Although the Bureau, up to this time had been principally concerned 

with establishing fundamental standards and planning basic research programs, an incident late in the. autumn of 1904 sharply reminded the staff of 

its responsibilities in the field. of commercial standards. One evening a 

fire started in the dead leaves near the' railed boardwalk that had been built 

from the top of the hill' down through'. the woods to the avenue. Franklin 

Durston, who as a. very junior member of the electrical division was also 

acting night watchman, got out all the hose in the North and South buildings 

to get a line to reach' the fire. He found that because of differences in the 

threads the hoses. could not, be coupled. With some difficulty and damage 

to his shoes, the fire was. finally stamped out. The next day was 

quite a discussion as to how it. happened that hose from two the 

National Bureau of Standards was not sufficiently standardized to,; admit of 

mutual coupling." 61 The same lack of uniform threads had been largely responsible for' 

the raging destruction of the great Baltimore fire back in February1 of that 

year. Engine companies arriving by special train from within 

3 hours after the fire began found themselves helpless when their hoses would 

not fit Baltimore hydrants. As one by one "completely fire-proofed" build. 

ings burned like torches all that day and the next, and the fire raced throught 

block after block of the business district, additional fire units from the 

nearby counties, from New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmingtom, 

Chester, York, Altoona, and Harrisburg, arrived in the city oniy to discover 

that few of their hoses matched any other or fitted the local hydrants. 

"If there had been nozzles enough, we could have flooded the burning 

district," the Baltimore Fire Chief said afterward, for at no time was there 

any shortage of water. Instead, 1,526 buildings and all electric light, telegraph, telephone, and power facilities in an area of more than 70 city blocks 

60 Stratton and Rosa, Proc. AIEE, 24, 1056 (1905). Stratton foresaw need of still another 

building, attached by tunnel to the opposite or east end of North building, to house laboratories for the testing of engineering instruments and structural materials, and two 

additional buildings, each about the size of South building, at the east and west ends 

of that structure, one exclusively for electrical work, the other for chemical and metallurgical studies (ibid., pp. 1041—1042) - These four new structures, as detached wings 

of North and South buildings, were to be enclosed by the east and west buildings proposed earlier. Why the Bureau plant did not expand in this fashion has not been 

learned. 

MS, Dorsey, "Some memories of the early days." 
85 

The Baltimore fire of 1904. The turn of the century was still an age of kerosene lamps 

and wooden cities, except in the business districts which were largely of "fire-proof' 

brick and stone. But there were wooden stables and sheds behind the buildings, and 

the structures themselves were filled with highly combustible partitions and furnishings, and there was actually little that was fireproof in their construction. 

Despite progress, as late as 1964 firefighters in at least one county adjacent to Baltimore were confronted with two types of hydrants in use, one with the national 

standard thread and the other with the Baltimore steamer thread. Although they had 

adaptors, the firemen were asking that fireplugs be coated with colored fluorescent 

paint, to distinguish the two threads at night and reduce delay in hooking up. The 

Baltimore Evening Sun, Oct. 1, 1964, p. D2. 
86 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

in the business district were razed before the fire burned out, 30 hours after 

it began.62 

For over a quarter of a century the National Board of Fire Underwriters and the National Fire Protection Association •had been advocating 

standard couplings for all fire departments but had received little support. 

Shortly after the disaster, a Baltimore steamship line called on the Secretary of 

Commerce for help with shipboard hose and couplings and the Bureau of 

Standards was asked to investigate. Thus several months before its own humiliating experience, Stratton had already set Albert Merrill of the engineering instruments section to work on the problem of fire.hose couplings.63 

Before the investigation ended, over 600 sizes and variations in fire.hose 

couplings were collected across the country. 

In 1905, a year after Merrill began his study, the National Fire Protection Association, with the active concurrence of the Bureau, adopted as the national standard what it considered the most serviceable hose coupling 

then in use, together with an interchangeable device for nonstandard cou- plings. But the expense of converting or replacing fire hose, as well as 

normal civic inertia, made agreement in the cities of the Nation a slow proc- ess. By 1914, 9 years later, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 

reported that only 287 of 8,000 cities and towns had fire.hose couplings and 

hydrant outlets conforming to the standard. Up to 1917, 897 cities had 

agreed to adopt them, but only 390 had put them in service. By 1924 the 

number of cities with standard fire-hose couplings had risen to 700. Conversion was to continue at this slow pace. In many cases, municipalities 

would make the change only when they had experienced their own version 

of the Baltimore fire.64 

Efforts at standardization in another direction offered somewhat 

better, and certainly more spectacular, results. They began in the spring 

of 1901 when Louis A. Fischer visited some of the larger cities in New York 

State to inquire about their inspection of commercial weights and measures. 

The answers were discouraging. On his return he made a compilation of 

the laws of all the States relating to weights and measures, revealing a hopeless tangle of regulations, as remarkable for their variety as for their inadequacy. Fischer's section subsequently drew up designs for simple, accurate, 

Harold A. Williams, Baltimore Afire (Baltimore: Schneidereith, 1954), pp. 11, 20, 43. 

°' Stratton and Rosa, Proc. AIEE, 24, 1070 (1905). 

NBS C50, "National standard hose couplings and fittings for public fire service" (1914, 

2d ed., 1917). Press release, American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC), 

June 25, 1924, "Screw threads for fire hose couplings approved as American standard" 

(NBS Box 77, IDA). 

NOTE.—C designates Circular of the NBS, as M, when cited hereafter will designate an NBS Miscellaneous Publication. 
AN AUTUMN FIRE AND A CONSUMERS' CRUSADE 87 

inexpensive working standards for the use of State, county, and city sealers 

and put them in the hands of several manufacturers. Thus sealers for the 

first time could buy sets of standard weights, measures, and scales specifically 

designed for their use and send them to the Bureau to be verified and certified.65 But it was not enough. The old standards had been around a long 

time and there was no rush to acquire the new sets. The States had to be 

stirred up. 

Dr. Stratton's first proposal to the Governors of the States in 1903 

for a meeting of State sealers fell through, it was said, for lack of State 

travel funds. In November 1904, shortly after moving out of downtown 

Washington and into the new buildings on Connecticut Avenue, Stratton 

renewed the invitation. Although there were few acceptances, he was determined to hold the meeting anyway. 

The first conference, meeting in January 1905, with representatives 

from seven States and the District of Columbia, disclosed that in most of 

these States the laws relating to weights and measures were "exceedingly 

lax * * * with nothing obligatory" or were "practically a dead letter," 

that the State sealer's office was usually unsalaried, and the duties of county 

sealers were often imposed on the county treasurer or even the superintendent of schools. In more than one State, the county and city sealers 

were not compelled to procure standards, and several of the State representatives knew nothing about their State standards or even where they 

were to be found In one State Hassler's standards had been destroyed by 

fire some years earlier and the $550 necessary to replace them had never 

been appropriated. in another instance the standards were said to be 

"hoary with age from long confinement in the dingy and dark recesses of 

the basement of the capitol." 

The consequence of this almost studied disinterest, it was admitted, 

had long made fraud and trickery in weights and measures commonplace in 

most of the States represented at the conference. And as Dr. Stratton com- mented: "Remarkable as have been the statements made today we have not 

heard the worst, as there are States in which absolutely nothing is done and 

which are not represented here today." The Bureau agreed to host further 

meetings in order to discuss means for securing uniform laws and inspection 

of commercial weights and measures.66 

At the second conference, in April 1906, it was decided to set up a permanent organization of State officials, make the conference an annual 

event to discuss the testing and sealing of commercial weights and measures, 

"Letter report, Fischer to 0. H. Tittmann, Supt., U.S. C. & G.S., June 15, 1901 (Stratton 

Papers, Box 12); NBS Annual Report 1904, pp. 6—7. ""Conference on the weights and measures of the United States * * * January 16 and 

17, 1905," NBS M4 (1905), pp. 26, 27, 31, 40, 42. See the voluminous correspondence 

with. State officials in NBS Box 18, 1W, 1901—11. 
8a FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

andi work toward. adoption of uniform laws. Seventeen States were repre. 

sented at the third conference in 1907, and as at the previous meetings the 

discussion soon centered around "the question of honest weights and measures in all business transactions," the almost infinite variety of laws affect. 

lug weight and measures, and the meager funds provided by the States for 

their inspection. The conference began work on a model weights and meas- ures law, to be offered for adoption by all the States, and recommended 

unanimously that additional powers be given the Bureau of Standards to 

make the State laws effective.67 Such enforcement, of course, the Bureau 

could not undertake, but it offered its cooperation to State governments in 

establishing effective inspection systems while it sought other means to 

"police" weights and measures. The means was exposure. 

Since 1901, as Stratton said, "a great reform [had been] going on throughout the country," its principal target the commercial oligarchy that 

ruled the Nation.68 It had been touched off by journalists such as Ida M. 

Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker through their exposure 

in the periodical press of the knavery in big business, the roguery of politics 

and politicians, of labor leaders and employers alike. Aroused by the 

literature of exposure, a passion for change, for honesty, and for justice 

swept the Nation. Among the consequences of the reform wave were 

Roosevelt's indictment of the meat-packing trust in 1905 and passage of the 

Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. 

Before the wave receded, the whole Nation became aware of the 

presence of the Bureau of Standards in the Federal Government. Beyond 

anything its proponents could have contemplated, the coincidence of the 

founding of the Bureau with the age of reform shaped its history for the 

next 30 years. Weights and measures was to be the trigger. 

The annual conferences of State sealers at the Bureau made it clear 

that through ignorance and neglect of State responsibilities the American 

public was being robbed of enormous sums daily in the marketplace. Since 

the State governments showed little interest in weights and measures reforms, 

said Stratton, the Bureau "must reach the public through State and city 

officials by testing their standards." In December 1908 he asked Congress 

for a special grant of $10,000 "to investigate what the States are doing with 

their standards, and to encourage them to take up and supervise the local 

work as they should." 69 It was the Bureau's first request for special funds, 

and Congress approved it without question. What Stratton intended was an 

investigation to reveal the extent of false and fraudulent weights and measures 

in use throughout the Nation. 

NBS Annual Report 1907, p. 6. 

Hearings * * * 1908 (Nov. 30, 1906), p. 351. °° Hearings * * * 1910 (Dec. 4, 1908), pp. 185—186. 
AN: AUTUMN FIRE AND CONSUMERS' CRUSADE 89 

Between and 1911,. ihspectors. from the' visitedi every 

State of the: Union, over scales; weights;. an'di dry and liquidi 

measures ili. 3,220 different and stores: They- were badly- ihaccurate,,tliat: percent: 

of the ha1F.the' dry measures, and a. liquid 

were in error; or thatwith remarkable consistency these;scai'es measures 

favored the: storekeeper: The B,hreau esthnated'. that. the; case pràt 

butter alone the loss the' consumer;, thr.o;ugh or 

weighing devices, 

From: start;, and the- track: 

of the 

the 

of 

and New York of 

their own andi other. States; foThawed. Over the: next 2 years almost. a hundired articles: in- the periodical press reported. the weights and! measures 

campaign across the: 

As: a result of the widespread demand for better laws: and better 

inspection of trade weights and measures in the wake of the survey, first 

New Jersey and- then other States enacted the model law proposed by the 

Bureau,, and State after State exhumedi and submitted for verification to the 

Bureau, the standards that had been furnished them some 50 years earlier or 

purchased new equipment for their State sealers.72 Answering urgent appeals, the Bureau drafted a model weights and measures ordinance for 

municipalities, and detailed its experts to first one and then another of the 

States which requested aid in setting up their inspection departments. 

A Bureau proposal to require that the net weight, measure, or numerical count of contents be printed on sealed packages was accomplished by an 

amendment to the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1913, and in 1915 Congress 

passed a standard barrel law; but efforts of the Bureau to promote national 

legislation to define the weights and measures used in everyday trade, to 

'°Louis A. Fischer, "Recent developments in weights and measures in the United 

States," Pop. Sci. Mo. 84, 345 (1914), reported the Bureau's findings, State by State. See 

also NBS Box 18. 

For example, F. T. Cordage, "Serious leakage: short weights and measures," Good 

Housekeeping, 48, 744 (1909) ; F. Reichmann, "The necessity of the supervision of 

weights and measures," Am. Stat. Assoc. 12, 146 (1910); Sloan Gordon, "Is the housewife 

guilty?" Cosmopolitan, 50, 73 (1910) ; Francis J. Dyer, "The Government to the rescue," 

Good Housekeeping, 52, 334 (1911). In Reichmann's "Savings through proper super. 

vision of weights, measures and standards," Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 50, 94 (1913), 

he estimated that as a result of reforms in New York State, annual savings to consumers in the past several years had amounted to $15 million. 72 NBS Annual Report 1909, pp. 11—12. 
90 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

fix the sizes of other common shipping units besides the barrel (such as the 

bale, box, and basket), and to require certification by the Bureau of all 

weights and measures apparatus manufactured and sold in the United States, 

got nowhere.73 

The crusade ended, but not before the Bureau had made the Nation 

conscious of the meaning of measure at the market—temporarily, at least. 

Ninety-eight officials representing 25 States and 34 cities attended the Bureau 

conference held in February 1912, and except during wartime years, these 

conferences have been held annually ever since.74 Through the conferences, 

the continuing research at the Bureau, the training of sealers, and the furnishing of informaton and assistance to State and local officials, the pioneer 

work of Louis A. Fischer lives in the weights and measures control we know 

today. 

THE BEGINNING OF GOVERNMENT TESTING 

The era of exposure not only served to acquaint the general public 

with the name of the Bureau of Standards but it brought to the notice of 

other agencies of the Government a new and versatile auxiliary in the Federal family. Even before the weights and measures crusade began, the 

Federal Government, alerted by the hue and cry of the reformers calling 

citizens and consumers to arms, discovered that as a consumer it was itself 

being victimized. 

Incandescent lamps, bought by the Government at the rate of a million a year, were burning out at a fearful rate in Federal offices. When a purchasing agency sent one of its recent shipments to the Bureau for tests, the 

Bureau promptly threw out three-quarters of the bulbs. They were neither 

uniform in accordance with the manufacturer's own standards, nor did they even come up to the simple specifications suggested by the Government. The 

Bureau was soon to find similar shortcomings in the clinical thermometers, 

electric meters, chemical glassware, inks, mucilages, and indeed the whole 

catalog of supplies purchased for Government use.75 

"NBS Annual Report 1911, pp. 13—15. NBS C61, "Specifications and tolerances for 

weights and measures and weighing and measuring devices" (1916, 2d ed., 1920), was adopted at the weights and measures conference of 1916 for use in ordinary commercial 

transactions and had wide acceptance. 

By 1929 the Bureau reported there were almost 300 officials on the State level dealing 

with weights and measures work and 1,400 on the local level (NBS letter report, May 

2, 1929, NBS Box 285, 1W). For later reports, see NBS M172, "Index to reports of the 

National Conference on Weights and Measures, 1905—41" (McCormac and Smith, 1942). 

Hearings * * * 1906 (Dec. 2, 1904), pp. 231—232; Hearings * * * 1909 (Jan. 30, 

1908), pp. 496—497. 
THE BEGINNING OF GOVERNMENT TESTING 91 

The light bulb incident occurred in 1904. By 1906, Stratton reported, 

there was "a wave of reform going on all through the Government service 

as to proper specifications and proper tests to determine whether goods 

purchased complied with specification." 76 

- And Bureau testing for the Government began to double annually as increasing varieties and quantities of 

Government supplies and materials were sent to the Bureau before acceptance. The Bureau was called on to test the tensile strength of a new cable 

for the elevator in the Washington Monument, the cement used in the con- struction of the new House Office Building, paper and inks for the Government Printing Office, paints, oils, and varnishes for the Lighthouse Board, 

and virtually every instrument and piece of apparatus destined for a Federal 

laboratory. 

Congress, concerned over the repeated increases in personnel and 

funds that Dr. Stratton found it necessary to ask for, complained that it was 

"shocked a little bit by the way [the Bureau] is developing." In answer 

to the question, "Do you not think that you are broadening the scope of the 

work of your Bureau?" Stratton described the growth of the Government 

testing program.77 This testing had not been specified in the organic act, 

nor even contemplated when the Bureau was founded. But the Bureau 

laboratories were uniquely well fitted to make such tests, and great economies 

accrued to the Government as a result. It was, Stratton told Congress, almost entirely "commercial testing" and offered little opportunity for original 

investigation or research; still, it necessitated hiring specialists in many 

fields and large numbers of aids, apprentices, and assistants. 

By 1908 two-thirds of all testing at the Bureau was for Federal agencies alone. During that year it carried out tests for 37 bureaus and divisions 

of the Government, analyzing rag and wood papers for the Post Office 

Department and the Government Printing Office, investigating naphthas and 

celluloids as cargo hazards for the Steamship Inspection Service, assisting 

in Pure Food and Drug Law analyses, and carrying out a long series of 

cement and concrete examinations for the Panama Canal Commission. As an illustration of the usefulness of its tests, said Stratton, the Bureau had 

recently rejected outright 4 of 6 samples of varnish and 14 of 24 samples of 

paint submitted for analysis by the Lighthouse Board.78 

So extensive had this testing program become by 1909 that the Bureau 

had to restrict its own research and was experiencing difficulty in handling 

76 Hearings * * * 1908 (Nov. 30, 1906), p. 351. 

Hearings * * * 1904 (Dec. 2, 1904), p. 229; Hearings * * * 1907 (Feb. 23, 1906,) 

p. 657. 

Hearings * * * 1909 (January 30, 1908), PP. 495—496; Hearings * * * 1910 (Dec. 4, 

1908), p. 171. 
92 !FOUNDJNG BUREAU OF SIANDARDS (1901-10) 

requests for Stratton feared for the Bureau: "Nothing .could cause the. institution to deteriorate 

more quickly than to floo.d it with -routine testing. It must 4o .a certain 

amount of original investigation to develop methods of meas- uring or become second-rate institution." 

Yet in addition to greater economy in Federal much 

good was from the Government testing, as Stratton was well aware. 

It supplying a much needed incentive to industry. The high rate of 

rejection by the Bureau and the impartiality and justice of the tests thor. 

ough-ly alarmed hundreds of firms goods -and materials to the 

'Government. Supplying the Government was good business, and even though the Bureau did not publish its findings by brand name, word got a -Government contract found 

he lost other contracts. Manufacturers began beating a path to the lab. 

oratories on the hill for advice and help with their materials, measuring, 

and testing apparatus, and methods of quality control.8° 

"Scarcely a day passes," Dr. Stratton reported, "that some manufacturer does no.t 'visit the Bureau to learn how to measure or to secure 

sta-ndards." -in many -insta-nces -the Bureau did not have the answers industry sought, since no criteria existed for the products or materials in question. 

'But with the -manufacturer's assistance, the Bureau would agree to under. 

take the necessary research and establish the required standard. In this 

manner -industry, a-nd Government agencies as well, were to provide the 

kind of research -the Bureau -wanted to -do. 

'The Bureau was quick to -see -the importance to the public as well as -to '-industry of expanding its random commercial testing for the Government 

into a large-scale research program that would cover as widely as possible 

the range of materials and products of commerce. As early as 1905 the 

Bureau reported that "numerous cases of dispute regarding the quality of 

construction materials, such as iron, steel, brick, stone, cement, concrete, 

etc., have been referred to the Bureau for a determination of the physical 

proper-ties in question." 81 Virtually no data existed, for example, on the 

tensile and compressive strength, specific gravity, and time of set of cement 

and cement mortars, or on the thermal conductivity and effects of temperature upon the compression, expansion, and durability of concrete aggreHearings * * * 1910 (Dec. 4, 1908), p. 177. 

soAs Henry S. Carhart pointed out in Pop. Sci. Mo. 79, 209 (1911), the Government 

purchased only about 1 percent of the incandescent lamps made, the other 99 percent 

being sold to the general public, but Bureau testing elevated the quality for all. 

"NBS Annual Report 1906, p. 15. 
THE BEGINNING OF 93 

gates, poured concrete, or concrete ibuilding iblocks. And so with other 

construction materials. 

Search of the literature on :materials submitted for Government pur. 

chase disclosed that no standard :methods or apparatus existed for the testing of wood, paper, twine, 'fabrics, inks, mucilages, .and related materials, or for the testing lubricating oils, resins, varnishes, protective 

coatings, and glues, all of qualities were as important to the buying 

public as to the Government. In order to provide proper specifications to 

industry for the manufacture of materials, the physical, chemical, and 

other properties of their composition had to be investigated. The program 

of structural, engineering, and miscellaneous materials research thus begun was to consume much of the Bureau's for many years to come. By 

1911 the program, originally scattered throughout the laboratories, had attained divisional status. It had a special appropriation of its own, and was 

well on the way to becoming the largest single activity at Bureau. 

Allied to this research in commercial and industrial products, but 

actually derived from the function calling for "the determination of 'physical 

constants and the properties of materials," was the Bureau's standard samples 

program. This began in 1905 when the American Foundrymen's Assodiation turned over to the Bureau its work of preparing and distributing samples 

of standardized irons to its member 'industries. To prepare these samples, a quantity of iron was reduced to fine borings and then carefully analyzed, 

divided into samples of known composition as certified by the Bureau, and 

sold to manufacturers as a check on their own laboratory analyses. 

Preparation of like samples of a number of alloys, iron ores, and 

copper slags prompted Albert Ladd Colby, representingengineering interests on the Visiting Committee to the Bureau and a leading authority on metallurgy, to suggest 'that the Bureau produce samples of steels as well. The 

work began the next year when the Association of American Steel Manufacturers requested preparation of aseries of 17 standard steel samples. The 

Bureau's samples won high praise and requests for similar certification of 

other basic materials. When the American Chemical Society assigned its 

standard sample work to the Bureau, Dr. Stratton announced the Bureau's 

intention of preparing an entire spectrum of sample materials, covering 

hundreds of products, for American industry.82 

The chemistry division, 'increasingly involved in its investigation of 

properties of materials for the Government testing program, found itself 

NBS Annual Report 1906, p. 16; Annual Report 1907, p. 13. The methods of analyses and range of samples were described in NBS C14 (1909), NBS C25 (1910), NBS C26 

(1910) and their successive editions. 
94 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

pressed for time and staff as the work on standard samples grew. Nevertheless itborrowed time from these efforts to launch a much needed investigation of 4mpurities in analytical chemicals. Other groups at the Bureau, now grown to divisions, were also pushing out exploratory parties into new 

lines of inquiries. The weights and measures staff had begun its investigation of State standards, the pyrometry and heat divison sought new methods 

arid instruments for high-temperature measurement in industry, the optics 

division attacked theoretical problems in polarimetry, spectroscopy, and 

radiometry, and the electrical division became involved in absolute measurement, electrical instrumentation, and photometry. But making constant in. 

roads into the research efforts of all divisions was the acceleration of routine 

testing and calibration for science, industry, and above all for the Government. Between 1905 and 1910 the number of such tests increased from 

16,500 to almost 50,000, the Government's share rising from 26 to 70 percent 

of all calibration and testing. And complicating the testing was the demand 

for new research in technology, in order to establish a methodology and 

instrumentation that would put testing on an increasingly scientific basis. 

The volume of testing, doubling in 1909 over the previous year under 

the impact of Government work, soared again the next year when, to con- solidate effort and responsibility, the staff and equipment of the structural 

materials laboratories of the Geological Survey were transferred to the 

Bureau of Standards.83 The transfer on July 1, 1910, involved 53 engineers, 

chemists, and assistants. It included a small group in Washington under 

Dr. Samuel S. Voorhees, who with his chief assistant Phaon H. Bates was 

engaged in chemical research in mineral pigments, paints, and other building 

materials, mainly for the Supervising Architect's Office; a Pittsburgh laboratory under Dr. Albert V. Bleininger, where cements for navy yard and dry 

dock construction, as well as clays, ceramics, lime, steel, and other structural 

materials were tested; a Northampton, Pa., laboratory under R. L. Humphrey, 

testing cement at the plants supplying the Isthmian Canal Commission; and 

still another laboratory at Atlantic City under Rudolph J. Wig, where the 

effect of sea water upon concretes and protective coatings was being investiThe Geological Survey, ordinarily concerned with assaying and mapping the earth resources of the Nation, began its structural materials program in 1904 when it was persuaded to make tests of cement-making materials, building stones, and clays for an 

exhibit of the American Portland Cement Manufacturers at the St. Louis fair. By 1910 

the Survey, since restricted by law to research for the Government, was testing a wide 

range of structural materials, principally for the Panama Canal (under construction 

• from 1904 to 1914) and for some 400 public buildings planned or under construction in 

the United States. See Annual Report, Department of the Interior, 1910, pp. 202, 206; 

Weber, The Bureau of Standards, pp. 48—49. 
The Bureau about 1910, just prior to the construction of the electrical laboratories (East building). From left to right: the corner of West building, South building, the Low Temperature Laboratory, and North building. 
96 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

gated. Soon after, the Bureau itself established a fifth field laboratory, at 

Allentown, Pa., to sample and test cement produced in plants there for the 

Navy and War 

Well before this augmentation of the Bureau, its test program had 

already crowded into the last of the laboratories available in North and 

South buildings. Planning expansion of both the Bureau's work in structural materials and that of the former Geological Survey group, Dr. Stratton 

asked Congress for new mammoth testing machines and a special building 

to house them. The funds were approved and a 1.million-pound crushing 

machine for compression tests of brick, stone, cement, and concretes, another 

of 230,000-pound capacity, a 100,000-pound universal (compression and 

tension) machine, and a specially designed 2,300,000-pound Emery universal 

testing machine, for breakdown and exhaustion tests of girders and other 

large structural members, all built to Bureau specifications, were ordered.55 

Well before they arrived, West building, a four-story laboratory situated 

between North and South buildings, was completed in December 1909 at a cost of $175,000. 

Surpassing West building's giant Emery machine in capacity if not 

design was the Olsen machine acquired with the Pittsburgh laboratory. It was the most powerful testing machine in the country at that time, capable 

of exerting a force of 10 million pounds slowly and irresistibly in destruction 

tests of massive masonry columns. Structural materials testing at the 

Bureau and its field stations, nowhere contemplated in the organic act, 'began 

to expand. 

In 1911, with almost no further increase in staff over the previous 

year, the number of tests and calibrations leaped from 50,000 to more than 

80,000, almost 77 percent of them for the Government. The Bureau was to 

maintain this level until we entered the war in 1917. 

Largely as a consequence of the Government testing program, authorized personnel for the Bureau, including the group transferred from the 

Geological Survey, rose from 87 to 269 between. 1906 and 1911. Acquiring 

that number of trained scientists and craftsmen—and keeping them—had 

for some time become a serious problem. The Bureau could not compete 

in salaries either with the. larger universities or with industry, and the increasing interest of manufacturers in the application of science to industry made 

them particularly eager to entice specialists away from the Bureau. Industry was willing to pay twice the Government salary for men it wanted and even 

'4Annual Report, Department of the Interior, 1910 p. 297; ibid. 1911, p. 377; NBS Annual 

Report 1911, pp. 26—28. Detailed descriptions and correspondence concerning the acquisition of these ma- chines will be found in NBS Box 5, El. 
97 

The 2,300,000-pound Emery testing machine in Washington, for making exhaustion tests 

of beams, girders, and other large metal structural components. A similar compressionto-exhaustion giant, the Olsen machine, was at the Pittsburgh laboratories, for destruction tests of piers and other masonry columns. 
98 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

the universities offered lures hard to resist, as Dr. Stratton demonstrated 

graphically at a congressional hearing in 1906: 86 Harvard University Bureau of Standards 

Instructor $1,200—$1,500 Laboratory assistant $ 900—$1,200 

Assistant professor 2,500— 3,000 Assistant physicist 1,400— 1,800 

Associate professor 3,500— 4,500 Associate physicist 2,000— 2,200 

Professor 4,000— 5,500 Physicist 3,500— 4,000 

The Bureau, said Dr. Stratton, had lost a number of its staff that 

year, and some of its most valuable members were strongly tempted to leave. 

One was Dr. Noyes, the Bureau's chief chemist, who between 1904 and 1907 

had won international fame for his development of standard methods of 

analysis and standard specifications for chemicals while at the Bureau. He 

had had university offers as high as $4,750, although the Bureau could not 

pay him more than $3,500. Two years later Dr. Noyes went to the University of Illinois as head of its chemistry department. Dr. Rosa refused an invitation to go to MIT, but Dr. Edward Hyde, in charge of Bureau research 

in photometry, left his $2,000 position for similar research in the Edison 

lamp laboratories at $5,000 a year. 

Congress was not inclined to be sympathetic about such losses. "Is 

not that thing likely to occur with any reasonable salary that the Government 

can pay?" asked Washington Gardner, Republican representative from Michigan and member of the House Subcommittee on Appropriations. It was, 

Dr. Stratton replied, but the nature of the work at the Bureau made its staff 

particularly vulnerable to good offers outside, especially since "nearly every 

great manufactuing concern in this country is establishing a research laboratory" and looking for trained men. "I think it [is] a good thing for 

the country to have them go out into the world," answered Mr. Gardner, and 

suggested that the Bureau continue to hire men at its lower grades and promote them as vacancies occurred.87 

Despite the low salaries, employment with the Bureau of Standards 

had many compensations, not least the prestige of working for a new, important, and rapidly growing scientific agency of the Federal Government. 

Status and tenure were apt to be mere certain than in a university or in 

industry since all positions, then as now, were filled through competitive 

civil service examinations, thus guarding against personal whim or 

favoritism, with permanency and promotion determined by civil service law. 

Except for division chiefs, whom he selected on the basis of demonstrated productivity and promise, Stratton, hampered by the competition 

in salaries, adopted the policy of bringing in talented graduates of firstclass scientific or technical colleges, appointing them to the lower grades of 

Hearings * * * 1907 (Feb. 23, 1906), p. 602. 

Hearings * * * 1911 (Jan. 27, 1910), pp. 332—336. 
THE BEGiNNING OF GOVERNMENT TESTING 99 

assistantships, and advancing them as their proficiency increased and 

vacancies occurred. To provide minor assistants for routine testing and 

experimental work, he set up a system of apprentices and aids, taking on graduates of manual training and technical high schools as apprentices, advancing them to aids after 2 years, and thence to the lowest grades of laboratory assistant when they had acquired the requisite mathematics and training 

in theoretical science through evening courses given at George Washington 

University in downtown Washington.88 

Many who were later to be luminaries of the scientific world came 

to the Bureau as laboratory assistants, among them Dr. William F Meggers, 

dean of American spectroscopists; Dr. George K. Burgess, who succeeded 

Stratton as Director of the Bureau; Dr. Frederick J. Bates, one of the 

country's outstanding sugar physicists; Dr. William W. Coblentz, founder 

of modern radiometry; and Dr. Paul D. Foote, pioneer in high temperature 

measurements.8° 

The Bureau grounds, remote from the city, tree-shaded, and populated predominantly by young college graduates, possessed from the begin. 

ning an unmistakable campus atmosphere. The group loyalties and mild 

intramural competition that naturally resulted were diligently fostered by 

Dr. Stratton, as a means of keeping his staff from straying. He did more. 

Many of the young holders of B.S. and M.S. degrees who came to the Bureau, some with wives and all with ambition, wanted their doctoral degrees. 

Stratton proposed a plan for giving graduate courses at the Bureau in mathematics, physics, and chemistry equal to those in the best universities, and 

88 Stratton and Rosa, Proc. AIEE, 24, 1043—1044 (1905). 

89 One measure of the caliber of the physicists that Stratton brought to the Bureau is 

represented in the star system of American Men of Science. From its first (1906) to 

it seventh (1944) editions, American Men of Science, by an intricate ballot system, 

periodically starred the thousand outstanding scientists in the Nation. Among the 150 

top physicists (headed by A. A. Michelson) that were selected in 1906 (actually chosen 

in 1903), Bureau members included Austin, Dorsey, Guthe, Nutting, Rosa, Stratton, 

Waidner, and Wolff. (This 1906 list appeared in American Men of Science, fifth edition, 

1933, pp. 1269 if.) 

By the fourth edition (1927), the Bureau had increased its number of leading scientists 

from 8 to 23 members, its group of physicists alone representing the strongest collection 

of any institution in the country, ranking above Harvard, General Electric, University 

of Chicago, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia, California 

Institute of Technology, Cornell, and Yale. And at that time the number of entries in 

American Men of Science had risen from 4,000 (1906) to 13,500 (1927). Starred 

members of the Bureau in the 1927 edition included Acree, Austin, Bleininger, Blum, 

Briggs, Brown, Buckingham, Burgess, Coblentz, Crittenden, Curtis, Dellinger, Dickinson, 

Dorsey, Foote, Heyl, Meggers, Mohler, Skinner, Priest, Washburn, Wènner and Wolff 

(American Men of Science, fourth edition, 1927, p. 1128 if. See also J. McKeen Cattell, 

"The scientific men of the world," Sci. Mo. 23, 468, 1926, and Science, 66, 516, 1927.) 
100 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10.) 

permitting staff members to offer parts of their Bureau research results as 

graduate theses, provided their universities would accept this course work 

and research. 

Precedent for the latter had been established even before formal adoption of the plan. Original research at the Bureau had been accepted toward 

the doctorate when the Johns Hopkins University admitted an investigation 

in photometry by Edward P. Hyde for his degree in 1906, when the University of Michigan accepted work on magnetic testing by Charles W. Bur- rows in 1907, and also that year when George Washington University 

accepted an investigation of capacity and power factors of condensers by 

Frederick W. Grover.90 

The experience of Harvey L. Curtis, one of the first to secure his 

doctorate through Bureau courses and research, and long.time member 

of the electrical division, was typical of many who followed him. In the 

spring of 1907, with a master's degree in physics from the University of 

Michigan, a wife and two children, and 4 years' experience as instructor 

at $700 at Michigan Agricultural College, Curtis, then 31, chanced upon a notice of an examination for assistant physicist at the Bureau. He had 

just been promoted to assistant professor when he received word he had passed 

the examination. He was offered the Bureau appointment at $1,200. When 

he declined because the college assistant professorship paid better, Rosa 

sent him a telegram asking him to come to Washington anyway for an interview. He was offered $1,400, and was persuaded to accept when Dr. 

Stratton told him of the graduate course plan being inaugurated. 

Soon after Curtis began work in the electrical laboratories, he wrote 

at Dr. Stratton's suggestion to Prof. Henry S. Carhart at the University of 

Michigan about the course plan. Carhart replied 'that the faculty had voted 

to give Curtis a hearing when he presented the completion of his work. 

Other youngsters at the Bureau, Roy Y. Ferner, Paul G. Agnew, E. C. 

McKelvy, J. Howard Dellinger, and Hobart C. Dickinson, also wrote to their 

universities. A few of the replies were discouraging, some were tentative, 

but Prof. Joseph S. Ames, head of the physics department at the Johns 

Hopkins, wrote enthusiastically to one of his former pupils: 

There is not a college or university in the United States that 

can give a student as much apparatus for experimental work and as 

°° H. L. Curtis, "Establishment of graduate study courses at the NBS," J. Wash. Acad. 

Sci. 29, 351 (1949). See also MS speech, G. K. Burgess, "The Bureau of Standards as an educational institution," June 28, 1924 (NBS Box 77, IDP). Memo, L. B. Tucker- man for L. J. Briggs, Oct. 12, 1927 (NBS Box 489, AP), reported that 11 of the 72 doctorates in physics granted by Johns Hopkins between 1906 and 1926 went to Bureau 

members, 2 others had received degrees for Bureau research in chemistry and 2 in 

electrical engineering. Dr. Briggs received his Hopkins degree in 1901 for work done 

at the Department of Agriculture. 
THE BEGINNING OF GOVERNMENT TESTING 101 

much help in the theoretical field of the physical sciences as he 

can obtain at the Bureau of Standards." 

Stratton proposed a 3-year cycle of evening courses in physics, 

mathematics, and chemistry, each course to be given 2 hours a week 

for 30 weeks, at $25 per course. The first subjects offered in the fall 

of 1908 were in differential equations, given by Dr. John A. Anderson, 

who came out weekly from the Hopkins physics department; theoretical 

mechanics, taught by Dr. Albert F. Zahm of Catholic University; and 

thermodynamics, by Dr. Edgar Buckingham of the Bureau. 

Dr. Rosa was to have given a weekly 4-hour course in experimental 

methods in electrical measurement that same autumn when a call for 

consultations on electrical standards at the British and German physical 

laboratories took him abroad. The course was given instead by three 

of the students who had signed up for it, Dellinger, then working in the 

resistance and electromotive force section, Curtis in the inductance and 

capacity section, and Agnew in the electrical instruments section. Upon 

his return in January 1909, Rosa completed the course with a• series of 

lectures on advanced electrical measurements. 

In the spring of 1909 a committee composed of Stratton, Rosa, 

Hillebrand, Wolff, Waidner, Burgess, Dorsey, Nutting, Waters, and Fischer 

was set up to direct the graduate program. To the classes already in progress, Dorsey began teaching a new course in electricity and magnetism and 

Dr. Kanolt began another in physical chemistry. 

Including advanced work taken earlier at the University of Michigan, 

Harvey Curtis completed the course work at the Bureau in the spring of 1910. 

With his thesis on "Mica condensers as standards of capacity," based on a recently completed investigation published that same year in the Bulletin 

of the Bureau, he went to Ann Arbor, passed his orals, and returned with his 

degree.°2 

The cyclic system of graduate course work established by Dr. Stratton 

continued for the next 50 years, and what was begun as an expedient to keep 

promising personnel, came to attract them as well. In 1960, 1,322 members 

of Bureau laboratories and affiliates were taking a total of 72 undergraduate 

and graduate courses offered in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engi. 

91 Quoted in H. L. Curtis, Recollections of a Scientist: An Autobiography (privately 

printed at Bonn, Germany: L. Leopold Press, 1958), p. 27. 92 Ibid., pp. 22, 26—30. Three years later, in 1913, Dr. Curtis became an associate 

physicist at the Bureau, in 1918 physicist, in 1924 senior physicist, and in 1928 principal 

physicist. He published a book on electrical measurements and almost 50 papers prior 

to his retirement from the Bureau in January 1947. The retirement was purely statutory. 

Like many other long-time employees of the Bureau, Curtis continued to experiment as a guest worker in his old laboratory, coming in daily until shortly before his death at the 

age of 80. 
102 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10) 

neering for advanced degrees or promotion. Since Dr. Stratton established 

the graduate program in 1908, more than 15,500 registrations have been re- corded, resulting in the award of 270 graduate degrees by 40 different universities, for research carried out in part at least at the Bureau.93 

After the l920's all the physical sciences were levied on for degrees, 

but in the age of electricity, as historians of modern technology have called 

the period prior to World War I, much of the doctoral research was done in 

the laboratories presided over by Dr. Rosa, where a hundred years of basic and 

empirical electrical research awaited standards and new measurements and 

the scientists to determine them. Well before the end of the first decade 

Rosa's had become the premier division of the Bureau. 

Annual Report, Research Highlights of the NBS, 1960, pp. 159—160. See also eightpage account of the program attached to letter, L. J. Briggs to U .S. Office of Education, 

Federal Security Agency, July 12, 1940 (NBS Box 443, ID-Misc). 

The brass troy pound of 1758, or Imperial 

Standard Troy Pound, which with the 

standard yard of 1760 were declared to be the only original and genuine standards 

of Great Britain. Both were damaged in 

the burning of the Houses of Parliament on October 16, 1834. 
ELECTRICITY, 

RAILROADS, AND 

RADIO (1911—16) 

CHAPTER III 

STANDARDS FOR THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY 

The first two decades of the 20th century witnessed a new industrial revolution, the electrification of American industry. In 1899 less than 5 percent 

of all power used in industry had been electric. By 1909, with the development of more efficient generators, better electric motors, and transmission 

lines of greater carrying capacity, it had risen to 25.4 percent, and by 1919 

to 55 percent.1 An age of electricity had arrived, its challenge to the long 

dominance of heavy industry, by promising lighter and more specialized 

products, as revolutionary in its impact on the lives of ordinary men as the present age of computers and automation. 

Dr. Rosa was speaking of the electrical industry when he said: "It is 

largely to meet their needs [the electrical instrument-makers and manufacturers-]—t-hat -the bureau was organized, and if by serving them the standard 

of excellence of American-made instruments and machinery is raised, the 

bureau will have served the public also." 2 Or. as Dr. Stratton wrote to 

Secretary of Commerce and Labor Cortelyou, in a letter of 1904 describing 

the spheres of interest of the Visiting Committee: "The work of the bureau 

is perhaps more closely related to electrical interests than any other." 

Electric light and power companies, appliance manufacturers, com- munication and traction companies developed at a phenomenal rate throughout the period. So numerous were the demands of the electrical industry 

and of electrical research laboratories for basic measurements, instrumentation, tests and calibrations that almost half the new people coming into 

the Bureau went into Rosa's division. By 1910 the testing of materials for 

Government agencies, by its sheer volume, was in the ascendant, but Stratton reported that electrical research and testing was still, "next to structural 

1 Samuel H. Schurr and Bruce C. Netschert, Energy in the American Economy, 1850— 1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960), p. 187. 2 Rosa, "The organization and work of the Bureau of Standards," Science, 19, 949 

(1904). 'Letter, SWS to Cortelyou, Dec. 10, 1904 (NBS Box 296, APV-Remsen). 103 
104 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

materials * * * the largest division of the bureau's work." As the world 

of electricity grew Rosa's division grew with it, extending its research in 

measurement into electrolysis and electrochemistry, into radio research and 

engineering, .and radiology. 

To satisfy the industry's need for better electrical standards and bet. 

ter measuring instruments, much of the early work of the Bureau was con- centrated in fundamental electrical measurements. N. Ernest Dorsey of 

the electrical division reported some of the results: 

The progress that was made in the seven years 1903 to 1910 in 

the accuracy of [these] measurements was great. In 1903 it was generally believed that it was not possible to make absolute 

electrical measurements to a higher accuracy than one in one 

thousand; by 1910, such measurements had been made with an 

accuracy of a few parts in 100,000. 

In 1903, manganin resistances were subject to large unexplained 

irregular variations; before 1910, these variations had been shown 

by [the] Bureau to be caused by the effect of varying humidity 

upon the insulation, and sealed coils largely eliminating that effect 

had been constructed. 

In 1903, the results obtained with the silver coulometer [i.e., volta. 

meter] were distressingly variable; by 1910, the major cause of 

the variations had been discovered, and several types of coulometers 

yielding high reproducibility had been designed. 

[Finally,] much improvement had been made in the constancy and 

reproducibility of the standard cell. 

By the summer of 1910, the modern era of high accuracy in electrical measurements had begun.5 

Most of the electrical values that were available to science and industry in 1903 were far from precise and tentative at best. The first application of electricity, to the telegraph, required few quantitative results other 

than resistance measurements. But by the 1880's, as electric energy was applied to light and power, the necessity for accurate measurements of other 

electrical quantities, of capacitance, inductance, electromotive force, and cur- rent, became acute. The Electrial Congress held in Paris in 1881, the first 

of many such international conferences, recommended that electric and magnetic quantities be measured in terms of absolute units, that is, the same 

units used to measure mechanical energy—the centimeter, gram, and second 

Hearings * * 1912 (Dec. 2, 1910), p. 267. 

'MS, N. Ernest Dorsey, "Some memories of the early days." 
STANDARDS FOR THE AGE OF ELECTRICiTY 105 

(CGS). But precise values for electrical units in relation to fundamental 

mechanical effects are difficult to establish, and electrical science and industry needed units that could be readily reproduced in their laboratories. 

By 1903 general agreement on reproducible primary electrical standards had been reached. The international ohm was arbitrarily defined as the resistance of a specified column of mercury, the international ampere 

by its rate of deposition of silver, and the international volt as a specified 

fraction of the electromotive force of the Weston standard cell. Commerce 

and industry, assuming that the units defined by reproducible standards were 

indistinguishable from absolute units, were satisfied. But for the most precise 

work, science looked to the Bureau for an accurate statement of the small 

but very real difference between these reproducible units and fundamental 

(absolute) units. 

Defining an electrical unit was one thing, determining its value relative 

to absolute units was quite another, and the standards set up in accordance 

with these definitions by the national laboratories here and abroad did not 

show the agreement that had been hoped for. Yet as Dorsey pointed out, 

between 1903 and 1910 the silver voltameter, standard resistors, standard 

cells, and instruments for comparing the standards were much improved. 

The work at the Bureau on the silver voltameter and standard cell, 

in terms of which current and voltage were measured, was to be of special 

importance in establishing more precise values for the volt. This was true 

of J. G. Coffin's construction and calculations of absolute standards of inductance, completed in 1906, a consequence of Rosa and Grover's extensive 

theoretical examination of inductance formulas. The work not only proved 

valuable for absolute measurement but of considerable service to the electrical 

industry in determining the inductance of circuit configurations.6 

Earlier experience in the absolute measurement of current, the results 

of which were expressed in electromagnetic units, led to Rosa and Dorsey's 

painstaking experiment in 1907 which demonstrated that the measurement 

of a current in electromagnetic CGS units was related to its measurement in 

electrostatic CGS units by exactly the numerical value of the speed of light, 

accurate to within 0.03 percent.7 An important confirmation of Maxwell's 

theory of light, the investigation otherwise had little inimecliate practical 

application, except as an immensely prestigious piece of work that paid 

dividends in recruiting young physicists for the Bureau. 

S9 and SlO (Rosa and Grover, 1903—5); S29 (Coffin, 1906). 

N0TE.—S designates the Scientific Papers of the NBS, issued from 1904—28, as hereafter RP will represent a Research Paper in the Journal of Research of the NBS, 1928 to date, T designates the Technologic Papers of the NBS, 1910—28, and H the NBS series 

of Handbooks. For further information on these and other Bureau publications, see notes to app. I. 

S66 (Rosa and Dorsev. 1907). 
Members and assistants of the International Technical Committee of 1910 gather on the lawn at the Bureau upon completion of the work to establish 

new values for the international ampere, ohm, and volt. From left to right: F. Laporte (France), Sir Frank Smith (England), Dr. Frank A. Wolff, 

Jr., Dr. W. Jaeger (Germany), M. P. Shoemaker, Dr. Stratton, Dr. Frank Wenner, Dr. A. S. McDaniel, G. E. Post, Dr. Frederick W. Grover, Dr. Rosa, and Dr. George W. Vinal. 
STANDARDS FOR THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY 107 

Most of the early research in Rosa's division, however, was specifically 

concerned with electrical standards, and before long the work of the Bureau 

and that of the national laboratories abroad had sufficiently increased the 

possible accuracy of the values established for the primary electrical stand. 

ards to call for a new international agreement. At the International Conference on Electrical Units and Standards held in London in 1908 a resolution 

was drawn up to adopt a new international ampere, ohm, and volt. 

Two years later a technical committee representing the British, 

French, German, and American national laboratories, with Dr. Rosa as 

chairman, met at the Bureau in Washington to carry out the resolution of the 

Conference. In May 1910 the committee completed its work, reaching agreement on new values to be assigned to the ampere and ohm and from these 

deriving a new value for the international volt. Adoption of these values 

promised for the first time international uniformity to a high degree of precision in the electrical units. With high satisfaction, Rosa wrote: "There 

is reason to believe that the values adopted now will be satisfactory for a generation at least without change." 8 The progress made by the committee had been reported in the Washington newspapers, and Congress was ready for Dr. Stratton when 'he 

appeared on Capitol Hill just prior to the announcement of worldwide adoption of the committee's work. In the Bureau budget before the Subcommittee on Appropriations was a request for a new electrical laboratory 

building, needed to regroup Rosa's division, now scattered all through 

North, South, and West buildings. Members of the subcommittee immediately challenged the need for the building. To Congress it seemed 

that the most pressing task of the electrical division of the Bureau was 

finished. 

Dr. Stratton had to reassure Congress that the recent work of the international committee did not mean that electrical measurements were "all 

done." "The work in connection with these standards," said Stratton, "is going on all the time. Some of them must be continually produced. For instance, the standard of electromotive force must be produced from year to 

year. The work in connection with the standard [of] current is not nearly 

completed * * * 

. We must maintain continuously the standards of resistance, of current, of electromotive force, of inductance and capacity, and the 

magnetic standards. Every electrical problem goes back to these standards." 

Stratton's argument may only have heightened the mystery of electricity 

to the layman, but Congress was convinced. The electrical laboratory was 

8 Rosa in Science, 31, 601 (1910), and Engr. Mag. 39, 263 (1910); NBS C29, "Announcement of a change in the value of the international volt" (1911); correspondence of 

1911 in NBS Box 8, IE; Annual Report, National Physical Laboratory, 1912, p. 7. 

Hearings * * * 1912 (Dec. 2, 1910), p. 267. 
108 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

The silver voltameter used to determine a new value for the international ampere. The 

experiments at Washington in 1910 made it possible to assign mutually consistent 

values to the standard cells and standard resistors used in the respective national 

standardizing laboratories, in terms of the resistivity of mercury and the electrochemical equivalent of silver. The units thus established formed the basis for all electrical 

measurements throughout the world for the next 37 years. 

approved and the sum of $175,000 appropriated for its construction. As 

East building, it completed the quadrangle on the hilltop, and Rosa and his 

division moved in during the spring of 1913.10 

Useful and even necessary as the new international values were to 

electrical science and industry, they were, as Stratton had said, far from permanent. Continued research in instrumentation and procedures resulted 

in greater refinements of the values and the standard resistances and standard cells slowly began to drift. By 1925, serious discrepancies were evident 

among the standards maintained in the national laboratories here and abroad. 

Where measurements had been made with once satisfactory accuracies within a few parts in 100,000, certain of them could now be kept constant within a few parts in a million. There was need for agreement on the new values 

possible. 

10 The building was accepted in June 1913 but not actually completed until several 

months later, after members of the electrical division themselves installed the wiring. 

See correspondence in NBS Blue Folder Box 77. That wiring was still functioning satisfactorily when it was replaced with modern fireproof conduits in the 1950's (interview 

with Dr. F. B. Silsbee, Jan. 29, 1963). 
STANDARDS FOR THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY 109 

In 1929 the International Committee of Weights and Measures at 

Sèvres, to which the establishment and conservation of electrical standards 

had been assigned in 1923, approved a resolution to replace the international 

system of electrical units by the absolute or CGS system originally proposed 

for them. The need for conveniently reproducible standards had diminished 

with the expansion of testing services in the national laboratories. Electrical methods of measurement, of increasing importance to science and engi. 

neering, demanded higher and higher degrees of precision that apparently 

only an absolute system of measurement could satisfy. Also the discovery 

of isotopes in 1913, with their hitherto unsuspected variation among different 

samples of silver and mercury reduced the certainty of international units 

defined by properties of these elements and favored absolute units independent of isotopic variations. 

The conference of 1929 agreed that the pursuit of "ideal" measurements must be resumed within the framework of the absolute system, and 

from the 1930's on this became the direction of fundamental electrical re- search. The same decade saw a marked acceleration in the work of extending the range of measurement of electrical quantities. Here, earlier pioneer 

work such as Dr. Herbert B. Brooks' development of the deflection potentiometer for measuring current and voltage in lamp testing came to full fruition. 

It was the first of many highly specialized potentiometers he subsequently 

designed.11 

These lines of research continue to the present day at the Bureau and 

in the electrical standards laboratories abroad. Bureau research alone in 

the field of modern electrical measurement has been reported in almost 300 

separate publications. The early work of Rosa, Wolff, Grover, Agnew, Wen. 

ner, Vinal, and Lloyd was continued in the l920's and 1930's by Curtis, 

Brooks, and Silsbee, by Sanford, Snow, Thomas, and Moon, and from 1940 

on by Curtis, Snow and others.12 

In the early years of electrical research at the Bureau, something more 

than international agreement on standards of measurement, and provision of 

quantitative standards and instruments for the industry, was at stake. Out 

of its research, the Bureau also recommended to the industry equally important, if not equally welcome, standards of a quite different nature, those 

of service and safety. 

S33 (Brooks, 1906). 

"Lyman J. Briggs, "Early work of the NBS," Sci. Mo. 73, 167 (1951); F. Silsbee, 

"Establishment and maintenance of the electrical units," NBS C475 (1949); F. B. Silsbee, 

"Extension and dissemination of the electrical and magnetic units by the NBS," NBS 

C531 (1952). 
110 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

STANDARDS FOR PUBLIC UTILITIES 

Still developing along the empirical lines evolved in the previous cen- tury, the electrical industry in the early century was as much in need of 

standards of quality, of performance, of safety, and of service as it was of 

standards of quantity. A contemporary historian's indictment of the gas 

industry, that owing to its monopoly in many cities it used fraudulent meters, 

supplied inferior gas, and collected excessive rates from helpless consumers, 

applied equally well, he said, to the electric lighting industry, street railways, and the telegraph and telephone companies.'3 

The Bureau was more charitable. Talking with utility company 

representatives, manufacturers, and industrial scientists, Stratton and Rosa 

found that many of the shortcomings of the industry were "not entirely [the 

fault] * * * of the manufacturer, but [resulted from] the lack of uniform 

standards and specifications." 14 So Stratton reported when in 1904 the 

Bureau threw out three-quarters of a shipment of electric light bulbs submitted for testing by a Government purchasing office. Not long after, the 

Bureau of Corporations, the new watchdog agency set over trusts in the 

Department of Commerce (and predecessor of the Federal Trade Commission, organized in 1915), asked the Bureau to investigate the relative illuminating power of a number of kerosene oils on the market. Their quality 

proved no less dubious than that of some of the gas and electric lamps already 

determined by the Bureau. Standards of illumination and uniform specifications for the lighting industry were manifestly needed. And because the 

Bureau's investigation began with the incandescent lamp, photometry or the 

scientific measurement cf light became a function of Rosa's electrical division and remained so for 40 years before it was transferred to the optics 

division of the Bureau. 

Before long the Bureau became involved with much more than gas, oil, 

and electric lamps. In the wake of Roosevelt's crackdown on the trusts, the 

public service monopolies came under fire. Many States and cities, goaded 

by the press, the muckraking periodicals, and reforming citizenry, instituted 

reforms of their own, first attempting to regulate the utilities by legislation 

and lawsuit and then setting up public service commissions and other local 

regulatory agencies. Beginning in 1907, city and interurban street rail. 

ways, gas and water companies, electric light and power companies, the 

telegraph and telephone, and even the all.powerful railroads found their 

rates and services increasingly subject to a measure of regulation. 

Harry T. Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic: 1885—1905 (New York: Dodd Mead, 

1906), p. 315. 

Hearings * * 1906 (Dec. 2, 1904), p. 232. 
STANDARDS FOR PUBLiC UTILITIES 111 

Very much aware of the weights and measures investigation of the 

Bureau and its assistance in setting up inspection systems in cities and States, 

the new public service commissions turned to the Bureau for help. The 

ensuing research that began with the measurement of lamp light was even- tually extended to almost every aspect of public utility service. 

One difficulty in establishing a uniform standard of light hinged on 

the use of the term "candlepower," based by tradition on a natural light 

source, the light value of an open flame measured by comparison with a sperm oil candle. By reason of the varying sizes and designs of the sperm 

candles used, the values originally derived from them differed considerably. 

Thus the "candles" of the electric lamp and illuminating gas industries bore 

little relation to one another, and even within the same industry the Bureau 

found the "candle" had little constancy.15 

As working standards, some gas and electric companies referred to 

the English parliamentary candle. Most electric lamp manufacturers, however, had turned to the standard of light maintained by the Reichsanstalt, 

the Hefner amylacetate lamp, for their "candle" value. The flaws that 

Rosa's group found in the Hefner standard shortly after the establishment 

of the Bureau led him to propose as a new standard for the electric lamp 

industry the mean value of a number of 16-candlepower commercial lamps, 

and to make this applicable to gas light as well as to electric light.'6 

When the value of this new standard "candle" proved to be only 

slightly greater than the unit maintained by the national laboratories of 

England and France, the Bureau proposed an adjustment of its own value 

looking to an international candle. The proposal was accepted, and in 

1909 the new value, based on a simple relationship between the British 

Hefner unit, the French bougie décimale, and the carbon-filament unit 

maintained in Washington, became the standard for all photometric measurements in this country.'7 - Interestingly enough, a year earlier, in 1908, Waidner and Burgess 

in the heat division of the Bureau attempted to construct an absolute standard 

NBS Annual Report 1909, p. 7. 

"See letter, SWS to Edison Lamp Works of General Electric, Harrison, N.J., Apr. 30, 

1904, and attached correspondence (NSB Box 8, IEL). 

In July 1904 an instructor at Cornell, Eugene C. Crittenden, was brought to the Bureau 

to investigate flame standards in photometry. He remained for more than 50 years. 

Under his guidance the problems of a light standard were finally resolved by the international acceptance of a "new candle" in 1948, based on two accomplishments of the 

Bureau, the platinum black body standard of Wensel, Roeser, Barbrow, and Caidwell, 

and the determination of spectral luminosity factors by Gibson and Tyndall. See ch. 

V, p. 245, and ch. VI, p. 337. 17 NBS C15, "The international unit of light" (1909; 3d ed., 1911). The Reichsanstalt's 

Hefner unit was assigned the value of 0.90 international candle. 
112 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

of light, for use in pyrometrical measurement. For lack of suitable materials 

at that time, 20 years passed before the work was resumed and an absolute 

prototype standard was at last experimentally realized. With it the incandes. 

cent lamp standard, always difficult to maintain, was reduced to a working 

standard. 

A uniform sitandard of light was not enough to assure acceptance of the 

lamps made by the electric industry, and 2 years before adoption of the international candle representatives of the lamp manufacturers in this country 

met with Government engineers at the Bureau to adopt standard specifications for electric lamps. Although the General Electric Co. had introduced 

its G.E. metalized (GEM) carbon-filament lamp in 1905, and in 1907 put 

its first tungsten.filament (Mazda) lamp on the market, the first specifications were based on the Edison carbon.filament lamp, then owned and manufactured by General Electric and its subsidiaries and the most widely used 

of electric lamps available. 

It was agreed that the carbon-filament lamps sold to the Govern. 

ment must initially consume no more than 3.76 watts per mean spherical 

candle (the Bureau standard) and their "life," before decreasing to 80 per. 

cent of their original light value or burning out, must be 300 to 450 hours. 

Failure of 10 percent of the test lamps in any lot would automatically result 

in rejection of the entire lot. The details of these specifications were pub. 

lished in NBS Circular 13 (1907) and revised editions of the circular ap. 

peared with the adoption of the international candle and as each of the new types of electric lamps came into general use.18 

Although Bureau testing of incandescent lamps was the entering 

wedge, it was not by electric light but by old-fashioned gas light that the 

Bureau prepared its first proposals for the regulation of a public utility. 

For years the illuminating gas and oil industry had referred to Hefner and 

pentane lamps for its photometric standards. How unreliable these standards were the Bureau learned in 1906 when some 40 kerosene oils were submitted to it for tests of their composition and illuminating power.19 

Preliminary studies revealed the necessity of a thorough investigation of gas and oil illuminants, and in 1908 the Bureau requested and re- ceived from Congress a special 2-year appropriation to work on this problem, 

in cooperation with the American Gas Institute. Russell S. McBride, a bright young graduate in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, was 

brought into Rosa's electrical division, sent to school for courses in gas engineering, and put in charge of the investigation.20 

18 The last edition of C13, "Standard specifications for incandescent electric lamps," was the 10th, in 1923, after which the Federal Specifications Board, recently established in 

the Bureau of the Budget, took over the function of promulgating lamp specifications. 

Hearings * * * 1907 (Feb. 23, 1906), p. 653. 20 See Hearings * * * 1915 (Feb. 26, 1914), p.910. 
113 

Laboratory setup for testing the candlepower of incandescent lamps about 1910. This was the brightness test, using a horizontal bar photometer. 

Dr. Brook's deflection potentiometer permitted the measurement of direct current and 

voltage more precisely than with any former laboratory indicating instrument. The 

potentiometer has come into wide use in the manufacture and rapid checking of 

precise indicating instruments with direct reference to a standard cell. 
114 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

The work that McBride and his group did between 1909 and 1911 

resulted in new methods for calibrating pentane lamps in terms of the Bureau candle and laid the basis for establishing standards of gas service, both 

illuminating and heating. The results were furnished to State and municipal 

authorities that had requested Bureau assistance in drafting gas service 

regulations. 

The Bureau urged that the quality of gas be determined by its heating value rather than its candlepower, as was then the practice in most cities, 

and that it be sold on the basis of the British thermal unit (Btu), not by 

the cubic foot. Gas company engineers argued that the consumer was not 

concerned with heating value, certainly not in gas lamps; but statistical 

studies by the Bureau showed that the usefulness of gas to the consumer was almost exactly proportional to its heating value, whether used in heating 

appliances or in gas-mantle lamps, and successfully refuted the claims of 

some of the companies that the amount of gas used by consumers was not 

increased when the heating value was reduced. So long as gas was sold 

by the cubic foot, the gas companies had little incentive to purify their 

product, and it permitted them to sell excessive and useless quantities of 

nitrogen and sulfur compounds in their gas, introduced during the 

manufacturing process.21 

The Bureau circular putting standards of gas service into the hands 

of public service commissions recognized the hostility of the utilities to the 

regulations it recommended. It reassured the industry that the Bureau "in 

no way concerned itself with the financial regulation of gas companies * * * 

[or with their] works management." It carefully stressed that "the attitude 

of the Bureau is entirely advisory, and its intention is only to place in the 

hands of the technical and general public an impartial and, as nearly as may 

be, accurate summary of the facts which must be considered in connection 

with the inspection and testing of the quality and distribution of * * * gas." 

The circular also pointed out that the utilities stood in need of public con- fidence and would therefore gain much from the passage of local laws and 

ordinances regulating their services.22 But a decade passed before the inElmer R. Weaver, MS, "History of the gas chemistry section, NBS, 1910—1957" (October 

1964), pp. 2, 6 (NBS Historical File). 

22 NBS C32 (1912), pp. 5—6. "Drastic" was the word Henry L. Doherty used to describe some of the Bureau's proposed regulations. A self-made gas utilities magnate, whose 

Cities Service holding company was to take over 53 independent operating companies 

in 1913 alone, Doherty spoke for the industry when he wrote to the Bureau: "I cer- tainly do not want to see any burdens placed on the gas companies that will be hard 

for them to meet." Confidential letters, Doherty to NBS, Mar. 9 and Apr. 2, 1912 (NBS 

Box 7,1CC). 

The original and somewhat intimidating title of C32, "State and municipal regulations 

for the quality, distribution and testing of illuminating gas," was changed to "Standard 
STANDARDS FOR PUBLIC UTILITIES 115 

dustry accepted the findings of the Bureau and agreed to sell gas on the basis 

of its heating value. 

One of the early investigations of the Bureau's gas engineering group 

to modifications in the street gas lamps in the District of Columbia that 

increased street illumination by 50 percent, with no rise in the cost of 

service.23 The gas industry was further aided, against its will, by later 

Bureau investigations of gas appliances, gas stoves, and gas furnaces. The 

results led to notable increases in gas efficiency and safety, as well as in sales.24 

Dr. Rosa's division continued its research in gas photometry and gas 

engineering until the early 1920's when the work was transferred to a section 

in the chemistry division under Elmer R. Weaver, and gas instruments re- search became the province of the weights and measures division. By then 

the electric light had begun to replace gaslight almost everywhere and gas 

appliances were rapidly making wood and coal stoves obsolete. For lack 

of a satisfactory Btu meter, gas continued to be measured in cubic feet, as it 

is to this day, but in more and more States it was gas monitored by State 

laboratories equipped with chemical and calorimetric test equipment. 

Four years passed before the Bureau undertook to establish standards 

of service for the electrical utilities as it had for gas. Meanwhile, the 

electrical industry continued to seek Bureau help with its measuring instruments, in particular the ammeters, voltmeters, wattmeters, and watthoux 

meters by which its power production and consumer rates were measured. 

For almost 40 years, beginning with his arrival at the Bureau in 1903, Dr. 

Herbert B. Brooks dominated this section of the electrical division, devising 

a long series of ingenious new instruments for more accurate and rapid 

measurement of current and voltage. And the Bureau aided in other ways. 

As electric power consumption rose, not only Federal agencies, but business 

firms, and the public reacted to what they considered excessively high electric 

bills and called on the Bureau for meter tests. The meters were not at fault. 

The tests proved them to be much more reliable than generally supposed, and 

if neglected they actually tended to favor the consumer.25 The Bureau was swamped as company meters poured in for calibration. 

As long-distance power transmission developed out on the Pacific 

coast, Dr. Paul G. Agnew began his pioneer studies in the analysis and testing 

of current transformers for high-voltage power stations. Out of the work 

came the insulating materials (dielectrics) program of the Bureau, begun 

regulations for manufactured gas and gas service" in the second edition, 1913, and to 

"Standards for gas service" in the third edition, 1915. A fourth edition came out in 

1920, and in 1934 was superseded by C405. 

NBS Annual Report 1911, pp. 8—9. 24 See ch. V pp. 263—265. 22 Letter, Rosa to Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Dec. 2, 1910 (NBS Box 9, IEP). 
116 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

about 1912, and 2 years later the first high-voltage studies.26 Other investigations in Rosa's enterprising electrical division in that decade included 

preparation over several years of a complete set of copper wire tables, for 

the American Institute of Electrical Engineers; preliminary studies in color 

photometry, a development of the gas flame standards work, later transferred 

to the optics division; and photometric measurement of locomotive head. 

lights, carried out at the request of several States preparing new regulations 

for the railroads.27 

Another kind of railroad problem came to the Bureau when the 

Interstate Commerce Commission, aroused by mounting complaints, re- quested that a study be made of railroad, elevator, grain-hopper, and other 

large-capacity scales used in determining freight charges in interstate shipments. Few States inspected scales, the Bureau found', and many railroads 

maintained such scanty supervision over their freight scales that some were 

little more than "guessing machines." As a result, railroad freight scales, 

upon which more than $2 billion annually in revenues were determined, had 

long been a source of bitter complaint and litigation. So high had feeling 

run against the railroads, Dr. Stratton reported, that they were more than 

willing to cooperate with the Bureau in order to "get right" with the public 

again.28 

In 1913, with an appropriation from Congress of $25,000 for 'the 

investigation, the Bureau had a special railway scale test car built, hitched 

it to a series of slow freights headed north, and began testing railroad scales 

in the States of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. The 

results matched the earlier experience with market weights and measures. 

Allowing a fair tolerance for such scales, between 75 and 80 percent of the 

track scales tested were candidates for outright rejection, some weighing 

short by as much as 1,349 pounds with a load of 35,000 pounds and 2,459 

pounds with loads of 70,000 pounds. Acquiring another test car, the 

Bureau extended its investigation of scales into the Midwest and the South.29 

The first high-voltage work began in a room in North building in 1911, when the 

Bureau acquired 3 voltage transformers, none with a maximum voltage exceeding 2,300 

volts. The Bureau's high-tension laboratory, adjoining East building and housing two 

100,000-volt transformers, was completed in July 1914. Present-day surge generators 

at the Bureau deliver 2 million volts. (See correspondence in NBS Blue Folder Box 

80, and interviews with Dr. Silsbee.) 

NBS Annual Report 1909, pp. 5, 7; Annual Report 1911, p. 8. For the extensive 

correspondence on the copper wire tables program, 1910—14, see NBS Box 9, IER. Rosa's 

range of interests is displayed in his article, "The work of the electrical division of the 

Bureau of Standards," Science, 35, 8 (1912). 

Hearings * * * 1914 (Nov. 26, 1912), pp. 305—306. 

29NBS Annual Report 1912, p. 14, et seq.; Science, 37, 937 (1913); NBS C83, "Specifications for * * * railroad track scales" (1920; revised as C333, 1927). For correspond- ence on the investigation, 1912—20, see NBS Box 20, IWS. 
117 

The first iVBS railway scale test car for the standardization of railroad track and master 

scales. 

Its equipment consisted of eight 10,000-pound weights, four 2,500-pound weights, 

10,000 pounds of weights, and the truck itself, a 5,000-pound weight which 

carried the test load on the rails. 

Together with small auxiliary weights, the total testing equipment made it possible 

to determine weights between one-ten thousandth pound and 105,000 pounds or over 50 tons. 

The crane for handling the weights was powered by an electrical generator driven 

by a gasoline engine. The equipment, mounted in a standard boxcar, was constructed 

for the Bureau by the A. H. Emery Co. of Connecticut, which built many of the 

Bureau's heavy test machines. 
118 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

As the railroads, as well as manufacturing concerns and State 

agencies, set up inspection procedures under Bureau direction and largecapacity scales began to register more nearly true (i.e., with a tolerable 

error of 200 pounds in 100,000 pounds gross weight), the Bureau test cars 

with their master scales still continued their rounds, adjusting track scales and 

calibrating the scale cars that were acquired by the railroads. At a standstill 

during the war, the Bureau cars resumed their travels across the Nation into 

the 1930's, when the depression curtailed all but a fraction of this work.3° 

Yet another railroad investigation was prompted by a series of alarming statistics that appeared in the Interstate Commerce Commission annual 

report for 1912. Legislation enacted 2 years previously had for the first 

time required monthly reports of railroad accidents, and the returns, disclosing deaths and injuries resulting from collisions and derailments alone 

at the rate of almost 13,000 a year, shocked the Commission into further 

study. Going back into records for the years 1902 to 1912, the ICC came 

up with a total of 41,578 derailments caused by broken rails, broken wheels, 

flanges, and. axles. Faulty maintenance, inferior iron and steel, severe 

service, and excessive wheel loads were suspected. The Secretary of Commerce urged the Bureau to make a thorough study of the cause of railroad 

accidents and related problems.31 

Specimens of failed parts, sent to the Bureau by the ICC and the 

railroads, were subjected to chemical, microscopic, and mechanical tests. 

In every instance of rail failure, hidden defects or splits, identified as transverse fissures, were found in the interior of the rails. In track inspections made by the Bureau in the field, as many as four or five of these 

fissures or points of internal stress were found in a single mile of track.32 

With the cooperation of the big steel companies, the recently 

organized metallurgical division at the Bureau and the engineering and 

chemical divisions began an investigation of the constitutents of railroad 

iron and steel, of heat stress and heat treatment and related problems in the 

manufacturing process. Here seemed to be the source of failed rails and 

wheels. The steel industry, behind Europe in this tec}mology, had insuffi30 See track scale testing appropriations, NBS Annual Report 1934, p. 76. 

In 1917 Bureau scale testing was extended to the scales used in weighing coal at mines 

(NBS Annual Report 1918, pp. 28—30), and in 1936 to vehicle or truck scales (NBS 

Annual Report 1937, pp. 61—62). As the programs began, the relative gross errors in the 

scales on which miners' wages were based and those on which safe operation on the 

highway depended matched or even exceeded those found earlier in railroad scales. 

"ICC Annual Report Dec. 16, 1912, pp. 53, 63; letter, Secretary of Commerce Redfield to 

SWS, July 1, 1913, and attached correspondence, 1913—15 (NBS Box 11, IM). 3° "Report on the formation of transverse fissures in steel parts * * (ICC Report by 

James E. Howard, NBS engineer physicist, 1923) L/C: TF258.U6. 
STANDARDS FOR PUBLIC UTILITIES 119 

cient knowledge of rail and wheel characteristics, the Bureau metallurgists 

reported, and had not established uniform practices in their manufacture.33 

The Bureau investigation of railway materials, begun with special 

funds appropriated by Congress in 1912, continued until 1923 when the 

program was absorbed in the statutory research work of the metallurgical 

division. Answers were slow in coming, and during the war years railroad 

accidents hit an alitime peak. But from 1921 to 1930, as better steel 

through better technology went into rails and rolling stock, the rate of accidents from these causes fell by more than two-thirds.34 

When the Bureau began its "high iron" investigation, it was already 

deeply involved in another rail problem, this one concerning city street cars. 

Of all its public service investigations, few• defied the concerted efforts of 

Bureau physicists, utility company engineers, and municipalities as did 

the problem of electrolytic corrosion. The trouble began in the year 

1887 when Frank J. Sprague laid out the first commercially successful 

trolley system in this country, 12 miles of track in the streets of Richmond, 

Va. In the next decade more than 2,000 miles of trolley track were put down 

in cities and towns and out into their suburbs. By 1917, over 40,000 miles of 

street and interurban railways spidered the Nation. New York City alone con- tained almost 700 miles of trolley track, and it was actually possible to 

ride from Brooklyn, up the length of Manhattan, out through Westchester to 

Bridgeport, on to New Haven and Providence, all the way to Boston 

by street car, paying a total of 48 five-cent fares for the trip.35 

The majority of the trolleys operated on Sprague's overhead wire 

system, with the electric current flowing into the rails through the car 

wheels after passing through the car motor. In theory, the current then 

flowed back to the generating station by way of the tracks and earth, com- pleting the electrical circuit. In fact, much of the current strayed on its 

•return, following paths of least resistance through underground pipes, 

cables, and metal structures. 

The first signs of trouble turned up in Boston in 1902 when, ex- cavating to repair a break, the water mains under Boylston Street were 

found badly corroded. The moisture and ordinary salts in the earth 

"Hearings * * * 1913 (Feb. 10, 1912), pp. 761—762; Hearings * * * 1915 (Jan. 27, 

1914), p. 677. 

"From an annual average of 13,000 collisions and derailments in the period 1902—12, 

they rose to 25,000 in 1918 and 1919, to more than 36,000 in 1920, and then began a steady decline. By 1930 the total had dropped to 12,313. See Annual Table No. 61 

in ICC Accident Bulletin Nos. 70 (1918), 74 (1919), 78 (1920), 99 (1930). L/C: 

HE1780.A2. 

"Robert A. Futterman, The Future of Our Cities (New York: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 52—53. 
120 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

made soil a fine conductor of electricity, and current straying from the 

trolley tracks into nearby water pipes and gas mains ate away the metal 

by electrolytic action as the current flowed out again. 

The same condition was found elsewhere in the lead sheathing 

around telephone and telegraph wires that had been put underground after 

the series of city conflagrations around the turn of the century. When electrolytic pitting and corrosion was also discovered on underground light and 

power cables, at the foot of bridge structures, and in the reinforced con- crete supports of piers and buildings, the press, the utilities, and construction 

people raised cries of alarm. Losses were estimated in the millions of 

dollars as a result of leakage from gas and water mains, the necessity 

of repairs and replacement, and devaluation of capital investment, to say 

nothing of the fire hazard traceable to electrolysis and the losses due to 

interruption of service. 

lii 1910 Stratton reported to a Senate committee that the problem 

had become nationwide, and the Bureau was granted a special 3.year 

appropriation to investigate earth electrolysis and find ways to mitigate 

its effects. Dr. Rosa's first move was to bring in Burton McCollum and 

Kirk H. Logan, two talented young electrical engineers then teaching in 

the Midwest, to head the investigation. 

Working with municipal authorities and engineers in St. Louis, 

Chicago, Philadelphia, in Elyria, Ohio, and Springfield, Mass., McCollum 

and Logan identified the nature of the problem, developed procedures to 

enable utility engineers to make their own electrolysis surveys, and as the 

congressional appropriations came to an end, had devised an insulated 

feeder system as one way of mitigating electrolytic corrosion. The street 

railways, confronted with litigation brought by the utilities and hoping 

for a more economical solution than insulation, pressed the Bureau to 

continue its research. Aware that the problem was yet far from solution, 

the Bureau resumed the investigation under its regular funds. 

With the organization in 1919 of the American Committee on Elec. 

trolysis, representing the principal national associations of utility com- panies, a research subcommittee was appointed to work with the Bureau. 

Of considerable importance was the development by the Bureau of an 

earth-current meter in 1921. In maintenance testing of pipe systems that 

the utilities established, it accurately measured the currents directly re- sponsible for electrolytic corrosion and hence the rate of corrosion. Al. 

though electrolysis seemed impossible to eliminate entirely, almost 20 

methods of mitigating it were devised by Bureau and utility 

NBS Annual Reports 1911, et seq.; NBS C401, "Abstracts * * * of NBS publications on stray-current electrolysis" (Shepard, 1933). 
STANDARDS FOR PUBLIC UTILITIES 121 

One phase of the electrolysis problem, the study of the corrosive 

action of soil itself on metals, without the agency of stray currents, con- tinued. Urged by the utilities, particularly the gas companies transporting 

and distributing natural and manufactured gas via pipelines cross country 

and in the cities, the Bureau set up its Corrosion Laboratory in 1922. 

After more than two decades of research in corrosive-resistant materials 

and protective coatings, a new approach through cathodic protection came 

to seem most promising. Its principle was well known, going back to 

early 19th-century experiments made by Sir Humphrey Davy. As applied 

to soil corrosion, it involved the use of replaceable zinc anodes attached 

to the underground structure to be protected, making the structure cathodic 

or resistant almost indefinitely to the adjacent soil.37 

If electrolysis wrought great damage to property but posed little life 

hazard, almost every other manifestation of electricity, from its generation 

to its consumption, threatened both. The mining industry that produced the 

coal for electricity was among the first to electrify many of its operations. 

But electric sparks often proved disastrous in the mines, and in 1909 the 

American Mining Congress called on the Bureau for assistance in setting 

up standards of electrical practice in mines and mining practices.38 

The Bureau investigation for mines led to other studies of life and 

property hazards in the generation of electricity, both in its distribution at 

high voltages and in its industrial and domestic uses. These in turn prompted studies of lightning hazards, particularly as they affected the power industry.39 In 1914, assembling the data amassed, the Bureau published a 

comprehensive set of safety rules for the electrical industry. A year later 

it prepared the first nationwide electrical safety code4° 

Like the standards proposed for the gas industry earlier, the electrical 

safety code met strong resistance for a number of years. The very formulation of a safety code, protested the industry, gave undue publicity to the hazards of electricity. Its recommendations, and above all its origin in a Federal 

C450, "Underground corrosion" (Logan, 1945), superseded by NBS C579 

(1957); RP1876 (Dension and Romanoff, 1948). 

"NBS C23, "Standardization of electrical practice in mines" (1910). Although the 

Bureau of Mines for a time protested the NBS investigation, it later acknowledged that 

its own interest was in "improving mining practices," not standardizing them. Letter, 

SWS to Director, Bureau of Mines, Oct. 14, 1914, and attached correspondence (NBS Box 

9, IES). With the NBS circular as guide, the Bureau of Mines assumed responsibility 

for electrical safety in mining operations. Letter, SWS to Congressman William B. 

McKinley, May 28, 1920 (NBS Box 10, IG). 

"T56, "Protection of life and property against lightning" (Peters, 1915), superseded 

by M95 (1929) and H13 (1929); M92, "Code for protection against lightning" (1929), 

superseded by H12 (1929), H17 (1934), H21 (1937), H40 (1945). 

40 NBS C49, "Safety rules * * * in the operation and maintenance of electrical equipment and lines" (1914); NBS C54, "Proposed national electrical safety code" (1915). 
122 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

agency, seemed an infringement of management and a threat to the independence of the industry.41 Not a few city and State commissions, persuaded 

by the industry that the Bureau was setting intolerable standards, took up the 

proposed code only to let it languish. 

The Bureau, with no authority but the congressional appropriation for 

the work, found it necessary to issue a special circular explaining the code 

and its scope, "to give [it] more publicity * * * and gain wider acceptance 

of it." Driving home its point, the circular included accounts of 100 typical 

electrical accidents, most of them fatal, taken from the newspapers of 1913, as representative of what was happening daily throughout the United States. 

Yet up to 1920 less than half the States had adopted the code or any part 

of it.42 

But the years of unregulated operation of public utilities were running 

out. The State of Wisconsin had set up the first public service commission 

in 1907. Less than a decade later some 30 States and twice as many cities 

had established similar commissions or enacted regulating ordinances. Confronted with often hastily drawn and confusing rules and regulations by 

State and city authorities, the utilities in time came to welcome the Bureau's 

efforts to apply scientific and uniform principles to their services. 

In 1913 Dr. Rosa reported that the Bureau, in cooperation with the 

interstate Commerce Commission or with State commissions, was engaged 

in almost a score of investigations involving engineering problems and 

standards relating to the natural monopolies. All in one way or another 

looked to the resolHtion of "the mutual distrust and mutual misunderstandThe utilities misunderstood Bureau recommendations and for years complained that 

by its appropriations Congress was "extending the field of regulation and control by the 

Bureau of Standards over the public utilities of the country." Letter, Acting Secretary 

of Commerce to Congressman Carl Hayden, May 26, 1919, and other correspondence in 

NBS Box 2, AG. 

NBS C72, "Scope and application of the national electrical safety code" (1918). 

Letter, Rosa to Prof. A. C. Lanier, University of Missouri, Feb. 26, 1918 (NBS Box 9, 

IES), recounted Bureau efforts to promulgate the code. 

NBS C72 (3d ed., 1920), also issued as a handbook, H3, said the code had been approved by the American Engineering Standards Committee and adopted by administrative 

authorities in nearly half the States. The revised fourth edition in 1926 (issued as H4 in 

1928) said this revision "more nearly meets the views of the various interests involved, some of which are to a certain extent conflicting." 

For many years the able assistant of Dr. Lloyd in negotiations on the electrical safety code 

was Dr. J. Franklin Meyer, who represented the Bureau on the AESC electrical com- mittee. Much of the success in establishing a national code was through his efforts, 

and the series of handbooks on safety rules in the operation of electrical 'stations and 

electrical equipment that appeared between 1920 and 1944 were the joint work of Lloyd 

and Meyer. 
STANDARDS FOR PUBLIC UTILITIES 123 

ing existing between the leaders of the financial and industrial world, on the one hand, and the great body of the American people, on the other." 

Dr. Stratton, however, did not feel that these scattered investigations 

by the Bureau in a few of the public utilities were enough. Standards of 

service and safety applied to all the utilities, he told Redfield, the new Secretary of Commerce, and could best be provided by making the Bureau the 

central "place of reference and * * * clearing house for scientific and technical matters pertaining to the public utilities."" 

The Secretary agreed, and with his support Stratton proposed to 

Congress a large-scale study covering the public interest in all utilities, including gas, water, light and power, telephone, and street railways. It would 

include "the study of public relations questions, the preparation of specifications regarding the quality of service, methods of testing and inspection em- ployed by municipalities and commissions, safety rules for use by the utility 

companies to safeguard their employees and the public, and the collection 

and distribution of information by published papers and through 

correspondence." 

With little debate, Congress in 1914 appropriated a special fund of 

$25,000 for the investigation of public utility standards. (By 1920 the 

annual appropriation exceeded $100,000 and continued at that level into 

the 1930's.) To allay the misapprehensions and continuing hostility of 

the utilities, the Bureau in articles, talks, and through friendly editors 

assured industry that its work was "not inquisitorial * * * but is thoroughly 

scientific, being handled by impartial engineers concerned only in the study 

of economic problems." 46 With its congressional appropriation and, by inference, the directive 

to proceed, the Bureau began the preparation of a circular (4 years 

after that.for the gas. industry) on-uniform standards for electric service. 

Thirty-three States and the District of Columbia, in many cases with the 

help of the Bureau, had already enacted laws regulating electrical service 

to some degree or another; evidence, said the Bureau circular, that "it is now generally recognized that the supply of electrical service is a natural 

monopoly and should be regulated." The standards proposed, the circular 

Senator Root, quoted in Rosa's article, "The function of research in the regulation of 

natural monopolies," Science, 37, 579 (1913). 

"See letter, SWS to Director, Department of Public Works, Philadelphia, Dec. 9, 1913 

(NBS Box 4, AGC). 

"NBS Annual Report 1915, p. 60; SWS letter of Mar. 10, 1914, inserted in Hearings * * * 1915 (Jan. 27, 1914), pp. 977—980. 

"Herbert T. Wade, "The NBS and standards for public utilities," Eng. Mag. 49, 240 

(1915). Wade was science and technology editor for the New International Encyclopedia and author of many books and articles on weights and measures, the metric systern, electricity, and popular science. 
124 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

explained, were principally to unify existing laws and regulations, to ensure 

the adequacy and safety of electrical service, and to establish procedures for 

inspection laboratories set up by the State commissions.47 

Still educating the public and the utilities, another circular issued in 

1917 described the scope of Bureau investigations on behalf of the utilities, 

its gas and electric work, gas analysis studies, the progress made in gaining 

acceptance of the national electrical safety code, its work on electrolysis, and 

its railroad investigations. All these were to continue and be extended as new problems arose, while in the planning stage were a gas safety code and circulars on street lighting and on telephone service and apparatus.48 

The Bureau was well on the way to becoming the clearinghouse Dr. 

Stratton intended, its investigations springing from the need of the utilities 

to avoid long.drawn out or expensive litigation, or unfair and inconsistent 

regulation by local authority. As a spokesman for the Bureau said, it 

assembled facts in field and laboratory studies and reduced them to standard 

practices, "which may be adopted or not as those concerned may elect, and 

the published record of which will be available to all." Held temporarily 

in check by the war, by 1920 special appropriations to the Bureau for public 

utility standards were exceeded only by those for industrial research, the 

testing of structural materials, and the testing of Government materials. 

TESTING GOVERNMENT MATERIALS 

While electrical, optical, pyrometrical and other fundamental 

ment work at the Bureau grew steadily in the years prior to the war, structural and miscellaneous materials research and testing and calibration soared. 

In the period 191 1—17 the volume of testing work at the Bureau almost tripled, 

with engineering, structural and miscellaneous materials tests alone rising 

from 38 percent to 84 percent of the total.5° The establishment of a General 

Supply Committee in the Treasury Department in 1910, encouraging purchase 

by specification and standardization of miscellaneous supplies bought for the 

NBS C56, "Standards for electric service" (1916, 2d ed., 1923). 

48 NBS C68, "Public utility service standards of quality and safety" (1917). Of the circulars projected, only that on standards of telephone service later appeared in a new publication, as NBS C112 (1921). 

48 Wade, "The NBS and standards for public utilities." 5° In the fiscal year 1910—11, approximately 62 percent of the 80,100 tests and calibrations 

carried out in the Bureau laboratories were in weights and measures, temperature, optics, 

photometry, and chemistry, the remaining 38 percent in engineeting, structural, and miscellaneous materials. By 1916, less than 16 percent of the year's total of 217,400 tests and 

calibrations were in basic measurements; all else comprised physical and mechanical tests 

of materials. In 1917, as the Bureau shifted to wartime research, the number declined 

to 155,800, still almost 80 percent in materials. See NBS Annual Reports 1911—17. 
TESTING GOVERNMENT MATERIALS 125 

Government, sharply increased Bureau testing. The transfer to the Bureau 

of the Geological Survey materials program occurred less than a month later. 

The two events coincided with a Government building boom just getting under 

way, and Dr. Stratton with his enormous interest in the artifacts of commerce saw for the Bureau an opportunity for research in the widest sense, in the 

instruments, materials, and products of American industry. 

The principal structural materials that the Bureau began testing were cement, clays, lime, structural iron and steel, and protective coatings. Miscellaneous materials included Government housekeeping items ranging from 

rubberbands and rubber belting to paper, ink, paints, textiles, and cordage. 

Initially limited to the determination of their physical, chemical, and me- chanical properties, the tests soon raised problems of their manufacture and 

performance, requiring full scale investigations. What began as simple testing soieiy for the information of Government agencies in many instances became programs of product research, necessitating close cooperation with the 

industries and trade associations involved. 

While not entirely representative of the development in each of the 

materials investigated, a brief account of the Bureau's work on cement is 

illustrative. 

In 1911 the cement laboratories of the Bureau tested over 23,900 

samples, representing almost 21⁄2 million barrels of cement purchased for 

Government construction projects. The sampling required 521,000 physical 

tests, for fineness, specific gravity, tensile strength, and time of setting. These 

tests did little more than determine whether the samples met current Govern. 

ment specifications. In many instances the specifications were far from clear 

or consistent, and nowhere did the Bureau find any two Government agencies 

purchasing cement upon the same specifications. 

Early in 1912 the Bureau called manufacturers and Federal engineers to the first Portland Cement Conference, in order to consider preparation of a single standard specification. As a result, a Presidental Executive 

order was issued on April 30, 1912, declaring that all portland cement purchased by the Government was to conform to the specification agreed upon. 

Four years passed before final concurrence was reached and an acceptable 

specification was adopted by the principals, the American Society for Test. 

ing Materials and the American Society of Civil Engineers.51 

Even the most elementary of physical and chemical tests of cement 

disclosed the inadequacy or imprecision of many procedures and instruments in common use in the industry, and the test sections and the engineering group at the Bureau set to work developing better test methods and 

51 NBS C33, "U.S. Government specifications for portland cement" (1912); letter, 

Secretary of Commerce to Engineer Commissioner, Washington, D.C., Dec. 26, 1916 

(NBS Box 15, IRC) - 
126 ELECTRICITY, RAiLROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

equipment. Under Stratton, the lines of research at the Bureau were far 

from rigid, and he worked hard to keep them from becoming so. After. 

noons he toured the laboratories inquiring about the work in each, beginning 

his tour the next day where he had left off the previous afternoon. In this 

way he carried ideas and problems from one division to another. Thus it was that Dr. Wilmer Souder, in the weights and measures division, hearing 

of the extreme difficulty with cement sieve measurements, became interested 

and devised new 100. and 200-line ruled scales for testing and certifying the 

sieves used by the cement industry.52 

Improved test procedures and instruments disclosed the need for 

better understanding of the constitution and characteristics of cement 

terials, and as.testing became routine, the Bureau extended its investigations. 

A petrographic laboratory set up at Pittsburgh studied the raw materials of 

cement, and an experimental cement plant with grinding apparatus and 

rotary kilns made it possible to determine changes in cement properties by 

various methods of manufacture. Next, Bureau staff members developed a granulometric analyzer and separator, to study fine grinding of cement. 

Before long the test principles and equipment developed for cement were being applied to other building materials, to sands and silica cements, con- cretes and concrete aggregates, mortars and plasters, stucco, marls, stones, 

and paving blocks. 

Meanwhile, engineers at the Bureau subjected blocks of concrete and 

full-scale concrete columns to compression and tensile strength tests. The 

group at Atlantic City, investigating the action of sea water on cements, 

mortars, and concretes, established a second exposure station at Charleston, 

S.C. At Pittsburgh and Washington studies were made of the effect of alkali 

salts on cement, of temperature on its hardening, of the permeability of 

cement to water, and its resistance to heat, moisture, and pressure. The 

steady stream of reports announcing the results of these investigations brought 

inquiries from architects, engineers, contractors, and builders for still other 

tests and investigations that they were not equipped to make, and from the 

general public, for help with cement problems in and around the home. 

Much the same pattern of development, from simple testing of Government purchases to devising test procedures, new instrumentation, and 

finally to the establishment of a full-fledged technological research program 

in the product, occurred in other materials used in large quantities by Government agencies—in clays and clay products including brick, building tile, 

porcelain, terra cotta, fire clay, glass, and white-ware china; in lime, lime 

mortar, and gypsum; protective coatings such as asphalt, felt, paints, oils, 

"NBS C39, "Specifications for and measurement of standard sieves" (1912); cor- respondence in NES Box 19, IWL; interview with Dr. Souder, Jan. 16, 1961. 
TESTING GOVERNMENT MATERIALS 127 

and varnishes; lubricating oils; rubber and rubber materials, papers of all 

kinds, textiles and fibers, rope and cordage, and leather and leather goods.53 

Gradually a procedure evolved to bring the Bureau's testing program 

into closer association with the industries making these materials. At an 

early stage in each investigation, manufacturers' representatives, laboratory 

personnel, and industrial engineers were invited to the Bureau to discuss 

their problems. To assure as wide cooperation as possible, the Bureau held 

conferences with industrial associations, technical societies, and educational 

institutions concerned with the materials investigated by the Bureau. And 

research that started with establishment of a specification before long enabled 

the Bureau to suggest better materials or methods in the manufacture of the 

product, improved quality control, new uses for the product, and even utilization of waste materials. 

The Government testing program that began with a batch of incandescent lamps in 1904 achieved its main outlines by World War I. Almost 

three.quarters of the work of the chemical division was in materials testing 

and research. Dr. Stratton, in addition to heading the optical group, had 

taken over the new engineering research division, to supervise personally the 

construction of special test apparatus and to study and test instruments, 

devices, or machinery of intereSt to the Bureau but outside the province 

of its scientific divisions.54 And out of the testing of structural iron and 

steel came another new division, for research in metallurgy, under Dr. George 

K. Burgess. 

In charge of high temperature investigations since 1903, Dr. Burgess 

had done notable work in optical pyrometry, high temperature platinum 

resistance thermometry, determination of melting points of pure metals, 

and with Dr. Waidner, chief of the heat division, had proposed a theoretical 

absolute standard of brightness that was destined to be realized experimentally two decades later. Meanwhile, the testing of engineering instruments, metals, and metal materials—from alloy wire and flexible copper hose 

to car couplers, boilers, and girders—to see that they met Government spec. 

ifications, had led the Bureau into the chemistry of metals, into studies of 

their electrical, magnetic, and mechanical properties, and into the field of 

stress measurement. Frequently consulted on these tests, Burgess became 

especially interested in the properties of metals at high temperatures and in 

the working of metals in foundry processes. Despite the fact that iron and 

steel was the industrial giant of America and its metallurgical processes were carried out with great technological virtuosity, Burgess found a distressing 

lack of application of scientific principles.55 

See NBS C45, "The testing of materials" (1913). 

NBS Annual Report 1914, p. 15 

Burgess, "Metallography and metallurgy at the Bureau of Standards," Met. & Chem. 

Eng.1O,1 (1912). 
128 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

In 1911, at the suggestion of Henry M. Howe, professor of metallurgy at Columbia University and a recently appointed member of the 

Visiting Committee to the Bureau, Burgess undertook the determination of 

the critical points on their heating and cooling curves of a number of special steels. As the investigation continued, Burgess won Dr. Stratton to his 

proposed plan for a long-range investigation of basic physical metallurgy. 

In 1913, as the investigation of rail and wheel failures for the Nation's 

railroads began, his metallurgy section in the heat division was raised to 

divisional status.56 

An allied field even more empirically operated at that time than 

metallurgy was that of electrodeposition, the deposition by electrolysis of 

metallic coatings on a variety of materials. As electrotyping, it was widely 

used to produce facsimile plates of metal type from a wax impression. Electroforming was employed in the phonograph industry to make master plates 

and molds to produce recording discs. Electroplating coated metals to improve their appearance and protect them against corrosion. 

In 1913 the Government Printing Office asked the Bureau for help 

with their electrotyping baths. A young man in the chemistry division, 

Dr. William Blum, who had been preparing standard samples since his arrival at the Bureau in 1909, was sent to see what he could do. The GPO, 

he found, had no method for controlling the composition of the bath, and 

there was little or nothing in print on the subject. His calculations for re- storing the sulfuric acid content of the solution as it was used up in the 

plating process solved the difficulty, and Blum's career in electrodeposition 

began.57 

Blum's work on the structure of electrodeposits, on current distribution and throwing power in solutions, on pH control of the baths, and on alloy deposition was among the first scientific studies in this country to 

supplant the hit-or-miss information upon which the industry rested. His 

introduction in 1921 of electrolytic reproduction of plates used in printing 

currency at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing replaced the hand method 

of rolling into case-hardened soft steel, which was capable of approximately 

70,000 impressions at best, while electrolytic plates with a chromium surface that could be recoated permitted as many as a million impressions. He 

directed electrodeposition research at the Bureau for over 30 years. 

Not all Bureau work with metals was to be as rewarding as that in 

Burgess's division or in Blum's section. One such instance was the ingenious 

instrument developed during the early work on metals, a new type of 

permeameter, devised in 1909 by Dr. Charles W. Burrows of the magnetic 

Bureau Announcement No. 28, July 1, 1913 (NBS Box 3, AG). 

NBS C52, "Regulation of electrotyping solutions" (1915, 2d ed., 1916); Hearings * * * 1918 (Dec. 1, p. 483; interview with Dr. Blum, Oct. 15, 1963. 
TESTING GOVERNMENT MATERIALS 129 

section, from an idea supplied by Rosa. For several years Burrows' 

permeameter became the standird instrument for determining the magetic 

properties of irons and steels, and was used in the preparation of magnetic 

standard bars which the Bureau sold as standard samples to manufacturers 

of electrical equipment.58 

Elated by early results with the permeameter, Burrows became con- vinced that a close correlation existed between the magnetic and mechanical 

properties of materials and went on to develop magnetic test equipment 

which he was certain had great promise. The iron and steel industry had 

long sought a simple and effective means for detecting flaws produced in 

metal during the manufacturing process, as in rifle barrels and prison bars, 

in steel beams and track rails, to avoid the slow and costly destruction tests 

otherwise necessary. 

During the Bureau investigation of railroad materials involved in 

derailments and wrecks, Burrows and his group worked to develop a magnetic 

method for quick determination of such flaws as the mysterious transverse 

fissures found in steel rails. So promising did the first tests appear that 

the Bureau reported the method might "possibly become commercially 

feasible." In 1918, with special apparatus he constructed incorporating 

his permeameter, Burrows left the Bureau to set up a magnetic analysis 

firm to do this kind of testing. 

Subsequently, other workers at the Bureau found that magnetic and 

mechanical properties in metals showed little true correlation, and as a result the Bureau abandoned its magnetic standard sample work. For almost a decade the Bureau continued its efforts to develop magnetic tests for proving 

metals. Except in the case of soft steel and small metal objects the tests in 

most instances were inconclusive. So, to his disappointment, were Burrows' 

private efforts, and his firm folded with his death in 1925. Continuing 

research at the Bureau indicated that with the permeameter it was "not 

possible to realize any units of magnetic quantity in concrete form," and that 

it was "only by the greatest care in the selection of test specimens and 

manipulation of testing apparatus that an accuracy of 1 percent can be 

attained." 60 Although this early work on the magnetic properties of metals—a 

phase of Bureau research in the physical constants—led to largely negative 

results, some of the most successful work on the determination of physical 

constants was soon after to be done in the temperature laboratories of the 

NBS C17, "Magnetic testing" (1909). 

NBS Annual Report 1915, P. 50; Annual Report 1917, pp. 52—54; Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), p.955. 

"NBS C17 (4th ed., 1926), p.. 22, and repeated in its sucessors, C415 (1937), and 

C456 (1946). 
130 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

Bureau, particularly that on the temperature scale and on refrigeration 

constants. 

In 1909 the American Society of Refrigerating Engineers, in search of 

physical data for more efficient refrigeration, asked the Bureau to determine 

the specific heats of several calcium chloride brines. Upon completion of 

the work several years passed while the heat division which had made the 

study went on with investigations in the constants of gases for the use of gas 

engineers, in heats of combustion, its preparation of standard combustion 

samples, and its experiments preliminary to establishing new fixed points 

on the standard temperature scale maintained by the Bureau. 

Then in 1913, at the request of the refrigeration industry, Congress 

appropriated the sum of $15,000 for an investigation of the physical constants 

involved in the construction and operation of large-scale refrigeration ma- chinery, such as that used in meat-packing and other cold storage plants and 

in refrigerated cars. Under Dr. Hobart C. Dickinson, D. R. Harper 3d, and 

N. S. Osborne, studies were made of such fundamental constants as the 

specific heat of ice, the specific and latent heats of the liquids and vapors 

used in refrigeration, and their density and pressure-temperature relations. 

Engineering aspects of the investigation included the study of insulating and 

other materials used in the construction of large-scale refrigeration structures. 

It was, Stratton reported to Congress, "a splendid piece of work" and a distinct contribution in the field of physical constants.61 By 1918, when most 

of the original staff was diverted to military research, the basic investigation 

had been completed and the accumulated data were reported to the industry. 

The chemistry division took over certain portions of the work as a long-term 

project. 

A year after the study of refrigeration constants began, Congress 

authorized an appropriation for another special investigation, a study of 

fire-resistant properties of building materials. Fires were claiming thousands of lives annually in this country, with property losses exceeding $250 

million—lO times the rate of any country in Europe. Particularly baffling 

to many, in the series of disastrous fires that struck American cities around 

the turn of the century, was the fact that skyscrapers and lesser structures 

purported to be fireproof often burned out as completely as the older buildings. It was an investigation long overdue. 

Upon surveying city building regulations, Bureau engineers found 

them "full of the most absurd data regulating the properties of materials." 62 Hearings * * * 1919 (Jan. 25, 1918), p. 979; letter, SWS to Secretary of Commerce, 

May 31, 1922 (NBS Box 17, ITH). 

[Senate] Hearings * * * 1913 (May 22, 1912), p. 236. Stratton also noted that 

"The greatest [fire] losses are in the cities having fire laws regulations" (Hearings * * * 1913, Feb. 10, 1912, p. 759). 
TESTING GOVERNMENT MATERIALS 131 

In many of the codes it was assumed that brick, mortar, plaster, cement, and 

metals were uniformly fire resistant. No distinction was made between the 

various kinds and compositions of bricks, cements, metals, and other materials. Rules for their use had been set up without any real knowledge of 

their melting points or their behavior at high temperatures, without any real 

knowledge of the stress and support limits of common building materials 

under attack by fire. 

In a joint undertaking with the National Fire Protection Association 

and the Underwriters' Laboratories, the Bureau aimed at a thorough study 

of the behavior and safety of building materials in various types of construction under all possible fire conditions. The study would furnish architects, 

builders, State and city building bureaus, and insurance interests with fundamental engineering data long needed but nowhere available. In nominal 

charge of the program was Simon H. Ingberg, born in Norway and trained 

in structural engineering in this country, who was with a midwestern con- struction company when the Bureau brought him to Washington to plan the 

investigation. Less than a year later a fire-resistance section was established 

in the heat division, with Ingberg in charge. 

But so broad became the scope of the investigation that it soon involved almost every one of the scientific and engineering laboratories of the 

Bureau. It included high-temperature measurements, fire tests, and thermal 

conductivity studies by the heat division; solution of composition and con- struction problems by the chemistry and structural materials divisions; electrical wiring and safety code studies by the electrical division; and the behavior of structural materials under heat as a special study in the weights and 

measures division.63 

Besides data furnished city and State authorities on the fire-resistant 

and heat-insulating properties of common building materials and those used 

in fire-resistive construction, on fire tests of building columns, wood and 

metal frame partitions and walls, the Bureau evolved a standard time-temperature curve which specified the furnace temperatures to which the elements 

of a structure became subject in any period of time up to 8 hours. Building 

materials and construction design were classified by their hours of ultimate 

fire resistance, making it possible to set up regulations that would insure 

building into any structure a reasonable degree of fire resistance.64 

As the program developed, panel-testing furnaces were constructed 

and partial buildings, steel and concrete columns and numerous other structures were erected and destroyed in endless controlled tests. For years 

Bureau members in the project made hurried trips out of Washington to probe 

63NBS Annual Report 1914, PP. 29—30. 

See BH14, "Recommended minimum requirements for fire resistance in buildings" 

(J. S. Taylor, 1931), summarizing more than a decade of research. 
Fire-severity tests of buildings, deliberately made on abandoned structures in downtown Washington the 1920's. In the picture at left, the walls of a 

non-fire-resistive building began to bulge after 40 minutes. In the picture at right, a five-story and adjacent two-story structure, near the old Post Office Buildings, that were soon to be razed were loaded with typical office furniture, along with 30 types of office safes. Besides determining the progressive temperatures of the fire, observations were made on the destruction of the buildings and the effects of the fire on the structure and contents of the safes. The fire threatened to get out of control and local fire officials never again permitted such Bureau tests in a congested 

area. 
STANDARDS FOR THE CONSUMER 133 

in the debris of large city fires for additional data for their studies. Research and technological papers, handbooks and circulars recorded the results 

of the long-term investigation, and were reduced to rules and specifications 

in new and revised building and fire codes issued by city and State authorities and by fire insurance associations. Fire research continues in the building research division of the Bureau to the present day. 

Bureau records suggest that in its second decade, despite more than a score of other research projects going on, three investigations were paramount, certainly in the eyes of the public, and of great interest to their Congressman at budget time. These were the weights and measures, public 

utility standards, and structural and miscellaneous materials programs. And 

it was the results of these investigations that were levied on for a remarkable 

series of circulars that came out just before the war, designed not for Federal or State agencies or for industry, but for the ordinary citizen, the 

ultimate consumer. 

STANDARDS FOR THE CONSUMER 

The publication of lamp specifications in Circular 13 in 1907—the 

first of its kind—raised a problem that long plagued the Bureau. The circular, available to the public for 10 cents, was a technical report, as were later 

circulars on textiles, inks, soaps, paper, paint, varnish, and other materials. 

It was filled with complex data and it made no mention of brand names. 

How then was the ordinary consumer to identify the lamps or other products 

tested by the Bureau without the laboratory apparatus described in the 

circular? 

in England, the National Physical Laboratory, governed by the Royal 

Society, was largely supported by private funds, with only meager assistance 

from the British Government. It was therefore relatively independent, and 

free if it chose to make open recommendations of products it tested. The 

National Bureau of Standards, on the 'other hand, was an agency of the Federal Government. It had come intO being at a time when business and industrial interests were synonymous with the national interest. Without 

power to enforce adoption of standards or specifications, the Bureau could 

only offer its technical findings to Government purchasing agencies and by 

making them public suggest that their adoption was in the best interests of 

industry 

Dr. Stratton insisted from the start that the Bureau must be free to 

make test results public, but in doing so the Bureau must show no bias. All 

products and materials tested had therefore to remain anonymous. Yet in 

hearings before Congress, Stratton made much of the fact that the test and 
13L ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

research work of the Bureau for the Government was of equal service and 

value to the public. Through publication of the specifications of a Bureau 

standard, he said, "the public can see what should be allowed * * * and 

what should not." 65 That the "public" he referred to was industry rather than the ordinary householder, and in some cases only the industry for whom the specifications were established, was evident from the nature of the Bureau reports. 

The circular on incandescent lamps, for example, specifically stated that 

"only those thoroughly instructed in the art of lamp manufacture and in the 

science of photometry should undertake to determine upon the acceptability 

of lamps under the terms of the specification." While of considerable use to organizations with laboratories possessing the apparatus and skills for 

* * * 1912 (Dec. 2, 1910), p. 261; Hearings * * * 1917 (Feb. 2, 1916), 

p.974; Hearings * * * 1917 (Dec. 1, 1916), p 478. 

So great was the success of the first of the NBS "household" circulars with the American 

public that Secretary of Commerce RedJield wrote to Stratton: "I think the time is 

peculiarly fit now for the immediate publication of the book 'Materials in the Household.' I hope nothing will be allowed to delay it longer and that you may be able to tell me that it will appear within a very short time. It seems to me that it is wanted 

at this time more than ever before and at least as much as it will be wanted in the 

future." Letter, Aug. 22, 1917, NARG 40, Box 118, 67009/5. 

136 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

succeeding chapters. explained how to use these in household operations and 

in planning and buying for the house. 

Although no firm names, no trademarks or brand names appeared 

in the circular, in many instances the Bureau left little doubt of the product 

involved. A notable example appeared in the section on causes of high 

bills for electricity wherein the Bureau questioned the quality of some of 

the electrical lamps then on the market. There was reason to raise 

question. 

It had come as no surprise to the Bureau when in 1911 General Electric and 33 other companies manufacturing and marketing lamps under GE 

patents were accused in a Federal antitrust suit of price fixing. The Federal 

courts ordered General Electric's National Electric Lamp Association 

(NELA) dissolved, but were less successful in restraining General Electric 

from "bringing pressure to bear in order to market types of lamps lacking 

any legitimate demand." This referred particularly to the GE-metalized 

(GEM) lamp which Genera1 Electric, supplying both the lamp and, indirectly, its electric power, continued to manufacture profitably by the 

millions.71 The Bureau circular on lamp specifications had drawn attention 

to the inferiority of this old-fashioned carbon-filament lamp over tungsten, 

especially after Coolidge's development of ductile tungsten in 1911 and 

Langmuir's use of a gas-filled bulb in 1913 resulted in lamps with 14 times 

the efficiency and 13 times the light per watt of the early carbon lamps. 

Though the name "GEM" did not appear in "Measurements for the 

household," what this particular lamp meant to the consumer was clearly 

spelled out: "The tungsten lamp has been improved in quality and reduced 

in price to such an extent that no customer can afford to use carbon lamps, even if he were paid a bonus on each lamp for so doing. Many householders 

cling to the use of carbon lamps because they are usually supplied free." 72 It was true. Anyone could get GEM lamps for nothing, and for a good 

reason: the GEM lamp used almost three times as much electric current as the tungsten Mazda lamp for equal light values. 

As Rosa explained, when tungsten lamps were first introduced, the 

electric power companies, fearing loss of revenue, began the practice of giving 

away or exchanging burned out GEM carbon lamps and even tungsten lamps 

of 100 watts or more in order to maintain high power consumption. The 

public gladly accepted them. Neither Federal frowns nor Bureau exposure 

of these lamps won the public away from them or reduced their high rate 

of manufacture. As late as 1917, Secretary of Commerce Redfield told Dr. 

71 John W. Hammond, Men and Volts: The Story of General Electric (New York: 

Lippincott, 1941), pp. 335—336, 342, 388—389. 72 NBS C55, p. 84. The warning was repeated in NBS C56, "Standards for electric 

service" (1916), p. 157. 
STANDARDS FOR THE CONSUMER 137 

Stratton that when he moved into his new home he had to replace 74 GEM 

lamps with Mazdas.73 

The second Bureau publication designed "to make scientific results 

available for those with little or no technical training" was Circular 70, a 

heavy 259-page manual on "Materials for the household," of which 15,000 

copies were sold in 1917, the year it came out. It was an excellent summary 

in simple terms of Bureau testing results in engineering, structural, and miscellaneous materials, with chapters on structural materials in the home, 

flexible materials (rubber, leather, etc.), stationery, cleansing agents and 

preservatives, fuels, illuminants, and lubricants, and a final chapter on "Quantity in purchase and use of materials." 

In style and contents Circular 70 anticipated by many years the 

appearance of such publications as Consumer Reports and Consumer Bulletin, and had as in its declared purposes to stimulate intelligent interest 

in household materials, to explain the nature of their desirable properties, 

aid in their selection, and promote their effective use and preservation. The 

circular admitted that few standards of quality existed in the market as yet, 

and where possible it offered simple home tests of materials, such as the use 

of a spring balance to test the strength of thread. If home tests were not 

possible, the Bureau could only recommend that householders "buy of local 

reliable dealers, as learned from common repute or experience." Sounding 

very like the voice of Stratton himself, the circular noted that buying well. 

known brands "may not be an economy, but it is some safeguard as to 

stability of quality. There is no certainty, however, that the quality will 

improve with the art." 

Neither the circular on "measurements" nor that on "materials" seems to have been revised for a second edition, perhaps because of the size of the 

printing in the first instance and the transitory nature of the subject matter 

in the second. More enduring was the third publication, Circular 75, 

"Safety in the household," which came out in 1918 (10,000 copies), was 

revised in 1932, and again in If the inspiration of the first two 

Letter, Redfield to SWS, Mar. 16, 1917, and letter, Rosa to Redfield, Mar. 27, 1917 

(NBS Box 8, IEL). Edward Bok told Stratton that after reading "Measurements for 

the household," he found and replaced 140 GEM lamps in his home (letter, SWS to 

Redfield, Jan. 15, 1916, NBS Box 21, PA). 

The lure of the GEM lamp seems comparable to a present-day continuing phenomenon, 

the futile efforts of the Food and Drug Administration to warn the public against costly 

and useless food diets, drugs, and The warnings in FDA and medical publications apparently reach no greater public than did the NBS circulars. 

NBS C70, p. 11. 

NBS C75 was superseded by C397 (1932) and C463 (1948). A consolidated edition of 

the three circulars appeared as "Measurements, materials, and safety for the house. 

hold" in 1918. For further note of these circulars, see letter, SWS to Secretary of Commerce Hoover, Jan. 25, 1922 (NBS Box 21, PP) - 
138 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

circulars may be traced in some degree to the muckraking and reform move- ments of the period, the "safety" circular, as the introduction said, was 

prompted by the increase in hazards "in modern times from the service of 

gas and electricity and the use of such dangerous articles as matches, volatile 

oils, poisons, and the like." 

Drawing on the mass of safety code data gathered by the electrical, 

chemistry, engineering, and materials divisions of the Bureau, the 127-page 

handbook on safety in the home covered electrical hazards, lightning hazards, 

gas, fire, and chemical hazards, and in a final chapter covered falls, cuts, 

scalds, burns and other miscellaneous accidents in the home. 

Nothing since the Bureau's weights and measures crusade made so great an impression on the public as did the publication of these circulars, 

and for years the Bureau was identified in the public mind with testing of 

household materials and appliances and besieged with correspondence re- questing personal help with home problems. Reported for the most part 

in specialized publications and periodicals, the work of the Bureau in 

electricity, in thermometry, photometry, calorimetry, radiometry, polarimetry, and spectroscopy, in metallurgy and in chemistry, was known only 

in scientific and technical circles. It came as a shock to Dr. Stratton when 

late in 1915 the Secretary of Commerce told him that Thomas Edison, un- aware of the fundamental research carried on at the Bureau, had suggested 

that the Government establish such a laboratory.76 

Four years later, better acquainted with the Bureau, Edison wrote 

saying that its recent publication, The Principles Underlying Radio Communications, was "the greatest book on this subject that I have ever read 

* * * Usually, books on radio communication are fairly bristling with 

mathematics, and I am at a loss in trying to read them." The early radio 

work at the Bureau introduced a large public to the scientific research of 

which it was capable. 

RADIO, RADIUM, AND X RAYS 

In the autumn of 1904 a young man came to the Bureau with a new book and an assignment in a new field of physics, neither of which aroused 

more than passing interest at the time. He was Dr. Louis W. Austin, an 

assistant professor of physics at Wisconsin who had spent the past 2 years as a guest worker at the Reichsanstalt in Berlin. Returning home by way of 

Personal letter, Secretary of Commerce to Secretary of the Navy, Oct. 11, 1915 (NBS 

Box 3, AG). 

Letter, Edison to SWS, Apr. 25, 1919 (NBS Box 4, AGC). He referred to Radio 

Pamphlet 40, prepared by the Bureau and issued by the Signal Corps in March 1919. 
RADIO, RADIUM, AND X RAYS 139 

Cambridge, he picked up a book just issued by the university press, Ernest 

Rutherford's Radioactivity. 

Rutherford's book was the first summary account of the experimental 

work of Roentgen, Becquerel, Thompson, Mme. Curie, and Rutherford 

himself in the decade following the discovery of radium and X rays. A 

young man in Rosa's division, Liewelyn G. Hoxton, given the book to discuss 

at one of the weekly meetings of the Bureau staff, recalls that when he sat 

down, Dr. Rosa came over and said, "Let me see that book!" But little in 

the book except the chapter on methods of measuretnent, describing the 

crude "electrical method" as the best then available for the quantitative determination of radiation and emanation, seems to have interested Rosa, for 

he returned the book the next morning.78 

A second edition of Radioactivity, enlarged by the avid research 

abroad from 382 to 558 pages, appeared a year later, and Rutherford 

himself, who won the 1908 Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on alpha 

particles, visited the Bureau to lecture on radium and radioactivity not 

long after.7° Such was the Bureau's introduction to the coming age of 

nuclear physics. 

Dr. Austin himself was not particularly interested in radioactivity 

but in another kind of emanation and a still newer phenomenon, that of 

radio telegraphy or wireless, as it was called. Radio as we know it today was as yet remote, although in 1901, the same year that Marconi received 

his wireless signals across the Atlantic, Reginald A. Fessenden, recently 

appointed head of electrical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh 

but still then with the U.S. Weather Bureau, heard at a distance of a mile 

the first faint voice by electromagnetic waves over his wireless apparatus.8° 

Six years later Lee de Forest invented his audion detector or three.element 

tube and applied it to the long-distance telephone. When used in 1912 to 

amplify a feeble audio-frequency current, modern radio was born. 

Although experimentation continued, much of it in secrecy and 

attended by barbaric litigation, voice radio remained primitive, found no application on the battlefields of World War I, and was not developed 

commercially until the 1920's. For the first two decades of the century 

7° Interview with Dr. L. G. Hoxton, Charlottesville, Va., Nov. 27—28, 1961 (NBS Historical File). Austin's copy of Radioactivity is in the NBS library. 7° Dr. Hoxton recalls Rutherford's visit to the Bureau. No record of the visit has been 

found, but in his biography of Rutherford (Cambridge University Press, 1939, p. 129), 

A. S. Eve says: "About 1905 the world caught fire and radium was the vogue. * * * 

A great number of Universities and Societies poured in appeals to Rutherford to come and lecture to them about radium. He did what he could." °° Helen M. Fessenden, Fesseden: Builder of Tomorrows (New York: Coward-McCann. 

1940), p. 81. 
140 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

the problems still posed by long distance radiotelegraphy were sufficient 

to keep scientists and electrical engineers fully engaged looking for useful 

solutions. 

Austin came to the Bureau as a guest worker to investigate the 

practical application of radiotelegraphy for the Navy, and from 1908 

to 1932 headed the U.S. Naval Radiotelegraphic Laboratory at the Bureau 

(in 1923 renamed the Laboratory for Special Radio Transmission Research). Shortly after Austin's arrival, the U.S. Army Signal Service also 

requested space in the Bureau's electrical division, where their engineer, 

E. C. Cramm, investigated military applications of wireless.81 

Not until 1911 did the Bureau itself enter the wireless field, when an engineer in one of the new commercial "electric signaling" companies 

sent in a wavemeter (frequency meter) for calibration. To set up a standard for this instrument was a problem in inductance and capacity, and 

the wavemeter was turned over to J. Howard Dellinger, who had come to the Bureau in 1907 from Western Reserve where he had been a physics 

instructor. He was then taking courses locally for his doctorate in physics, 

had become interested in the high frequency phenomena associated with 

radiotelegraphy and as a result was the acknowledged wireless "expert" at 

the Bureau. Soon Dellinger headed a new section in the electrical division 

called radio measurements. 

Earlier that year a draft of regulations on the use of wireless as a safety aid in navigation, prepared by Prof. A. G. Webster of Clark University 

for a forthcoming London Wireless Conference, was submitted to the Bureau for review. Dellinger studied the paper and among other suggestions 

proposed that the word "wireless" everywhere in the text be changed to 

"radio," in keeping with its connotation of radiation. And "radio" 

rather than "wireless" became the accepted name in this country. 

Bureau research in radio began in earnest with an investigation by 

Dellinger of ammeters used to measure the high frequency current in 

transmitting apparatus. As determined then, ammeter measurements were subject to considerable margin of error, and Dellinger's study resulted in a much needed heavy-current standard for radio frequencies. The work 

earned him his Princeton doctoral degree in 1913.82 

No conflict of work existed in the several radio laboratories that 

had been set• up at the Bureau, for Austin and Cramm were working on 

81 Letter, Chief Signal Officer to Secretary of War, Oct. 18, 1909, and attached corre- spondence (NBS Box 10, IEW). Although Cramm's tenure at the Bureau is uncertain, 

Austin headed the Navy laboratory at the Bureau until his death in 1932, publishing 

much of his research on radio signal intensities, long-wave transmission phenomena, 

atmospheric disturbances, and long-wave radio receiving measurements in Bureau 

publications. See Science, 76, 137 (1932). 

82 S206, "High-frequency ammeters" (Dellinger, 1913). 
RADIO, RADIUM, AND X RAYS 141 

various means of generating and detecting low frequency (long distance) 

radio waves, while Dellinger concentrated on higher frequency waves, those 

used by experimental broadcast stations. Considerably later his investigations moved into still higher frequency wave ranges, where they became the 

short waves of long-distance transmission, and after that into very high 

frequencies, where he first confronted the problems whose challenge con- tinues to the present day, those found in communication via outer space. 

It was also in 1911 that Frederick A. Koister was brought to the 

Bureau by Dr. Rosa to investigate some of the difficulties in radio engineering 

coming into the electrical division from industry. A former assistant in Lee 

de Forest's laboratory in New York, Koister proved to be one of the most 

inventive mechanical geniuses ever to work at the Bureau. As his first as- signment, he went to the Wireless Conference in London as technical adviser 

to Professor Webster. 

.On the night of April 14, 1912, 2 months before the Conference, the 

White Star liner Titanic, on its maiden voyage, struck an iceberg 800 miles 

off the coast of Nova Scotia. The disaster disclosed how much an innovation maritime wireless was at that time. The scarcity of trained telegraphers 

often put ships' wireless in the hands of inexperienced operators who found 

signals hard to catch, were hampered by the necessity of having to relay their 

messages, and to send frequent repeats 'before their messages—most of them 

for passengers beguiled by the novelty—made sense on shore. 

Four ships were within 60 miles of the Titanic when it sent out its 

first call for help. All at various times that day had warned the Titanic of the 

ice fields in the vicinity. One, the Californian, was less than 10 miles away 

when the CQD went out. But its wireless operator, rebuffed earlier by the 

operator on the Titanic for interfering with private messages going ashore, 

had shut down for the night. Of the others, only the Cunard liner Carpathia 

58 miles away, dared to chance .the ice field in which the Titanic lay sinking. 

When it arrived a bare handful of lifeboats and rafts drifted in the area 

where the Titanic had foundered more than hour before.83 

Shocked by the disaster but ignorant of the catalog of human errors 

that had caused it, the Wireless Conference meeting in London gave its attention to the technical aspects of radio it had met to resolve. Of the two 

wavelengths then used by international maritime wireless, the Conference 

agreed that the 600-meter wavelength be restricted to the use of ships at sea. It also agreed that in order to reduce interference from the spark transmitters on ocean liners, the decrement or rate of decay of the waves emitted by the 

transmitting antenna should not exceed the log 0.2. 

83Walter Lord, A Night to Remember (New York: Henry Holt, 1955), pp. 36—38, 171— 172; Logan Marshall, Sinking of the Titanic . . . (New York: John C. Winston, 

1912), p. 299. 
142 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

The Conference ruling on interference 'became the second radio law 

enacted by the United States. (The first, in 1910, had called for installation 

of radio apparatus on all steamers, foreign and domestic, operating out of 

American ports.) 84 Congress, aroused to the importance of radio, also called 

for more efficient radiotelegraphic service, restriction on the free use of wave- lengths, and the licensing of commercial and amateur radio stations. Commerce's Bureau of Navigation, made responsible for these matters, called on the Bureau of Standards to investigate the bases for establishing the laws 

asked for by Congress, including better radio equipment, test procedures, 

and standards.85 

Congress turned over enforcement of the interference ruling to the 

Bureau of Navigation, and at its request Koister was assigned to devise a portable measuring instrument for this purpose, to be used by ship radio inspectors. The decremeter he designed, measuring wavelength as well as decrement, was at once adopted by the Bureau of Navigation and by the 

War and Navy Departments.86 

The Bureau of Navigation also called for a radio beacon system to 

aid ship navigation in fog and rough weather. Between 1913 and 1915 

Kolster developed an improved radio direction finder or radio compass—the 

forerunner of modern aviation instrument landing systems—that enabled a ship to establish its position by determining with high accuracy the direction of sending station signals.87 But it took more than twice as long to put 

the new direction finder into operation as to design it. The Bureau of 

Lighthouses proved reluctant to use scarce funds to install beacon stations 

along the shore until ships were equipped, and ship captains, traditionally 

conservative, refused to have all that machinery—and electrical, at that— 

cluttering up their ships. 

Commerce's Bureau of Navigation C211 (1910) announced that after July 1, 1911, by 

the Radio Act of June 24, 1910, it became unlawful for any ocean-going passenger steam- ers to sail without radio communication apparatus. After the Titanic, the Radio Act was amended to require two operators, instead of one, on constant watch; an auxiliary power 

source; and extended the act to include cargo ships. See correspondence with NBS and 

copy of the act in NBS Box 10, JEW; also Paul Schubert, The Electric Word: the Rise 

of Radio (New York: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 63—65. "Earlier, in the summer of 1912, Waidner and Dickinson of the Bureau's heat division, 

aboard Navy patrol boats, investigated methods of detecting the proximity of icebergs. 

Most promising seemed temperature variations, but they proved as great far removed from 

icebergs as near them. NBS Annual Report 1914, p. 28, and S210 (1914). Later a salinity meter was developed for the International Ice Patrol to locate icebergs and 

reported in RP223 (Wenner, Smith, and Soule, 1930). 

NBS Annual Report 1914, p. 35; S235, "A direct-reading instrument for measuring * * * decrement" (Kolster, 1915); correspondence in NBS Box 10, IEW. 87 NBS Annual Report 1916, p. 56; S428, "The radio direction finder * * (Koister 

and Dunmore, 1922). The original direction finder was the invention of two Italians, 

Bellini and Tosi, in 1907. See Schubert, pp. 139, 154. 
RADIO, RADIUM, AND X RAYS 143 

The Koister decremeter for 

measuring wavelength 

and decrement was developed between 1912 

and 1914 for the use of 

the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Navigation and for the armed 

services. 

An early radio receiving 

set constructed by the 

Bureau, designed, along 

with a separate transmitter, for use on ships of 

the Lighthouse Service, 

Bureau of Navigation, 

and the Coast and Geodetic Survey. 

It was a closed-circuit type 

of receiver using a variable condenser of the 

decremeter t y p e and 

with a crystal detector 

connected across the con- denser. This particular 

set served as a wavemeter 

and decremeter as well 

as radio receiver. 

It was 1919 before the impasse was resolved and the direction finder 

was successfully demonstrated and officially approved. Soon after, Koister 

left the Bureau to set up a company to manufacture his radio compasses. 

When success eluded him, he turned to the development of radio receiving 

sets. The radio boom was on, he was hired away by industry, and his inventive genius was exploited, but he got none of the millions made through his 
144 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

work or from the Koister Radio Corp. set up to trade on his name. He died 

"a magnificent failure," as he called himself, in 1950.88 

Until 1917 the electrical work of the Bureau centered around the 

power industry. There was almost no research in wire telephony or telegraphy, radio research was just beginning, and except for Kolster's radio 

direction finder, Bureau efforts were concentrated on more precise determinations of the laws and physical quantities involved in radio apparatus, 

in trying to maintain and improve measurements and standards, and supplying basic information.89 Nevertheless, some tests and calibrations had been 

made of available radio apparatus, of circuit components, of various kinds 

of detectors (electrolytic, Fleming valve, audion), and of the new continuous- wave techniques that were coming in with radiotelephony, putting an end 

to damped-wave (spark) transmission. For use with Koister's direction 

finder, the radio section had devised an automatic device that sent out a 

characteristic signal once every minute, to guide incoming ships in fog. Unable as yet to obtain specialized equipment from industry, the laboratories 

also built and installed a number of radiotelegraphic units on Coast Survey 

steamers and tenders of the Bureau of Lighthouses, enabling the latter to 

maintain communication between lighthouses and ships at sea.9° 

The Bureau received its first special appropriation for radio research 

from Congress, the sum of $10,000 "for the investigation and standardization of methods and instruments employed in radio communication," in 

1915. A year later Congress appropriated $50,000 for the construction of a radio laboratory building, a two-story structure erected south of the electrical laboratory, with two 150-foot antenna towers adjacent to the laboratory. The ensuing pioneer work in radio at the Bureau was to prove its 

worth when war came. Radio and radioactivity, as previously noted, arrived at the Bureau on the same day in 1911, but laboratory interest in radium and radiation, 

phenomena actually far removed from radio, did not begin until late in 

1913. It may well have been the use of electrical methods for the measure-• ment of radioactive quantities that made it seem logical to establish this 

work in Rosa's division. Or it may have been, as Dr. N. Ernest Dorsey said, 

that the disintegration hypothesis promulgated by Rutherford, together with 

his conjectures on the structure of the atom and the phenomena associated 

with radioactivity, were all "bound up with our ideas of electricity." 91 

"Letter, Lloyd Espenschied, Bell Telephone Laboratories, to A. V. Astin, Feb. 18, 1954, 

and attached correspondence on early radio at NBS (NBS Historical File). 

89 George C. Southworth, Forty Years of Radio Research (New York: Gordon and 

Breach, 1962), p. 32. 9° NBS Annual Report 1916, pp. 55—56. Dorsey, Physics of Radioactivity (Baltimore: Williams and Williams, 1921), p. 33. 
Koister's wireless laboratory in East building in 1916, showing models of the decremeter on the left, and in the center, an early radio receiving set. 

The overhead wiring was the beginning of the intricate webs that were spun with the passing of time in most of the electrical laboratories of East building. 
146 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

That the two somehow seemed related is evident from Dr. Stratton's frequent 

use of the portmanteau phrase "radio telegraphy and radio activity." 92 In Europe, where radium and radiation research had been carried on at fever pitch since the discoveries of Roentgen and Becquerel, a Congress 

of Radiology and Electricity met at Brussels in 1910 to survey recent progress and discuss the question of standards for radium research. A year 

later Mme. Curie prepared a carefully measured quantity of radium chloride 

scaled in a glass tube, based on the proportion of radium to the weight of 

the radium salts in the tube as measured by its gamma rays. This was accepted by the International Committee on Radium Standards, appointed 

by the Congress at Brussels, as the international standard and deposited in 

the International Bureau of Weights and Measures at Sèvres. Research in 

radium began at the Bureau of Standards in December 1913 when a phial 

containing 20.28 milligrams of pure radium arrived from abroad. A covering communication certified its equivalence to the International Radium 

Standard at Sèvres and described its comparison with another quantity of 

radium salts prepared at Vienna and accepted as a second standard.93 

Dorsey, who came to the Bureau from Johns Hopkins in 1903 and 

for almost a decade worked under Rosa on electrical measurements, had 

followed with excitement the published accounts of radiation research. He 

became interested particularly in the applications of X rays and radium to 

medical diagnosis and treatment, then a craze sweeping the country and involv. 

ing almost as many fakers as reputable physicians. 

As early as 1896 Scientific American magazine described the con- struction of a fairly effective X.ray tube by connecting the carbon filaments 

of an incandescent lamp to an improvised high.voltage apparatus. These 

X-ray tubes, as well as fluoroscopic screens, soon became commercially available and doctors and technicians by the hundreds opened offices across the 

country to practice the new wonder on marveling patients. Pusey and Caldwell's The Practical Application of the Roentgen Rays in Therapeutics and 

Diagnosis (1903, reprinted in 1904) warned of certain radiation hazards to 

doctors and patients alike but the dangers were not yet clearly understood. 

As a result, efforts at protection from the rays tended to lapse after the first 

meager precautions.94 X-ray and radium protection standards were not 

to come within the province of the Bureau until the late 1920's. 

Learning of the international standard of radium in Washington, hospitals and physicians sent their radium salts to the Bureau for analysis, and 

°' E.g., at Hearings * * * 1918 (Dec. 1, 1916), p. 465. 

Dorsey, Physics of Radioactivity, pp. 162—163. 

For the early history of medical radiology, see Percy Brown, American Martyrs to 

Science Through the Roentgen Rays (Springfield, Ill., and Baltimore, Md.: C. C. 

Thomas, 1936), pp. 144—145. 
REVISING THE ORGANIC ACT 147 

Dorsey became the radium specialist as he began making intercomparisons 

of sealed radium standards and started an investigation of the gamma-ray 

method of radium measurement. Soon Dorsey and his assistants were studying the properties of radioactive substances, the alpha-ray activity of powdered radium salts, of uranium mixtures, radium ores and radium emanations. 

in a few short months he, like all who were handling radium at that time, 

had burned the thumbs and the index and middle fingers on both his hands. 

By 1919, as a result of the amount of radium and luminescent materials con- taining radium handled during the war, he had developed typical "X-ray 

hands," characterized by ulcerative tissue, whitlows below the nails, pro. 

nounced lack of sensitivity of touch in the fingers, and extreme sensitivity to 

cold.95 

Dr. Dorsey left the Bureau in 1920 and, away from radium, his hands 

though permanently scarred improved rapidly. His book, Physics of Radioactivity, based in part on a Bureau circular he began in 1915 and never 

completed, was prepared as a text for the medical profession and came out in 

1 921.98 For almost a decade he practiced privately as a consultant physicist 

in radium. He returned to the Bureau in 1928 'with independent status and 

until his retirement in 1943 carried out a number of research projects in 

physics and acted as advisory consultant to the radium and X-ray section 

of the optics division.97 

"REVISING" THE ORGANIC ACT 

The year 1913 was a milestone in the history of the Bureau, a time of re- appraisal and redirection. Much of the testing of standards, measuring instruments, and materials was now "organized on an accurate routine basis 

and * * * handled with dispatch, through increased efficiency of appliances and methods of testing?' 98 Fundamental research in the scientific divisions continued at a high level, but the principal energies of the Bureau were directed to investigations for the Federal and State governments, for inDorsey, Physics of Radioactivity, pp. 175—177. °°Announcements of the circular appeared in NBS Annual Reports 1915 and 1916. 

Dr. Dorsey, whose research for his book on "water substance" was conducted in that 

period, was the second of three workers given independent status at the Bureau, free 

from all administrative duties. The others were Dr. Edgar Buckingham, 1923, to 

continue his work in theoretical thermodynamics, and Dr. Louis B. Tuckerman, in 1937, to carry out research in aeronautical mechanics. Memo, Hugh L. Dryden to Division N 

section chiefs, Dec. 20, 1937 (NBS Box 403, ID-Misc). 

°'NBS Annual Report 1913, p. 36. 
148 ELECTRICiTY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

dustry and the public. utilities.99 The Bureau had grown far beyond the 

confines of its organic act and in directions unforeseen. 

Seemingly taking all knowledge for its province, the Bureau was currently engaged in over 200 different projects, its Baconian scope of research 

demanding an extraordinary spirit of cooperation. in his annual report 

that year Stratton said of this spirit that it alone "minimized the somewhat 

narrowing effects of a rigid division system. Each problem when studied in a broad scientific spirit leads into every specialty * * Cooperation 

had been "particularly notable in the development of standards for gas, in 

the researches upon metals, and the methods of testing the properties of materials, in the study of electrolysis experimentally in the, field, in the structural materials investigation, and in many other cases where success depends 

upon many specialties." It had 'been most striking "in the gradual develop. 

ment of the public-service commission work of the Bureau. This is an outgrowth of the weights and measures activity of the Bureau, of the cooperation 

with the Interstate Commerce Commission, and with other regulative and 

inspection services, notably the wireless service, the regulation of navigation, 

municipal gas regulation, standardization of specifications for materials, and 

central-station power service * * * simply [applying] measurements and 

standards to new fields * * * Such work is an extension of the general 

purpose of the Bureau as a whole, cooperation in all movements which have 

for their object increase in efficiency in all fields through measurements and 

standards." 100 It was this "extension of the general purpose of the Bureau" that had 

resulted in its extraordinary growth. In a little more than a decade appropriations for the Bureau 'had risen from $32,000 to almost half a million dollars a year, with that much again appropriated in 1913 for a new electrical 

laboratory, additional land, and special test equipment. in addition to the 

field laboratory at Pittsburgh, three new divisions—engineering research, 

metallurgy, and structural and miscellaneous materials—had been added to 

the original five in Washington, and Bureau personnel had risen from 13 to 

more than 280, of whom at least 50 were high-grade physicists. 

Congress sometimes worried about those physicists. Other agencies 

in the Government didn't seem to need them. "What is a physicist?" Mr. 

Leonidas F. Livingston of the House Appropriations Subcommittee asked. 

"I was asked on the floor of the House what in the name of common sense a 

physicist is, and I could not answer." 101 At a Senate hearing, Mr. Lee S. 

"The bureau is, to a certain extent, a clearing house for technical information * * * 

cooperating with all movements tending to improve conditions in which standards of 

quality or standards of measurement are involved." M18, "The National Bureau of 

Standards" (1911), p. 7. 

Annual Report 1913, p. 3. 

Hearings * * * 1912 (Dec. 2, 1910), p. 263. 
REVISING THE ORGANIC ACT 149 

Overman of North Carolina wondered too: "You have here * * * [a request 

for] a physicist qualified in optics. I want to know what you do with that 

fellow. What is his business?" 102 Patiently, Dr. Stratton explained, and 

the physicists were his. 

So well did Stratton get along with Congress that one of his admiring 

colleagues, sitting with him at the annual hearings, referred to him as "a 

scientific politician." Congressman Joseph T. Johnson of South Carolina 

marveled at Stratton's way with a committee, even when the subject was as minor as funds for grading the Bureau grounds. "Now, you have made a specially strong plea—in fact, you always make a strong plea and hypnotize 

this committee." 103 Behind the pleas were results, and the kind that a business-minded 

Congress appreciated. Stratton poured out facts on the dollar-and.cents 

value of Government testing and the public benefits "from a financial standpoint" of Bureau research in public utility service. He had only to show 

•that "we have never been able to keep up with 25 percent of the demands 

made on the Bureau," to say that never before had "the Bureau had so many 

demands for its cooperation in regard to industrial standards, in devising 

standard methods of measurement and test, and in researches involving 

precise measurement," for Congress to reach for its purse and add some- thing more.104 

The annual increases in Bureau staff, equipment, and funds were 

the envy of other research agencies in the Government. "As you know," 

Congressman Frank H. Gillett of the Appropriations Subcommittee once 

said to Stratton, "our liberality to this bureau is one of the things that is 

criticized somewhat, and [so] we should be glad to get * * * results." 105 And Stratton cited the weights and measures investigation and the testing 

of Government materials, now being done for almost 60 different bureaus 

representing every department of the Government, the success of which had 

led to the organization of the General Supply Committee and almost doubled 

the test work of the Bureau. 

The proliferation of Bureau research interests' under' Stratton and Rosa 

had largely changed the mission of the Bureau envisioned in its organic act. 

Established to provide this country with a scientific basis for accurate meas- urements and a source of information regarding basic properties of materials 

determined by such measurements, the Bureau became involved almost at 

'°' i{earings * (May 22, 1912.), 232. 

10"Hearings a a a 1916 (Nov. 28, l9l4),p. 

104 Hearings * * (Dec. 2, 1910), p. 270; NBS Annual Report 1912, p. 3. 

Hearings * p. 262. On a later occasion, when asked by Congress how 

appropriated were being spent, Stratton said that in most investigations 

from 75 to 80 percent went for staff, the remaining for materials and equipment (Hearings a a a 1921, Jan. 2, 1920, p. 1566). 
cJ1 OF COMME 

The proliferation of Bureau interests, abetted by special congressional appropriations for investigations not covered in the Organic Act, inspired the 

wheeled chart of NBS activities. It was probably prepared for an appropriations hearing before Congress about 1915. 
REVISING THE ORGANIC ACT 151 

once in practical applications of these services to meet the needs of Government and industry. The resulting activities, nowhere referred to in the 

organic act, fell within the province of the• Bureau only through broad interpretation of the clauses calling for "the solution of problems which arise 

in connection with standards" and "the determination of * * * properties 

of materials" (ignoring the qualifying clause in the latter case, "when such 

data are of great importance to scientific or manufacturing interests * * 

The standards intended in the organic act were physical standards 

of measurement, but in the technological and engineering fields entered 

through Government testing, in the preparation of standard samples, and in 

structural and miscellaneous materials testing, "standards" had come to 

mean specifications of materials and codes of practice. Other research 

agencies in the Government began to question the broad interpretation of the 

Bureau act and its extended use of the term "standards," but not Congress, 

which found Bureau investigations highly productive of visible and tangible 

results. 

The Bureau was further encouraged by the method adopted by Congress to expand Bureau activities—that is, by the appropriation of specific 

funds for special investigations.106 This began in 1910 with the appropriations for the weights and measures crusade and the investigation of gaslight standards and continued thereafter, with special appropriations for one or more new projects almost annually, until 1936. By the thirties, grown 

to double the amount of direct appropriations by Congress, they had become 

administratively unwieldly. In 1936 all Bureau operations and activities 

funded by Congress were consolidated in four general categories: administration, testing, research and development, and standards for commerce. 

With the first of the special appropriations the Bureau set up two 

categories of personnel, those engaged in fundamental research and routine 

work and paid from statutory funds, and those brought in for its special 

investigations and paid from specific appropriations. Although most of the 

special investigations went on for a decade or more, in some instances, as funds were withdrawn, those portions of the investigation that the Bureau 

thought ought to be permanent were transferred, with their staff, to the 

regular work of the Bureau. Thus the Bureau grew, but not without some friction. 

It seems possible that it was criticism of certain of the Bureau research 

in this period that first alerted Stratton to a hazard in the latitude of research 

permitted in the wording of the organic act. In 1908 the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture 'had complained that the Bureau of 

Standards was duplicating work specifically delegated to Chemistry, including determination of the quality of volumetric apparatus, testing sugar 

The chart showing these special appropriations from 1910 to 1935 appears as app. G. 
152 ELECTRiCITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

imports at the ports of entry, and chemical analysis of supplies furnished 

to Agriculture and other departments, in particular of paper and paper 

materials bought for the Government. Although Dr. Stratton pointed out 

that the Bureau's physical and chemical tests were to determine specifications 

of quality and design, improve the standards used in polariscopic work on sugar, and develop paper testing instruments and methods, while Chemistry's 

investigations were confined to -the agricultural side of these problems, the 

Bureau of Chemistry continued to insist that "no part of the organic act 

establishing the National, Bureau of Standards * * * warrants transfer of 

this kind of work * * * to the Bureau of Standards." 107 As Bureau investigations expanded, so did the murmurs of Agriculture, that work "conducted by or projected by the Bureau" was duplicating 

that being done not only in its Bureau of Chemistry but in. its Forestry 

Service, Bureau of Plant Industry, and Bureau of Animal Industry.108 And 

when, at the request of the American Mining Congress, the Bureau made a study of standards for electrical machines and electrical practice in mines, 

Interior's Bureau of Mines saw it as an invasion of its domain, as it had 

the investigation of building stones and mans earlier. The Bureau ac- knowledged that "in spite of [its efforts] to avoid infringing upon the functions of other Bureaus * * * there has been a feeling in some quarters that 

the Bureau has enlarged its activities unduly." 109 This problem of function was very much on Stratton's mind when 

late in 1912 the President's Commission on Economy and Efficiency sent 

out a questionnaire to all departments in the executive branch asking whether 

any changes in law pertaining to the organization and form of appropriations for their agencies were necessary for more efficient operation. Dr. 

Stratton expressed his entire satisfaction with the method of appropriations 

for the Bureau; his principal concern was over the continuing criticism: 

In view of the fact that the organic act establishing the Bureau 

has been somewhat misunderstood (generally by those bureaus 

claiming authority for the same class of work), I have sometimes 

107 Letter, SWS to Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Feb. 15, 1908, and attached cor- respondence (NBS Box 4, AGA) 108 Letter, Secretary of Agriculture to Secretary of Commerce, Apr. 28, 1913 (NARG 

16, Records of Office of Secretary of Agriculture, sub: Duplication of work, 1913). 

109 Letter, Rosa to Secretary of Commerce, Oct. 2, 1913 (ibid.)'. The feeling possibly 

had some warrant, as is indicated later in a memo from P. H. Bates to stratton, May 1, 

1918 (NBS Box 2, AG): "With such active competitioa as we are now getting in the 

ceramic work from the Bureau of Mines, it is very essential: that we' be able to take up 

and actively push to completion all problems given to us." 
REVISING THE ORGANIC ACT 153 

thought that the organic act might be made more specific. On the 

other hand, this would be gained at the expense of flexibility.110 

Unwilling to tamper with the basic act, Stratton suggested another 

way around the problem. Because of their national eminence and their 

connections, the Visiting Committee to the Bureau, then composed of Dr. Elihu 

Thomson, Dr. Robert S. Woodward, Prof. Henry M. Howe, Prof. Arthur 

G. Webster, and Prof. John F. Hayford, exerted considerable influence on 

behalf of the Bureau in high places, as well as on its operations. Stratton 

proposed to Secretary of Commerce and Labor Nagel that the Committee, 

presently made up largely of scientific men, be increased from 5 to 8 or 10, to 

include more representation for the new research interests of the Bureau: 

"It is highly desirable that the technological and industrial interests be also 

represented." 

Neither an increase in the Committee nor a change in the organic act 

proved necessary. What amounted to an amendment to the organic act was 

sufficient. On March 4, 1913 Congress passed an act (37 Stat. 945) that 

made the testing of industrial and commercial materials for the Government a specific function of the Bureau: 

Materials for fireproof buildings, other structural materials, and 

all materials, other than materials for paving and for fuel, pur. 

chased for and to be used by the government of the District of 

Columbia, when necessary in the judgment of the commissioners 

to be tested, shall be tested by the Bureau of Standards under the 

same condition as similar testing is required to be done for the 

United States Government. 

In Dr. Stratton's view, this act for the benefit of the District of Columbia 

formally justified the materials testing and public service testing involving 

materials that the Bureau had been doing since 1904 for the Federal Govern. 

ment, its establishments in this country, in Panama, and in its oversea 

possessions. 

That same month of 1913 the Wilson administration took office, the 

Department of Commerce and Labor was split in two, and William C. Red. 

field, soon to become a close friend of Dr. Stratton and one of the most ardent 

supporters the Bureau has ever had, was appointed the new Secretary of 

Commerce. Redfield at 55 had been in business and manufacturing most 

of his life, was vice president of an engineering firm, author of a recent 

book, The New Industrial Day (1912), and had been a Congressman for the 

past 2 years when he became Secretary. An intense man, with strong con- Letter, SWS to Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Nov. 14, 1912, and attached cor- respondence (NBS Box 3, AG). 

Ibid. 
154 ELECTRICITY, RAiLROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

Secretary of Commerce William C. Redfield, a prince of industry and a splendid 

presence, who bought his first automobile 

in 1916 because the trip to the Bureau 

was too far by horse and carriiige. 

victions about what his Department should be. he left it in 1919 feeling he 

had failed it. His books and articles describing his years as Secretary were filled with passionate criticisms of Congress and Congressmen as venal, incompetent, and do-nothing. But of this sense of frustration there was little 

evidence at the time. He was a better Secretary than he knew. 

He found good men everywhere in the "working" areas of the Government, as he called the executive branch, and nowhere so many as in 

tue Bureau of Standards, which he particularly admired for what it was 

doing for industry, often against industry's will. As he said: 

Long industrial experience taught me what our work at the Bureau 

of Standards constantly justified, that on the whole American 

manufacturers failed to apply science to industry * * *112 

Dr. Stratton he came to admire for a talent he felt he lacked, the ability to 

get along with Congress, but he took no credit for his own efforts before 

Congress on behalf of the Bureau. 

One service, the Bureau of Standards, which deservedly had the 

confidence of Congress, was not only well housed but well equipped so far as the requirements of that time were concerned. Its need was for steady expansion to meet the growing demands of the Government itself and the increasing call for aid from industry.'13 

Soon after taking charge of his Department, Redfield visited the Bureau and before long began coming up in his horse and carriage every week, 

Redfield, "Glimpses of our government," Saturday Evening Post, May 17, 1924, p. 44. 

Redfield, ibid., May 3, 1924, p. 81. 
REVISING THE ORGANIC ACT 155 

and sometimes twice a week.114 Stratton would take him to the laboratories 

he himself had been recently touring and where investigations that would 

interest Redfield were in progress. 

It was almost certainly as a result of Redfield's visits that in an effort 

to increase Bureau usefulness as well as to settle an old area of interdepartmental bickering, Redfield sought by agreement with the Secretary of Agriculture to transfer the miscellaneous testing laboratory in the Bureau of 

Chemistry to the Bureau of Standards. On July 1, 1914 that laboratory, 

with funds of $26,000 for the testing of textiles, paper, leather, rubber, oils, 

and paints, was officially transferred and within a week the new group, 

headed by Dr. Percy H. Walker and F. W. Smither, with eight assistant 

chemists and a clerk, was organized on the second floor of North building.115 

Redfield seems to have been diligent in his search for ways to enhance 

the prestige of his Department, and to have made the Bureau a prime beneficiary of these efforts. By tradition, the executive departments of the Government hid their lights and good works, a fact he resented since it made "informing Congress of one's needs * * * very difficult." Soon after taking 

office he began making it a point to attend congressional committee hearings 

with his bureau chiefs and personally brought key people with him to explain 

their needs"° He took an active part in the proceedings, demonstrating a fine talent in the use of the first person plural. His intense personal 

identification with the Bureau was exhibited on one occasion when Stratton was seeking a new special appropriation by his remark, "I can only say that 

anything that Dr. Stratton wants I back up." 117 It was almost certainly Redfield who authorized' a maj or change in 

format of the annual reports of his bureaus the year he came in. The Bureau 

report for 1913, 38 pages in length, almost tripled in size to 99 pages in 1914 

and continued to swell by nearly 50 percent each year thereafter.'18 Its 

114 At Hearings * * * 1919 (Jan. 18, 1918), p. 893, Redfield said he finally bought an automobile in 1916, because the trip to the Bureau was too far by carriage. 

115 Letter, SWS to Redfield, June 5, 1914, and attached correspondence (NARG 16, Office 

of the Secretary of Agriculture, sub: Duplication of Work, Department of Commerce, 

1914). 

Redfield, Saturday Evening Post, May 3, 1924, p. 78; ibid., May 10, 1924, p. 19. 

Results of these trips to the Hill were mixed. Stratton and his staff, Redfield found, 

explained their scientific problems in terms which laymen could understand. On the 

other hand, some like Dr. 0. H. Tittmann, chief of the Coast Survey, unfortunately 

"resented the sharp questions that were often asked," an attitude that was reflected in 

meager appropriations (Redfield, ibid., May 3, 1924, p. 81). 

117 See Hearings * * * 1915 (Jan. 27, 1914), p. 664 et passim; [Senate] Hearings * * * on H.R. 15279 (Apr. 29, 1914), p. 61. 118 The report of the Bureau of Corporations in Commerce expanded from 8 to 48 pages 

and all but three of the reports of the other nine bureaus of the Department showed 

considerable increases in size. No such sudden expansion occurred in other Department reports examined, i.e., Interior and Agriculture. 
156 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) new table of contents drew attention to the fact that the 8 divisions of the 

Bureau were engaged in more than 225 separate investigations. Following 

notes on administration and statistical data on the year's work, the report 

for the first time appended a list of current Bureau needs, including a new building to house the structural materials work, a radio laboratory, additional 

ground, and more scientific assistance. And where 300 copies of the Bureau 

report had been printed the year before, a thousand copies of the 1914 re- port were distributed. 

Most striking of all in the amplified annual report of 1914 was the 

restatement of the functions, aims, and purposes of the Bureau that appeared 

in the preface. Still concerned with the "extension of the general purposes 

of the Bureau," Dr. Stratton sought to clarify the new scope of work for 

which the Bureau had become responsible. The organic act was unchanged, 

he said, but a more "convenient" classification of functions as now authorized 

and exercised made the Bureau responsible for standards of measurement, 

standard values of constants, standards of quality, and standards of mechanical performance. In the report the next year Stratton amended this list to 

include a fifth function, standards of practice.119 

Standards of measurement, he wrote in the annual report, included 

their custody, construction, and comparison, with methods of comparison 

presently available ranging from those "capable of measuring the thousandth 

part of a milligram to the large testing machines capable of measuring a load of thousands of tons." Standard values of constants, requiring accurate 

and authenticated determinations of the many fixed relations between physical 

quantities, ranged from the relation between heat and mechanical energy, 

required in designing steam engines and boilers, to the amount of heat 

required to turn liquid ammonia into vapor or to melt a pound of ice, as in 

the refrigeration industry. 

Standards of quality, "confined almost exclusively to Government 

purchases," involved the physical and chemical investigation of materials to 

prepare methods of measurement and uniform specifications for their composition or manufacture. Standards of performance, whether of an engine, 

boiler, or pump, an electric generator or motor, a weighing device, or a telescope, involved the use of standards of measurement, standard values of 

constants, and standards of quality, and sought to arrive at specifications 

based on correct scientific and mechanical principles. A function only 

"° This classification may have evolved from Dr. Stratton's remarks at a congressional 

hearing several months before. In a discussion of the investigations in public utility 

services, the Bureau was, he said, concerned with standards of engineering, comprising 

standards of practice, standards of construction and operation, standards of service, and 

standard methods of testing, all of which involved standards of measurement and quality. 

Hearings * * * 1915 (Feb. 26, 1914), p. 980. 
REVISING THE ORGANIC ACT 157 

recently assumed by the Bureau, it too would relate almost entirely to Government purchases. Standards of practice looked principally to the enactment of laws in technical and scientific matters, to ordinances relating to 

the regulation of public utilities, and to the establishment of building and 

safety codes.'2° 

The almost wholly pragmatic cast of these functions could not be 

missed, nor their overwhelming reference to Government testing and Government investigations. The source of the new look of the annual report was ex- plained in a section entitled "The relation of the Bureau's work to the 

public." Yet not there but elsewhere in the report Dr. Stratton said: 

"Government purchases are not greatly different from those of the public," 

and all information and data obtained in this work by the Bureau "is given 

to the public in the form of suitable publications * * In other words, 

the needs of the public and the Government service are precisely the same as far as standards and specifications are concerned, whether it be standards 

of measurement, quality, or performance." And "the Government can do 

no greater service to the country than to place its own purchases on a basis 

which may be taken as a standard by the public at large." 121 years later an elaborate chart of these "new" functions appeared 

in the annual report. Asked about it at a congressional hearing, Stratton 

replied: "There is not a single thing that the bureau does that I can think 

of * * * which does not fall within five classes of standards * * I think 

it [the chart] will clear up a great deal of uncertainty as to the scope of the 

work of the bureau." 122 The new classification of functions and the elaborate reporting of 

Bureau research projects continued through the annual report of 1923, a 

tome running to an imposing 330 pages. Then a wave of conservation hit 

the Nation and the Bureau. The report of 1924, in the third year of 

Secretary of Commerce Hoover's tenure, totaled a scant 38 pages. The 

chart of functions and classes of standards that had appeared since 1916 was 

omitted and the splendid chart of the Bureau organization and map of the 

Bureau grounds that appeared in the 1923 report were gone. While standards were still pursued under five classes, they were not so listed, and in 

their place was the statement: "As a matter of convenience the organization of the Bureau is based not on classes of standards, but upon the nature 

of the work." 

In a way, an era as well as a decade had ended. 

120 NBS Annual Report 1914, pp. 9—12; Annual Report 1915, p. 14. 

NBS Annual Report 1914, p. 12. 

Hearings * * * 1918 (Dec. 1, 1916), p. 482. 
158 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16) 

The standard yard of Henry VII, showing sixteenths of yard 

and, below, the subdivisions of inches. 
THE 

WAR YEARS 

(1917—19) 

CHAPTER IV 

THE BUREAU TURNS TO WAR RESEARCH 

The war began in faraway Europe on August 4, 1914 and for several months 

the stock market and the American public were profoundly depressed. Then 

the long battle line across northern France stabilized, rifle pits became 

trenches, and as winter approached it appeared that the war had come to stay. 

Its early threat to American security was countered 'by President Wilson's dec. 

laration of neutrality; its threat to our economic stability dissipated as America became the arsenal of the Allies, supplying them with money, credits, 

munitions, oil, chemicals, explosives, and foodstuffs.1 

Pursuing neutrality, no Government agency made the slightest attempt 

to interfere in the booming production of war materials until a congressional 

act of August 1916, looking to a "future war of defense inferentially far 

distant," set up the Council of National Defense. Composed of the 

Secretaries of War, Navy, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor, it was to make recommendations to the President "for the co-ordination of in. 

dustries and resources for the national security and welfare." 2 Under no pressure and without a directive, the Council marked time until after war was declared, when its principal function was effectively assumed by the allpowerful War Industries Board, under Bernard Baruch. 

The first actual war.research agency of World War I was the National 

Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), established by Congress in 

March 1915 to initiate and direct scientific studies in problems of flight. 

The Bureau of Standards, represented on the Committee by Dr. Stratton, was 

asked to begin investigations at once of the physical factors in aeronautic 

'Exclusive of neutral countries, exports to the Allies rose from $927 million in 1914 to 

$3,013 million in 1916. Arthur C. Bining, The Rise of American Economic Life (New 

York: Charles Scribner's, 1943), p. 564; William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914—1932 (University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 16. 2 First Annual Report, Council of National Defense, 1917—18, p. 6; Second Annual Report, 

1918—19, p. 5. 

159 
160 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

design.3 Many of the aviation problems subsequently assigned by NACA 

to the Navy and War Departments were, since they lacked research facilities, 

turned over to the Bureau as it "became the scientific laboratory for the two 

military services." 

The initial attempt to mobilize the scientific and technical resources 

of the Nation began in the Naval Consulting Board, appointed by Secretary 

of the Navy Daniels in mid-1915. Headed by Thomas Edison, then in his 

68th year, with Willis R. Whitney, Frank J. Sprague, L. H. Baekeland, and 

Elmer A. Sperry on his staff, the Board, for lack &f firm direction, made 

little headway and found its wartime activity limited to screening the tens 

of thousands of inventions submitted to the Government by a war-stimulated 

public. A year later, in July 1916, the National Academy of Sciences, with 

President Wilson's concurrence, formed a National Research Council (NRC) as its operating subsidiary under George E. Hale, director of the Mount 

Wilson Observatory, to establish cooperation between existing Government, 

educational, and industrial research organizations. Important posts went 

to Dr. Stratton of the Bureau and Dr. Charles D. Walcott, Secretary of the 

Smithsonian Institution and director of NACA, as Government representatives on NRC. Industrial representatives included Gano Dunn of the J. C. 

White Engineering Corp. and John J. Carty, president of American Telephone & Telegraph; and Michael Pupin of Columbia University represented 

educational institutions.5 

in February 1917 the Council of National Defense requested the NRC 

to act as its agency for the organization of scientific information and person. 

nel, the Naval Cbnsulting Board to act as its committee on inventions. While 

neutrality tottered, the emergency councils and committees met and waited 

for a directive. No estimate, not even a guess, could be made of our possible 

troop commitment. The Nation was perilously close to war, yet few in 

this country even realized the nature of the conflict in Europe, that apart 

'Letter, Secretary of NACA to Secretary of Commerce, Dec. 18, 1915 (NBS Box 3, AG). 

For further details on the establishment of NACA and its relation to the Bureau, see NBS 

Box 7, IDS. 

NACA, established with an appropriation of $5,000, or "such part thereof as may be 

needed," was the predecessor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

(NASA) whose budget in fiscal year 1964 was approximately one million times the 

initial appropriation to NACA. 

Hearings * * * 1919 (Jan. 25, 1918), p. 960. Bureau records for December 1917, 

said Redfield, indicated that demands for scientific work from the military services came in at the rate of one every 20 minutes during that month (With Congress and Cabinet, 

New York: Doubleday, Page, 1924, p. 100). By then, Stratton reported (Hearings * * * 

1919, p. 960), military research constituted 95 percent of Bureau work. 

Letter, Hale to Secretary of Commerce, May 15, 1916 (NBS Box 296, APY-Hale). For 

the wartime organization of science, see Robert M. Yerkes, ed., The New World of 

Science: Its Development During the War (New York: Century, 1920), pp. 33 if. 
THE BUREAU TURNS TO WAR RESEARCH 161 

from a titanic struggle of armies it was a war of technology, of materiel, of 

massive and mechanized production. But of this the military services 

showed little cognition. Except for an answer to the growing U-boat menace, 

neither the Army nor Navy appeared to know what would be required of 

them or what science and technology could do for them. 

Even when war was declared on April 6, 1917, the Nation was slow to 

awake to the fact that it was unprepared. Few believed that American 

troops in any number would be involved.6 Two months later, in a show of 

the flag, Pershing took token elements of the First Division to France, and a month later cabled home the first unvarnished reports on the desperate plight 

of the Allied armies. Three years of carnage on a battlefront that had not 

changed by 10 kilometers in either direction had bled the British white. 

French morale was at its nadir and the armies close to mutiny. Pershing 

reported he would need 1 million men by the spring of 1918 and 3,200,000 

in France by early 

To send that initial force overseas and produce and supply the mountains of material it must have, the scientific, economic, and social life of the 

Nation became mobilized as never before in its history.8 There was no time 

for long drawn out research. For most of its war machine, the Nation 

had to rely on the research of the Allies. Artillery, ammunition, communication equipment, aircraft, and armored plate, all of Allied design, had to 

be adapted to American raw materials and American methods and machines. 

The scientific resources of the country were to be utilized principally in 

developing new sources and substitutes for war-scarce materials, devising new instruments and equipment for the Armed Forces, and accelerating 

standardization and mass production techniques in industry.9 The demand 

for weapons, armor, engines, rails, trucks, and other heavy duty equipment 

was to make it a metallurgists' war; the need for substitute materials, for 

nitrates, for the agents and materials of gas warfare made it a chemists' 

war. Confronted at last with the nature of its task, the Council of National 

Defense began by mobilizing the laboratories of the universities, of industry, 

8 Frederic L. Paxson, American Democracy and the World War, 3 vols. (Boston: 

Houghton, Muffin, 1936—48), II, 9. 

John J. Pershing, My Experiences in the War (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1931), 

I, 94.—99; II, 122—123. See also Prof. J. S. Ames' report from Europe in May 1917, 

quoted in The Autobiography of Robert A. Mihikan, pp. 157—158. 

Neither the Civil War nor the Spanish-American War "presented the necessity to convert to military use the maximum power of the Nation, nor to create for their use elaborate machines and weapons unknown to peace." Where earlier war manufacture was peace manufacture expanded, "in 1917—18 it was new manufacture upon an unknown 

scale." Paxson, II, 35. 

"The first important moving assembly line in this country, at the Ford plant just outside 

Detroit, went into operation in May 1913, cutting the production time of a car from 12 to 

less than 6 hours. 
162 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

and Government, and in particular the two Government bureaus "oriented 

to industrial problems—Standards and Mines." 10 Until 1917 the war in Europe had little impact on the Bureau of 

Standards. Personnel increases remained normal, the volume of Government testing rose briefly in 1916 and then subsided, and industrial testing 

actually declined between 1914 and 1917. Uncertain of their requirements, 

the military services made few demands. In 1915 the Signal Corps requested 

some tests of airplane frames, wing fabrics, and engines. The NACA 

asked for a study of the characteristics of airplane propellers. In 1916 

the Navy Department sought tests of steels going into its new warships. That 

same year Army Ordnance, soon to be swamped in problems, asked only for a study of several failures it had encountered in elevating gun screws. 

Although heavy industry began producing munitions for the Allies in 

1914, no call was made on the Bureau for certification of the gages used in 

their manufacture." But with something like prescience, Louis A. Fischer 

urged Dr. Stratton to seek out a gage expert and organize a special laboratory. 

Harold L. Van Keuren was brought in and set to work planning the laboratory. It was one of the few areas in which this country was prepared when we entered the war.12 Stratton also became concerned as German sources 

of chemical laboratory ware and high-grade optical glass were cut off, and 

early in 1916 he sought funds for additional furnaces and kilns at the Pittsburgh laboratory of the Bureau to undertake their experimental production. 

The gage laboratory and glass plant were not the first such resources 

acquired by the Bureau. Well aware that in the testing of materials, analysis 

could not be separated from synthesis, Stratton had acquired five of these 

small-scale "factories" before the war. Learning that the machinery firm 

of Pusey and Jones in Wilmington was constructing several small paper 

mills for paper research companies, Stratton had managed to obtain one of 

10 Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, p. 304. 

Export of American explosives, principally to England, increased from $6 million in 

1914 to $467 million in 1916. Bureau correspondence with the Secretaries of War 

and Navy in 1915—16 reported that munitions drawings were going to manufacturers 

with rio mention of the necessary gages or with insufficient gages, and warned of the 

"grave danger that [these war supplies] would not fit when delivered to the field" 

(NARG 40, file 67009/43). Not surprising, many of the shells on arrival overseas proved to be "of a low standard," and in June 1916 the British War Mission established its own gage testing laboratory in New York. It came too late. In the Battle of the Somme 

that opened in July 1916, "the faultiness of the [American.madei ammunition in the 

preliminary artillery barrage was particularly severe * * * [resulting in] numerous 

premature bursts, falling short of shells, and unexploded shells." Brian Gardner, The 

Big Push (London: Cassell, 1961), pp. 63, 86. 

"NBS Annual Report, 1917, pp. 20—21; SWS Address, 15th Annual Conference on Weights and Measures, May 23, 1922 (NBS Historical File). 
163 

Above, the NBS small-scale experimental paper mill in which all the operations of papermaking could be studied under controlled conditions. Below, the rotary cement kiln 

at the Pittsburgh laboratory, brought to Washington in 1918, for determining the effects 

of various processes in the manufacture of cements. 
164 

Abate, the experimental roiling mill in the metallurgical division, a 16-inch mill equipped 

for rolling plates, rods, or bars, both hot and cold. Below, the NBS experimental 

cotton mill, acquired after the war, showing the knitting machine on the left and the 

creel (sets of bars with skewers for holding paying.off bobbins) on the right. 
THE BUREAU TURNS TO WAR RESEARCH 165 

them for the Bureau at a fraction of its cost.13 Components and processes 

in the manufacture of rubber products were determined on a small rubber 

mill similarly acquired, in which rubber compounds could be mixed and 

tubing and other small rubber articles made. The Pittsburgh laboratories 

had several small-scale kilns for firing clays and clay products, in which the 

effect of various compositions were determined, and a cement kiln with a capacity of a 'barrel at a burn. The metallurgical division had both an ex- perimental foundry and a small rolling mill, for the preparation and heat 

treatment of alloys, where over 3,000 foundry castings were turned out during 

the 

With the acquisition of the gage shop and optical glass plant, the 

Bureau thus had seven of these small plants engaged in special production 

and process problems all through 1917—18. It was negotiating for two 

others, a small woolen mill and a cotton mill, as the war ended. 

The wartime expansion of the Bureau might be said to date from 

1913 when, to the original 8 acres of hilltop, an additional 9 acres were 

added on three sides of North building. In 1918 another 10 acres to the 

north gave the Bureau its first frontage on Connecticut Avenue, and small 

parcels totaling almost 8 acres purchased over the next 2 years 'brought the 

site close to its present form, except for the great slope down to the avenue, 

not acquired until 1925.15 

New field laboratories of the Bureau included two structural materials 

(cement testing) stations at Denver and San Francisco, transferred from 

the Department of Interior's Reclamation Service in July 1917. The next 

year another cement laboratory, for Army, Navy, and Shipping Board con- struction projects, was set up at San Diego, and branch laboratories for 

gage testing were opened in New York, Cleveland, and Bridgeport, Conn.16 

in Washington, the fourth major structure, East building, housing the 

electrical laboratories, was completed in the spring of 1914. Later that year a large storage and workshop structure called the Far West building went 

up; a handsome new Chemistry building, begun in 1915, was occupied in 

" Conversation with Dr. Robert Hobbs, Feb. 19, 1963. 14 For descriptions of these plants, see Stratton, "The work of the National Bureau of 

Standards," an address before the Engineers' Club, Dayton, Ohio, May 4, 1915, pp. 43—45 (in Stratton Papers, MIT), and interview with SWS by H. E. Lobdel, editor, Technology 

Review (MIT), 24, 7—10 (1922). For the foundry work, see NBS Annual Report 

1918, p. 188; Annual Report 1919, p. 263. 

"See app. L for the sequence of NBS land acquisitions. 

'° NBS Annual Report 1918, p. 139; letter, SWS to Bureau of Public Roads, Department 

of Agriculture, Jan. 24, 1919 (NBS Box 15, IRC). 
Mule teams leveling the ground for the new Chemistry building in the early fall of 1915. The rear of North building and the edge of the Low 

Temperature laboratory are in the background. 
THE BUREAU TURNS TO WAR RESEARCH 167 

the spring of 1917; and in 1918 the Radio Laboratory and its towers, adjacent to East building, was completed.17 

Of the hundred-million-dollar National Security and Defense Fund 

voted by Congress to President Wilson in 1917, a little over $2 million was allotted to the Bureau in 1918—19 for the construction and equipping of two 

large "war-emergency" laboratories and two lesser structures. Northwest 

building, centralizing metallurgical research, the gage work, and military 

equipment and military instrument research, was completed in March 1918, 

and an imposing Industrial building, almost three times larger than any 

previous Bureau structure, was finally completed early in 1920.18 

The first occupants of the Industrial building, moving in late in 

1918, were the structural materials laboratories, crowded out of West building, and Dr. Stratton's paper and rubber mills. Into a new Kiln building, 

back of Industrial, went an enlarged optical glass plant, as well as the cement 

and ceramic kilns brought from the Pittsburgh laboratory where the Army 

had commandeered much of the Bureau space for its own Use. The fourth 

structure was an Altitude Laboratory (later called the Dynamometer Laboratory), in which high-altitude conditions could be simulated for testing 

airplane engine performance under flight conditions.19 

While the President's emergency fund provided much needed buildings for the Bureau, special wartime funds for military research, amounting 

to $487,000 in 1917—18 and $622,000 in 1918—19, made it possible for the 

Bureau to acquire scientists it could never otherwise have afforded.20 The 

scientific, technical, and administrative staff rose from 517 in 1917 to 

1,117 a year later, some of the newcomers advancing to key positions and 

11 For construction details of these buildings, see NBS Blue Folder Boxes 77—79, 81. 

Among minor structures built following the influx of warworkers were the Standard 

Store and gas station, erected at the entrance to the Bureau grounds and operated by 

staff members in their off hours. Since the nearest stores were almost a mile away in 

either direction, the Bureau shop was a convenience, offering fruit, vegetables, canned 

goods and other groceries, tobacco and sundries, as well as gas and oil, at cost. By 

1925 commercial enterprises began to close in, and that spring the store and gas station were closed. Letter, GKB to H. W. Bearce, Dec. 1, 1925 (NBS Box 108, AG). 

NBS Blue Folder Boxes 82—84. 19 For the altitude laboratory, see letter, Secretary of Commerce tà President Wilson, 

Aug. 6, 1918 (NBS Box 5, FPG). 

Approximately half the funds were special military appropriations by Congress to the 

Bureau, the other half transferred funds from Army and Navy appropriations. See 

app. F. 
C' 

The Standard Store and gas station down on Connecticut Avenue, at the corner of Van Ness Street (formerly Pierce Mill Road). The recently 

completed Industrial building is in the background. The Ford passenger-freight van back of the store is being serviced, as a trolley approaches 

to pick up the waiting soldier and scientist. The year, 1918. 
THE BUREAU TURNS TO WAR RESEARCH 169 

destined to remain at the Bureau through the intervening years between 

wars.21 

The universities and, to a lesser extent, industry were to furnish num- bers of young scientists needed at the Bureau, but not before the services, 

indiscriminately accepting or drafting every male of military age, had made 

serious inroads on the staff. Those with Navy appointments were the first 

to go, and the cavalry units at nearby Fort Myer carried off a large group, 

including most of the textile section, before a halt was called. 

Dr. Stratton's long reluctance to hire women to work at the Bureau— 

he is reported to have said once that the sight of his scientists in shirtsleeves 

might offend them—broke down as the services not only called up many on the clerical and administrative staff but great numbers of the laboratory 

aids, apprentices, and assistants. While Stratton felt it was not "in the 

interests of the service to open such positions as assistant or associate 

21 Statutory employees in December 1918 numbered 341, those paid from special ap. 

propriations 424, those from the President's allotment and military funds 295, the re- maining 57 on loan from universities and other Government agencies. Hearings * * * 

1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), p. 934. 

From the universities in 1917 came Dr. Edward Wichers to work in the chemistry of 

platinum metals; Dr. Fred L. Mohier, a spectroscopist assigned to optical pyrometry in 

airplane engine research; Dr. Lewis V. Judson, to work on the calibration of military 

scales; Dr. Henry T. Wensel, on optical lenses and glasses; Laurens E. Whittemore, 

in radio; and Dr. Englehardt A. Eckhardt, to investigate sound-ranging problems. 

From industry came Arthur F. Beal (military timepieces), Howard S. Bean (gage 

testing), Carl S. Cragoe (methane analysis), and Francis W. Dunmore (radio). 

"Drafted" from other Government agencies as Stratton combed the lists for physicists 

and chemists were Dr. Lyman J. Briggs, later Director of the Bureau, to work in aviation 

physics, and Dr. Gustave E. F. Lundell, to do alloy research and head the standard 

samples section. 

In 1918 recent university graduates arriving at the Bureau included Archibald T. Mc. 

Pherson, assigned to gas chemistry studies of combustion engines; Raleigh Gilchrist, 

analytical chemist in platinum metals; and James I. Hoffman, iron and steel chemist. 

From industry that year same Ralph E. Gould (timepieces), Enoch Karrer (searchlights), 

Roman F. Geller (optical glass refractories), and Alexander I. Krynitsky (experimental 

foundry). 

Uniforms appeared on the Bureau grounds as the Army and Navy assigned specialists 

to work on military assignments, among them Cpl. Frederick A. Curtis, in paper re- search, and Herbert N. Eaton, in aeronautical instrument research. 

Among university personnel on temporary assignment to the Bureau were Dr. Frederick 

W. Grover, who had been there from 1903 to 1912 and returned to work on radio measure- ments; Dr. Liewelyn G. Hoxton, who came back to make physical studies on combustion 

engines; Prof. Albert A. Michelson, in a lieutenant commander's uniform, to work on optical problems for the Navy Department; and Dr. William B. Kouwenhoven, electrical 

engineer from Johns Hopkins, to make studies in the magnetic testing of rifle barrels. 
170 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

physicist" to women, few at that time could qualify, he had no choice 

in replacing his laboratory assistants.22 

Almost a hundred girls and women came to the Bureau during the 

war, among them Miss Johanna Busse, a researcher in thermometry, who 

in 1929 became chief of that section and held the position until her retirement 20 years later. The first woman with a doctoral degree in physics to 

work at the Bureau arrived in 1918, to assist in the preparation of a radio 

handbook for the Signal Corps. A second joined the colorimetry section a year later. From then on the doors were open and the question of ability 

to qualify was never raised again.23 

More serious than the exodus prompting the distaff influx, the military services and new war agencies also levied on key Bureau personnel, 

among them Louis A. Fischer, commissioned a major by Army Ordnance; 

Roy Ferner, called to the Emergency Fleet; and Rudolph Wig and Joseph 

Pearson, drafted by the Shipping Board. As requests continued to come 

in, Stratton did what he could to stop the raids on his staff.24 

The war ended Dr. Stratton's hours in his private workshop. To 

attend to new and pressing responsibilities and allow him more time to 

look after the scientific work going on in the laboratories, he was obliged 

to seek help with the routine operations of his office. In the fall of 1917 

Ie brought in as his technical assistant, Frederick J. Schlink, an associate 

physicist in the weights and measures division.25 As an executive of Consumers' Research in the 1930's, Schlink was to become a gadfly of the 

Bureau, making use of his experience and knowledge gained there in handling the disposition of incoming technical and scientific mail and administering the Government testing work in his divison. 

Acquiring personnel was in some respects the Bureau's most difficult 

wartime problem. Shifting from peacetime to military research was almost 

the least. So much of its work before the war was keyed directly or indirectly 

to industry that at congressional hearings on appropriations for 1917, Stratton had no difficulty in pointing out the wartime potential of every investigation at the Bureau. Asking for increases in funds for these investigations 

and proposing four new ones, in color standards, clay products, the physical 

Letter, SWS to Secretary of Commerce, May 25, 1918, and attached correspondence 

(NBS Box 4, AP 1917). 

Dr. Louise McDowell, Cornell, 1909, on leave from the physics department at Wellesley 

College, remained through 1918—19. Dr. Mabel K. Frehafer in colorimetry remained 

from 1919 to 1923. Interview with Dr. Silsbee, May 23, 1963. 

See letter, Secretary of Commerce to President Wilson, June 6, 1918 (NBS Box 4, AP). 

Hearings * * * 1918 (Dec. 1, 1916), p. 470. 
NEW SOURCES, RESOURCES, AND SUBSTITUTES 171 

constants of metals and alloys, and standardization of machines, mechanical 

appliances, and tools, he declared: 

There never was a time in the history of the country when we should 

be looking at such matters as critically as at present. The items 

submitted—I think I can say all of them—are as fundamentally 

concerned with both industrial and military preparedness as any 

that will come before you.26 

When war came, Stratton later said, it was not necessary to "change 

the bureau's organization one bit." 27 The metallurgy division turned from 

its rail and wheel investigations to armament steel research, the electro. 

chemistry section took up •battery research, the electrolysis section turned 

to sound-ranging problems, and the weights and measures division undertook 

the preparation of military scales and gage testing. Photometry turned to 

searchlight and other military illumination projects, pyrometry to optical 

glass and aeronautical engine research, radiometry studied invisible signaling devices, spectroscopy worked on military photography, and colorimetry took up problems of camouflage. As still other inquiries and requests 

for research poured in from the military services, from the NACA and the 

National Research Council, and from the civilian war agencies—the Shipping 

Board, the War Industries Board, the War Trade Board, the Railroad Ad. 

ministration, the Fuel Administration—the Bureau shifted its electrical, optical, and chemical investigations and its structural and industrial materials 

programs to their military applications with scarcely a hitch.2' 

NEW SOURCES, RESOURCES, AND SUBSTITUTES 

The 299-page report, "The War Work of the Bureau of Standards," 

suggests that except in medicine and foodstuffs, there was scarcely an investigation of the National Research Council or War Industries Board or a problem of the military services in which the Bureau was not concerned 

in one way or another. From aircraft construction to camouflage, from 

coke-oven investigations to concrete ships, from precision gages to illuminating shells, from optical glass to rubber, from submarine detection to X-ray 

and radium research, the Bureau participated in almost the whole range of 

America's wartime effort. As standards laboratory and as research institute 

Hearings * * * 1917 (Feb. 2, 1916), pp. 991—992. 

Hearings * * * 1919 (Jan. 25, 1918), p. 975. 

"For a roster of the scientific staff and the wartime projects of the Bureau as of 

September 1918, see app. J. 
172 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

it was called on to (1) furnish scientific and technical information and 

recommendations, (2) undertake specific research, (3) develop and standardize tests and test procedures, (4) standardize materials and equipment, 

and (5) make new as well as routine precision measurements. 

The first direct contact of the Bureau with the war in Europe occurred 

in the spring and summer of 1917 when members of the Bureau went 

abroad with a scientific mission "to obtain information concerning applica. 

tions of science to warfare and the part to be played by scientific men in 

the war." 29 That same spring British and French scientific missions arrived 

in this country and visited the Bureau, bringing with them new military 

equipment, products of their laboratory research and battlefield experience. 

The disclosures of both missions were jolting, for they indicated a range 

of research abroad of which we were entirely ignorant and a superiority in 

certain technologies of which we were wholly unaware. Particularly impressive were some of the French steels and semi-steels and the developments 

of French radio apparatus.'° 

Chemicals and steel, forging the weapons of the battle in France, were 

primary concerns of the Bureau throughout the war. Germany's preeminent 

dye industry, on which our textile industry depended for 90 percent of its 

dyestuffs, also made her dominant in explosives, for out of the same coal tar 

derivatives that built the aniline industry came the phenol for picric acid, 

the toluol for TNT, and the ammonia for ammonium nitrate.3' This coun- try's negligible dye industry made us almost wholly dependent on the coking 

industry for our supply of toluol. When war came that supply was already 

earmarked for the Allies and other sources had to be speedily developed. 

In the spring of 1917, at the instigation of the National Research Council, 

Bureau representatives met with American Gas Institute officials and with 

Federal, State, and city authorities to study procedures for the recovery of 

toluol from city gas supplies, as the British were doing, and to determine the 

adjustments necessary in standards of gas service.32 

29 NBS M46, "The War Work of the Bureau of Standards" (1921), pp. 11, 172. Hereafter 

cited as "War Work." 

'° The steel in the French 240-mm. trench mortar, for example, was much better than 

that in the same mortar made in this country. The French also made a satisfactory 

processed cast iron (semi-steel) shell that American industry was unable to duplicate 

until the Bureau established criteria its production. See "War Work," pp. 195—196. 

For the radio equipment of the Allies, see radio section, below. On the other hand, 

the Bureau discounted the new stainless steel made by the English and even after 

the war continued to believe it had only limited usefulness. See letter, SWS to Chief of Construction, Navy Department, Dec. 21, 1921 and attached correspondence 

(NBS Box 12, IMH). 

Letter, Secretary of Commerce Redfield to SWS, Feb. 22, 1915 (NBS Box 3, AG). 

See Benedict Crowell, America's Munitions, 1917—18 (Washington, D.C., 1919), pp. 

107—108. 
NEW SOURCES, RESOURCES, AND SUBSTITUTES 173 

Constructed on the basis of Bureau recommendations, 21 Governmentowned toluol plants were in operation extracting toluol and ammonia from 

the light oils of coal and water gas jn city gas works at the time of the 

armistice. The reduced efficiency of household gas that resulted from this 

stripping became a memorable experience of the war as heating values fell 

off and gas mantles roared as housewives turned them up full to get more 

light. But along with new coke-oven recovery processes, the plants raised 

toluol production from the prewar rate of approximately half a million gallons 

annually to 40 times that amount.33 

The Bureau also became involved in byproduct coke operations when 

in the latter part of 1917 the Department of Commerce asked Bureau gas 

engineers to study the recently developed Roberts coke oven, said to produce a commercial grade of metallurgical coke from the low-grade coals of Illinois 

and Indiana, as well as large yields of byproducts, including light oils, 

ammonia, and tar. With Bureau of Mines and Geological Survey representatives, more than 20 members of the Bureau took part in the work and 

continued the investigations through 1918. The war ended before the 

Roberts oven was proved, but the investigation indicated that the process 

had considerable merit. Perhaps more important was the reassessment of 

the value of some of the midcontinent coals as a new fuel and byproduct 

resource. Although considered uneconomical to work in peacetime, it seemed 

possible that new advances in mining technology might make them competitive with established fields.34 

The most extensive testing undertaken by the Bureau during the war was almost certainly in the chemical, physical, and structural properties of 

metals—of processed-irons for use in shells; of steels and steel alloys for guns, 

munitions, armor plate, high-speed tools, gages, airplane instruments and 

engines, helmets and gas masks, horseshoe nails and rivets; of aluminum for 

metal airplanes and Army canteens; of brass for ammunition. Under the 

stimulus of war, industry turned out scores of new alloy steels—nickel, 

chromium, tungsten, zirconium, molybdenum, vanadium, manganese, and 

cobalt—and sent them to the Bureau for precise determination of their com- position and qualities. Ingots of light armor alloy steels (containing 

zirconium, molybdenum, boron, cerium), made for the Navy at the Bureau 

of Mines were rolled into plates in the Bureau of Standards mill and thorough 

tests made of their mechanical, chemical, and thermal properties. And 

"War Work," pp. 288—293; T117, "Toluol recovery" (McBride, Reinicker, Dunkley, 

1918). For the less than cooperative attitude of the gas industry at the time, see letter, 

SWS to editor, Am. Gas Eng. J., Nov. 17, 1917 (NBS Box 7, ICG). 

"War Work," pp. 73—82. 
174 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

where tests of new alloys warranted it, the Bureau evolved standard test 

methods and manufacturing control procedures.35 

At the request of the NACA and the Navy, studies were made of the 

properties and methods of manufacture of light alloys of aluminum, for the 

construction of a proposed all-metal airplane, and of duralumin, known to be 

used in the construction of the German zeppelins.3° Cooperating with the 

War Industries Board in its drive to conserve imported tin, the Bureau 

found cadmium an acceptable substitute in tin.Iead solders. It also made 

recommendations for the reduction of tin in bearing metals, modified the tin 

content in bronzes, and contributed to recovery processes for tin scrap. 

Similar research to conserve manganese, in short supply throughout the war, 

lead to revised specifications of the manganese content in several types of 

steel.37 

In these metallurgical investigations the Bureau introduced, in many 

instances for the first time, new concepts of quantitative measurement in 

the industry. Under "cookery" methods of manufacture, still prevalent in 

many plants, adding a variable quantity of manganese, for example, and the 

necessary fluxes, resulted in a satisfactory steel and industry was therefore 

content. Bureau laboratory and foundry research showed that even better 

steel resulted from exact measurement of its ingredients, and besides con- serving raw materials this precision made possible greater control over the 

manufacturing process. 

New technologies and the all-consuming nature of the war soon 

produced shortages never before envisaged. One of these was in platinum, 

imported largely from Russia. It was needed in large quantities as a catalyst 

in the manufacture of munitions, was used in the contact points of airplane 

magnetos, and in the making of chemical laboratory ware. As it grew 

scarce its price soared, and hunting for platinum ores in this country became 

as avid a pursuit in World War I as uranium hunting was to be some 25 

years later. 

Despite its importance to industry, very little was known about the 

rhodium, iridium, palladium, iron and other metals found as alloys in corn- merical platinum or about their effect on manufacturing processes. The 

study of platinum and the platinum metals which began during the war under 

"War Work," Pp. 158—172. A supersteel rumored to be possessed by the Germans and 

thought to be a zirconium alloy was identified after the war as a uranium alloy, of more 

propaganda than military or industrial value. See letter, director, Nela Research Laboratory to SWS, July 28, 1917 (NBS Box 11, IM); correspondence in NBS Boxes 10 and 

11, IM 1918; interview with Dr. Raleigh Gilchrist, Oct. 30, 1962. 

For the Bureau's many years of interest in duralumin (1917—35), see correspondence in 

NBS Box 384, IM. 

"War Work," pp. 154—158, 160—162. See T109, "Conservation of tin in bearing metals, 

bronzes, and solders" (Burgess and Woodward, 1919). 
NEW SOURCES, RESOURCES, AND SUBSTITUTES 175 a special appropriation continued at the Bureau for almost 30 years. The 

wartime effort was limited to studying the effects of the metals alloyed with 

-platinum when platinum was used for catalytic purposes, assaying the hopeful finds of platinum prospectors—mostly negative—and searching for 

platinum substitutes. Although Bureau research showed that two goldpalladium alloys known as palau and rhotanium made fairly suitable platinum 

substitutes in the making of laboratory crucibles and dishes, they were not 

to be more than wartime expedients.38 

Since the whole of steel production was preempted for Allied arms and 

munitions, for war emergency buildings and plants, and for our own weaponry, it seemed for a time impossible to provide sufficient steel to build 

the transports and merchant fleet this country needed but did not have. 

Actually, by expansion of existing steel plants and almost total suppression of 

the automobile industry, the necessary steel plate was made available, but 

not before a number of wooden ships and even some of concrete came down 

the ways. It was in the latter program that the Bureau laboratory at Pittsburgh had a considerable role, assisting in the development of a burnt clay 

aggregate that expanded "like a loaf of bread when it rises," as Stratton said, 

and yet was strong enough to make concrete ships possible.39 

Based on designs prepared under the direction of Rudolph J. Wig 

and Joseph C. Pearson, Bureau members with the Shipping Board, more than 

40 concrete cargo ships and tankers were planned. Two experimental ships 

of 3,500 tons were floated and satisfactorily tested in 1918 and 10 more of 

7,500 tons deadweight were completed by 1921. None ever became operational. Although somewhat cheaper and faster to build than steel ships, 

concrete bottoms by reason of their relative brittleness and reduced cargo 

space were not deemed likely to replace steel or wood except in an emergency. 

The same held true of the several concrete barges and concrete freight cars 

tested by the Bureau4° 

The months of the emergency disclosed unsuspected gaps everywhere 

in this country's long vaunted belief in its self-sufficiency. Within weeks of 

the declaration of war, leather, paper, and textiles went on the list of critical 

materials and the search for substitutes began. Among leather substitutes 

produced by industry at the urging of the Council of National Defense and 

the War Department and tested at the Bureau were fishskin, porpoise, and 

sharkskin as uppers for civilian and military shoes and a variety of compositions for soles. When it was fcund that no flshskin would do, the shoe 

"War Work," pp. 65—66, 159—60; Raleigh Gilchrist, MS, "The scientific activities of 

Division 5 * * * 1917—61," pp. 15—18 (NBS Historical File). 

Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), p. 947. 40 Proc. Am. Concrete Inst. 14, 441 (1918); ibid, 15, 241 (1919) ; ibid., 17, 284 (1921); 

"War Work," pp. 86—87, 213; letter, SWS to R. J. Wig, Apr. 23, 1918, and attached 

correspondence (NBS Box 7, ICP). 
176 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

industry ceased making high-buttoned shoes, at one stroke solving the 

problem of civilian uppers and making a genuine contribution, however 

temporary, to foot comfort and esthetics. On the other hand, at least one of the hundreds of composition sc.les submitted to the Bureau proved almost as durable as leather under ordinary usage, though unsuitable for shoes 

destined for hard wear overseas.4' The infantry got the leather. 

Bureau tests of paper substitutes and the search for new uses for 

paper were more successful, resulting, in a critical area, in partial replacement of tin cans by impregnated paper containers for shipping greases and 

soaps, and paper barrels for shipping pitch or asphalt. A paper made in 

the Bureau mill from jUte and manila rope stock appeared especially promising. An exceedingly strong paper, it was intended as a substitute for the 

linen fabrics used to cover airplane wings. But it came too late. The 

substitute actually used for scarce linen was a mercerized cotton fabric developed in the textile section of the Bureau. It was adopted by this country 

and also by England, whose inadequate supply of flax for linen had made the 

research necessary.42 

Faced with the fact that 65 percent of our raw wool came from abroad, 

that shipping was scarce and uncertain, and that millions of uniforms and 

blankets would be needed for the American armies coming into being, the 

Quartermaster Corps and Ordnance Department appealed to the Bureau 

for help. To find out what characteristics a wool substitute must have, the 

Bureau sent inquiries to textile manufacturers concerning the nature of the 

raw stock and woolen compositions. The answers disclosed that neither 

here nor abroad had manufacturers ever made clothing materials, woolen or otherwise, with specifications that could be quantitatively measured. 

Wool was wool, as cotton was cotton, whatever the quality or properties of 

their ingredients. When the industry protested Bureau proposals to define 

wool compositions and set up specifications, Stratton began negotiations for a small experimental wool manufacturing plant to make the necessary tests. 

Working the raw materials with available laboratory equipment, the Bureau 

found that the heat-retaining properties of wool, as well as other textiles, 

depends less upon the intrinsic properties of their fibers than on their arrangement, and that a lightweight cotton could be made into almost as warm a fabric as wool.43 The Bureau thus learned that, as in some areas of 

the steel, glass, and other industries, the textile industry worked with little 

understanding of its fundamental principles. 

"War Work," pp. 143—144. 

"War Work," pp. 198—202, 282; correspondence in NBS Box 15, 1ST. For other 

leather, paper, and textile substitutes (wooden soles for shoes, cotton currency, transparent silk for airplane wing coverings, etc.), see NBS Box 15, files, ISL, ISP, and 1ST. 

Also letter, SWS to National War Savings Committee, June 11, 1918 (NBS Box 6, IC). 

"War Work," pp. 283—284. 
NEW' SOURCES, RESOURCES, AND SUBSTITUTES 177 

As with so many of the wartime investigations, the war ended before 

much of the research in substitutes could be translated into new products. 

In the emergency, the quickest solution was often elimination, as in the case of uppers on shoes. Wool simply disappeared from shops and stores and 

went into uniforms. Felt, too, went off the market and into canteen cases 

and helmets, splints, and shell packing. Silk went into powder bags. But 

elimination alone was not enough. To continue to supply the Allies and at 

the same time clothe, feed, and equip our military forces demanded an end 

to traditionally wasteful practices and a hitherto unknown degree of standardization. Thus, perhaps the most important result of the search for new sources or substitutes for materials in critical supply was not the substitutes 

themselves but the fact that both Government and industry were forced to 

establish specifications for materials and insist on greater standardization 

of products. 

The drive for standardization and elimination of waste in commercial 

and industrial practices had its beginning in the Commercial Economy 

Board, organized in the Council of National Defense in March 1917. Renamed the Conservation Division, it was transferred in May 1918 to Bernard 

Baruch's War Industries Board, soon to regulate the manufacture of some 

30,000 articles of commerce.44 

In the year and a half of the war the Conservation Division and its 

predecessor effected enormous savings of manpower and materials in over 

250 industries by reducing the number of styles, varieties, sizes, and colors, 

by eliminating services and certain materials and products altogether, by 

substituting plentiful for scarce materials, and by standardizing sizes, lengths, 

widths, and weights. The clothing industry was revolutionized from the skin 

out as steel for corsets, weighted silks, and heavy woolens disappeared from 

the market. Fabric was saved by shortening men's coats, eliminating outside 

pockets on suits, and restricting suit styles to 10 models. Shoe lasts were 

reduced in number and shoe colors restricted to black, white, and one shade 

of tan. 

Newsprint for papers and magazines was cut as much as 20 percent. 

Colors of typewriter ribbons shrank from 150 to 5 and were sold in heavy 

paper instead of tinfoil and tin boxes. Buggy wheels were reduced from 

232 sizes and varieties to 4, plows from 326 to 76 sizes and styles, and automobile tires from 287 types to 9. Brass pens were abolished, pocketknives 

"At the same time, Herbert Hoover's Food Administration began fixing food prices, to 

forestall hoarding and profiteering, inaugurated "meatless" and "wheatless" days, campaigned for other food economies in the home, and acted to stimulate food production. 

"Hooverizing" enabled the United States to export almost three times her normal amounts 

of breadstuffs, meats, and sugar in 1918. Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States, 

1900—1925. V. Over Here, 1914—1918 (New York: Scribner, 1933), pp. 383—384, 

418—422. 
178 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

cut from 6,000 to a hundred varieties, and steel pens reduced from 132 to 

30 styles. Mail order catalogs best reflected the new austerity as their cus- tomary bulk fell away by more than half. 

As a result of simplification and standardization, labor savings in 

the manufacture of products from clothing to coffins reportedly reached as high as 35 percent. Savings over prewar consumption of materials in some 

instances rose to 50 percent as simplicity ruled and plentiful wood, paper, 

zinc, and cotton replaced the steel, tinplate, copper, brass, bronze, pig tin, 

nickel, and raw wooi consumed by war.45 The country had experienced 

nothing like it before, and the impact of this husbandry of resources reached 

into every home, every office, factory, institution, and government agency 

in the Nation. 

Reviewing the wartime economy drive shortly after the armistice, 

the Bureau had to admit that despite more than a decade of testing of Government purchases, 

no very pronounced demand for standardization among * * * 

the different Government departments * * * had existed prior to 

the war. Large as the orders for * * * materials had been in 

normal times, the necessity for complete standardization was not 

very evident. When, however, as a result of the war many Government bureaus [began] buying goods of about the same kind at 

the same time, it soon became necessary to have some sort of standard specifications.46 

It must be admitted that in the case of the military departments, which 

had been left free to develop their own purchasing procedures, the new order 

of the day, for all its intrinsic value, permitted a latitude of interpretation 

that sometimes worked mischief. Specifications arbitrarily arrived at often 

defeated their purpose, as when General Electric complained to the Bureau 

that it frequently received greatly differing specifications for identical items 

of electrical apparatus ordered by the Army and Navy.47 Asked at a con- gressional hearing why the Government had requirements or specifications 

that manufacturers found all but impossible to meet, Stratton replied that 

these were not Bureau specifications. New department or bureau heads, 

particularly in the War Department, who suddenly became "specificationminded" were apt to set up standards for materials on their own initiative 

Grosvenor B. Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind 

the Line, 1917—1918 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1924), pp. 209—231; Bernard M. Baruch, 

American Industry in the War: A Report of the War Industries Board (1921), edited by 

R. H. Hippeihauser (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1941), pp. 65—69. 46 War Work, pp. 151—152. 

Letter, General Electric to NBS, Mar. 10, 1917 (NBS Box 7, IE). For a note on the 

Standardization Section of the General Staff, set up in August 1918, see NBS Annual 

Report 1919, p. 52. 
THE AIRPLANE IN THE LABORATORY 179 

that could be produced only at high cost. The tensile strength established 

for one kind of steel wire, for example, had proved clearly beyond the re- quirements and wholly impractical to make. In another case the Bureau 

found that a cement specification so limited the magnesium content that it 

cut off the most important cement-producing district in the United Sates.48 

And in at least one instance the War Industries Board had to act "to kill a general standardization suggestion that evolved in the War Department 

during an attack of unusually severe standardization fever. To have re- duced all machine tools to uniform standards [as recommended] would 

have stifled production for many 

Despite the follies committed in the name of standardization, the prac. 

tice emerged from the war as an indispensable consideration in the coming 

age of mass production. The war demonstrated not only the usefulness to 

manufacturers of specifications and standards, as the Bureau had long and 

patiently pointed out, but their inescapable necessity. For the Bureau to 

have supplied in those few months the thousands of standards asked for by 

agencies and industries in the grip of war was out of the question. The 

major effort of the Bureau was restricted to an attempt to codify Government 

procedures and to formulate, where it could, responsible and comprehensive 

specifications for materials and products it was equipped and staffed to deal 

with.5° 

The hope of the Bureau that the impulse toward conservation, toward 

sensible husbandry of resources through standardization, might continue 

in the postwar period was soon dashed. Industry 'no sooner turned from 

war production to the consumer market again than it reverted to all its former 

wasteful practices. It was brought up short by the severe postwar depression that struck late in 1920. Under the leadership of the Department of 

Commerce and the National Bureau of Standards, industry was again instructed in its wartime lesson. Conservation and standardization became 

key words of the decade. 

THE AIRPLANE IN THE LABORATORY 

So rapid was the wartime development of air power and air strategy 

that by 1917 some at the Bureau seriously believed that "victory was likely 

to go to the side having the largest and most effective types of machines51 

Yet in no aspect of scientific, technological, or industrial capability was America so utterly unprepared as it was in aviation. The airplane that first 

48 Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), pp. 929,945. 

'° Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War, p. 454. 5° "War Work," p. 16. 

nlbid 
180 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

flew at Kitty Hawk had continued to evolve in Europe, where the early years 

of the war saw successively improved military planes and power plants— 

the enemy and Allied artillery spotters, scouts, pursuit craft, and great lumbering bombers—whose designs were carefully withheld from neutrals. In 

the same decade and a half after the Wright brothers' flight, the military 

forces of this country had acquired just 2 flying fields and 55 planes. Every 

one of those planes was either obsolete or obsolescent by European standards 

and had little or none of the instrumentation in the aircraft then flying in 

France.52 

With our entry into the war, the Allies at once made their airplane 

designs available. On the other hand, because this country was supplying 

parts, some of their engine and instrument difficulties had arrived here 

earlier, through the war missions. Reports from abroad in 1916 indicated a number of shortcomings in their new high-powered planes. The spark 

plugs in use were said to limit better engine design, engine fuels were erratic 

in performance, and the lubricating oils often congealed at high altitudes. 

Bombers, fighters, and reconnaissance planes all required more refined instrumentation and, more important, improved wing fabrics and dopes, to reduce 

their vulnerability to fire. Other questions laid before the Bureau through 

the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the Bureau of Aircraft in the Signal Corps included determination of the rate of 

flame propagation and of pressure cycles in aviation engine cylinders and 

better design of engine radiators. 

Bureau ignition experts found that besides the high carbon deposits 

that frequently formed on the American-made spark plugs used by the Allies, 

sudden extremes of heat and cold at high altitude (10,000 to 30,000 feet) 

sometimes cracked the porcelain insulators, or the high heat alone caused 

the insulators to become conductors of electricity, resulting in the engine 

sudddenly cutting out in flight.53 The Bureau discovered that these failures 

occurred principally because of poor materials or poor workmanship, and 

sent to manufacturers of ignition equipment the data it had collected, along 

with new specifications and standard test methods to insure a better product. 

Before the war ended the Bureau's electrical and ceramic divisions had 

devised a much improved arrangement of engine circuits and produced a better type of porcelain for aviation spark plugs.54 The work continued 

52 Leonard P. Ayres, The War With Germany: A Statistical Summary (Washington, 

D.C., 1919), p. 85. 

Letter, General Electric to Chief Signal Officer, Nov. 22, 1917 (NBS Box 9, IEP), 

declared: "If we are correctly informed, the spark plug, as at present developed, is one of the weakest points in the equipment of the modern aeroplane." 

Silsbee, "Ignition work at the Bureau of Standards," Automotive Industries, nv, 

1294—1299 (June 12, 1919); "War Work," pp. 24—30. 
THE AIRPLANE IN THE LABORATORY 181 

after the war in a new power plant section set up in the heat division at the 

Bureau. 

All of the altimeters, airspeed indicators, tachometers, and other 

aeronautical instruments that came to the Bureau for examination and testing were based on European prototypes. Many were still in an elementary 

stage and underwent considerable modification in the laboratories prior to 

their adoption as standard by our Army and Navy. Successive modifications 

of the inclinometer or banking indicator led to an almost wholly new instrument. The same was true of the rate-of-climb indicator, whose inherent 

defects could not otherwise be eliminated.55 

If instrumentation and engine problems were to a degree overcome 

by the end of the war, time militated against getting the highly publicized 

"cloud" of American planes into the air. When in July 1917, the Signal 

Corps was directed by Congress to design and build a fleet of 22,000 planes, 

neither the military services nor American industry had developed a single 

modern airframe or engine. A year was simply not time enough to acquire 

the necessary skills or experience, and the Government's overambitious program resulted in fewer than 700 planes. These were chiefly flying boats and 

observation planes, the latter principally a redesigned De Havilland—4, called 

by the American pilots who took them up, the Flying Coffin.56 

"War Work," pp. 11—16, 38—40; NBS Annual Report 1919, pp. 186—187. 

George C. Reinhardt and William R. Kintner, The Haphazard Years: How Aierica 

Has Gone to War (New York: Doubleday, 1960), p. 80. 

The instrument panel in the De Havilland—4 of 1918. Most of the instruments shown were of European origin, all modified by the Bureau before adoption as U.S. Army 

standard for the De Havilland. 
182 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

Except for the pioneer work of the Wright brothers, Langley, Chanute 

and a few others, serious study of the scientific fundamentals of flight began 

in this country only after the NACA requested the Bureau in 1915 to undertake an investigation of aviation aerodynamics. The Bureau was to play an 

important part in this research before the NACA acquired facilities of its own. In January 1918 the Bureau transferred its aerodynamic studies from 

the library and laboratory to a new wind tunnel building recently constructed 

under the direction of Dr. Lyman J. Briggs. Dr. Briggs, a Department of 

Agriculture physicist lent to the Bureau several months earlier, recalled that 

soon after he arrived Dr. Stratton asked him to design and build a wind 

tunnel balance. Asked whether he knew what that was, Briggs answered 

that he presumed it was "to measure forces on an airfoil." "Right," said 

Stratton, "and while you're about it, you'd better design a wind tunnel to put 

it in." 

The wind tunnel that Briggs designed housed a 9.foot propeller that 

produced air speeds of 90 miles an hour. In it he installed recording apparatus and began his measurements on airfoils and on airplane and dirigible 

models. in almost continuous operation, the wind tunnel was also used 

to make studies of wind stresses, to test airspeed indicators and similar in. 

struments, and to determine the flight characteristics of aerial bombs. 

While the aircraft program as a whole lagged for lack of time, knowledge, and experience, aviation engine production, utilizing the Nation's 

automotive industry, quickly went into high gear. Both as a matter of 

national prestige and practicality, an American.designed engine was con- sidered crucial from the start. Although an aircraft commission sent to 

Europe in the spring of 1917 examined more than 80 different engines in 

use or under development by the Allies, none was deemed sufficiently powerful to meet future requirements or, what was more important, lend itself to 

mass production methods or materials.58 

Design work on both 8.cylinder and 12.cylinder engines was started 

that June by a group of Packard Motor Car engineers quartered at the 

Bureau. They had begun the preliminary paperwork in the Washington 

hotel where they were staying and were ready to start on the detailed manufacturing drawings when they phoned Dr. Stratton one midnight and told him 

they needed more space. He promptly made available the whole of the new Chemistry building and the use of any other facilities at the Bureau they 

might need. The engineers moved in the following morning.59 

"Interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1961; NBS Annual Report 1918, Pp. 127—128. 

Redfield, With Congress and Cabinet, p. 227; Paxson, American Democracy and the 

World War, II, 112. 

Crowell, America's Munitions, 1917—18, p. 270. 
183 

The Bureau's second wind tunnel as set up in Northwest building late in 1919. The 

honeycomb at the entrance of the 3-foot wind tunnel steadied the incoming flow of air. 

The maximum wind speed that could be established was about 150 miles per hour, more than enough to determine the air resistance of bombs, projectiles, airplane 

models, and for calibrating instruments. 

The 12-cylinder Liberty engine mounted for testing in the Bureau's altitude chamber. 

When both concrete side doors (one open here) were closed, the air pressure and 

temperature inside could be lowered to correspond to any desired altitude, making it 

possible to test the engine under simulated flying conditions. 

The exhaust from the engine and the air in the chamber were withdrawn by an electric-driven centrifugal exhauster. The pressure could thus be reduced as low 

as one-third of an atmosphere, corresponding to an altitude of approximately 35,000 

feet. 
184 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

But so rapidly was aviation history moving that 1 month later, when 

the first 8-cylinder engine arrived at the Bureau for testing, it was declared 

inadequate. Pershing had cabled that the planes he would need for his - operations in 1918 must have 12-cylinder engines. Exactly 2 months after, 

in September 1917, the "12," putting out over 300 (later more than 400) 

horsepower, as against the 225 horsepower of the "8," had arrived and 

successfully passed its 50-hour test. Originally named the "United States 

Standard 12-cylinder Aviation Engine," it was rechristened the "Liberty 

engine" as it went into production 4 months later. Up to the armistice, the 

Packard, Lincoln, Ford, Cadillac, Buick, and Marmon factories built 13,574 

Liberty engines, of which fully a quarter went overseas to the AEF and 

the Allied air services.60 

In preparation for tests of the Liberty engine, special 

and altitude laboratories were erected on the Bureau grounds for performance studies of the engine under simulated flight conditions.61 (The temporary structures were later combined in a permanent Dynamometer Laboratory, built adjacent to Northwest building.) Construction of the altitude 

laboratory, in which conditions of low air pressure and cold encountered 

at great heights could be established, was a tremendous engineering feat, 

and for a time the chamber was the only one of its kind in existence. 

Liberty engines, as well as Rolls-Royce, Hispano-Suiza, Fiat, Bugatti 

and other engines made by the Allies underwent endless tests and measurements of the effects of altitude on carburetor performance, on radiators, fuels, 

lubricating oils, and on supercharging devices designed to enable planes to 

attain higher altitudes.62 Of considerable importance at the time were the 

Bureau studies in its chemical and altitude laboratories on the conservation 

60 Crowell, pp. 273, 277, 280; Ayres, The War With Germany, p. 90. 

Stoutly defending what some claimed was "a cooperative monstrosity," Secretary 

Redfield said that Liberty engines after the war went into the planes of the airmail 

service inaugurated by the postal service in 1921, powered the transatlantic flight 

of the Navy NC—4 (Halifax to Lisbon) in 1919, and held all transcontinental record 

flights and world's altitude, speed, and endurance record flights up to 1923 (Redfield, 

With Congress and Cabinet, pp. 298—299). Stratton, too, thought it a fine engine, 

pointing out that it had 200 fewer parts than European equivalents and developed 

475 hp., where the most powerful European engine had less than 300 hp. Letter, SWS to Airplane Engineering Department, Signal Corps, June 7, 1918, and attached cor- respondence (NBS Box 16, ITA) - 01 Fourth Annual Report, NACA, 1918, PP. 483-498; NBS Annual Report 1917, pp. 

110—111. 82 "Lubrication presented its problems, because the engineers believed that no other 

lubricant possessed all the advantages of castor oil," and the Army Signal Corps called for 

the planting of 100,000 acres to the castor-oil bean in this country. Paxson, American 

Democracy and the World War, II, 269; letter, Director, Aircraft Production to SWS, 

Oct. 11, 1918, and attached correspondence (NBS Box 16, ITAL). 
THE AIRPLANE IN THE LABORATORY 185 

of petroleum. They yielded the first quantitative data reported anywhere on the power-producing qualities of gasolines, and resulted in liberalizing 

the excessively rigid specifications set by the French for the aviation gasoline we were sending them, and incidentally were using ourselves.63 

Designing an engine to lift the vast Government airplane program 

off the ground was only half the task. New woods or wood substitutes had 

to be found for airframes and materials for covering wings and fuselages. 

Spruce, considered most airplane construction, became scarce 

through oversea demands even before we entered the war. in exhaustive 

tests of proposed substitutes, more than 20 other kinds of wood, shaped as 

ribs, beams, and struts, went under the impact- and fatigue-testing machines 

of the Bureau. Although a laminated spruce, made of the waste in solidbeam construction, proved satisfactory, it was considered too costly, and only 

beams of fir showed practical promise. 

The spruce shortage and the desirability of building a nonflammable, 

or at least fire-resistant, plane led to a great deal of work on metal airplane 

parts. Several sheet metal companies even proposed an all-metal plane, 

similar to the German Fokker introduced early in 1918. The companies 

were far from encouraged when the wings on one all-metal mockup sent to 

the Bureau for testing proved to have a low safety factor. The plane went 

back for redesign.64 

Metal wing and fuselage frames seemed more promising, and nu- merous alloy steels were tested before attention finally centered on aluminum. 

Weight for weight, some of the structural beams of aluminum ranked well 

above Sitka spruce in strength tests, and in test flights an experimental plane 

with wing beams and ribs of aluminum demonstrated "the possibility of the 

successful manufacture of airplanes with metal-wing frames." 65 Only the 

discovery of a satisfactory nonflammable or fire-resistant wing and fuselage 

covering remained, and this problem had still not been solved when hostilities 

ceased. 

The development of an acceptable mercerized cotton fabric and even a strong paper of jute and manila rope stock as substitutes for linen in airplane wing construction has already been mentioned. No form of glue or 

adhesive, however, could be found that would fasten either cotton or paper 

to the frame and at the same time render them waterproof and fireproof. 

For this purpose, better airplane dopes had to be found. 

A cellulose acetate made in Germany by Bayer was the dope usually 

applied to the fabric on wing and fuselage, in order to shrink the material, 

"War Work," pp. 16—24, 30—32; NBS Annual Report 1919, P. 26. 64 "War Work," p. 33. For another all-metal design turned down by the Bureau, see letter, SWS to NACA, July 27, 1918 (NBS Box 13, INM). 

"War Work," p. 34. 
186 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

make it impermeable to wind and moisture, and improve the flight characteristics of the plane. In the turmoil of designing an American plane and 

engine, the subject of dopes was somehow overlooked, and when late in 1917 

the first acetate orders went out, its raw materials had already been com- mandeered by other Government agencies. 

With acetate gone, nitrate (guncotton) dopes were used for a time, 

until Eastman Kodak provided a small supply of acetate from cuttings and 

scraps of nonflammable motion picture film. (Why the airplane program 

was left with cuttings and scraps is not recorded. True, the research came 

late in the war and remained in the experimental stage. Possibly, too, the 

supply oi motion picture film was limited and was needed by the services 

and for the spate of propaganda films made for domestic consumption.) 

Meanwhile, the Bureau was testing scores of new solutions proposed as dope substitutes, establishing specifications for those that seemed to have 

some value, and making studies of their application to fabrics. Only a few 

"fire-proofed" nitrate dopes of the many so-called fire-resistant solutions submitted proved acceptable, and then only when the fabric itself was also fireproofed.66 

American scientists never wholly overcame the problem—nor did 

anyone else. The need for fireproofing was real even though in aerial 

combat, tracer and incendiary bullets rarely ignited the fabric of planes. 

It was the engine of World War I planes that was most susceptible to fire. 

Occasionally a pilot was able to execute sideslipping maneuvers and keep 

the engine flames from igniting the fabric. Where that failed, the plane was consumed as it fell. 

OPTICAL GLASS AND OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS 

Although Dr. S'tratton never actively took part in the optical research 

at the Bureau, his work with Michelson on light at the University of Chicago was the impulse for his years of personal direction of the optical division.67 

The men he brought in—Bates in polarimetry, Coblentz in radiometry 

Priest in colorimetry, Peters in interferometry, Meggers in spectroscopy— 

were topnotch, and he zealously followed with them every development in 

the field of optics both here and abroad. Yet as numerous as were the 

military applications of optics, it was a crisis in supply that shaped the 

principal wartime effort in optics at the Bureau. 

°° "War Work," p. 56. 

Explaining the interferorneter and its use in standardizing gage blocks to a congressional 

committee on one occasion, Stratton said that "interferometry is the field of measurement 

in which I am personally interested, and in which I was engaged when called to take 

charge of the bureau" (Hearings * * * 1924, Nov. 16, 1922, p. 191). 
OPTICAL GLASS AND OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS 187 

Stratton had long expressed concern over the foreign monopoly in 

high-grade optical glass and the fact that this country had to import every 

quality optical instrument it used. Because the glass for the optical systems 

of telescopes, microscopes, field glasses, navigation and surveying instruments, cameras and similar instruments was expensive to make and the 

market limited, American optical firms imported their quality glass and con- lined their manufacturing to spectacle zlass, a product midway between 

optical and plate glass.68 They had made little effort to learn for themselves German formulas and techniques and were content to have high-grade 

instruments manufactured abroad.69 The war in Europe abruptly cut off 

the supply of both optical instruments and optical glass. 

In the fall of 1914 Stratton ordered furnaces and apparatus for the 

Pittsburgh laboratory, where investigation of American clays and ceramics was already going on, and set it to work studying the manufacture of optical 

glass. A year later the Bureau began supplying its data to experimental 

optical glass plants organized at Bausch & Lomb, Keuffel & Esser, Pittsburgh 

Plate Glass and other firms that had been urged to take on this work. But 

development of good optical glass was a slow process, artisans in precision 

grinding were hard to find, and few outside the Bureau seemed to sense the 

emergency. When America entered the war in 1917 the industry had progressed little beyond the experimental stage.7° In desperation, urgent appeals 

went out across the Nation begging private owners to lend their binoculars 

and field glasses, in whatever condition, to our military services. 

Optical glass, a mixture of silica and chemicals melted in a clay pot, was highly susceptible to contamination from deterioration of the pot material under high heat. The initial problem of the Bureau was to find a suitable 

mixture of American clays as pot materials, capable of resisting the corrosive 

effect of fluid optical glass. The first satisfactory pot made was based on a 

OR Spectacle glass came under scrutiny during the war, too, when the cost of eyeglasses 

skyrocketed. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker complained to Commerce, and Stratton was asked to investigate. The war had "nothing to do with the increase in prices," the 

manufacturers told Stratton. Their price on lenses was a few cents each and they had 

increased it less than 10 percent. But the jobbers had raised their profit by 25 to 33% 

percent and retailers by 200 to 500 percent. Letter, Secretary of Commerce to Secretary 

of War, July 18, 1918, and attached correspondence (NBS Box 14, IPO). 

Quality optical glass, unlike glass for electric light bulbs, bottles, and window panes, 

must have a high degree of chemical homogeneity, freedom from physical imperfections, 

and be of varied compositions to insure a wide range of refractive index and dispersion. 

For its prewar status, see Science, 41, 788 (1915) ; George W. Morey, The Properties 

of Glass (New York; Reinhold, 1938), p. 26; Samuel R. Scholes, Modern Glass 

Practice (Chicago: Industrial Publications, 1946), p. 59. 

Robert M. Yerkes, ed., The New World of Science, p. 108; Secretary of Commerce 

correspondence, 1917, NARG 40, file 67009/43; MS, "Development of optical glass at 

the Bureau of Standards" (NBS Box 4.82, PA). 

OPTICAL GLASS AND OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS 189 

manufactured in this country on a large scale for the first time. This was particularly true of binoculars, but also included periscopes, range finders, 

military and naval gun sights, bomb sights, and aviators' goggles. Important 

assistance was given as well in the manufacture of mu scales for military 

binoculars and in the development of the 37-mm gun sight, the panoramic 

machine gun sight, a new tank-gun sight, and a periscopic alidade. 

The alidade, an angle-measuring device, illustrated how our armed 

services acquired some of their new optical instruments. The AEF sent 

back a French model, asking the Army Engineers to copy and supply it to 

our forces. The Bureau took it apart and from the data supplied, the 

Engineers prepared the blueprints for an instrument manufacturer. Samples 

of the American-made alidade then came back to the Bureau and with a few minor changes the device was approved for production.73 

An interesting adaptation of peacetime optical research to wartime 

needs occurred in the case of military photography. Some years before the 

war, the spectroscopy section had carried out an extensive program of measur- 

"War Work," p. 188. 

After the optical glass mixture has gone through the melting process and solidified under 

slow cooling, the pot is broken away from the 1000-pound melt. The glass cannot be 

removed from the pot in a molten or plastic condition or bubbles and cords will form. 

Although the chemical composition of good optical glass had been mastered by World 

War I, a satisfactory pot material had not, and the special kaolin-clay mixture developed 

by the Bureau proved a real contribution to the industry. 
190 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

ing standard wavelengths of light, particularly in the spectra of neon, helium, 

and iron, by photographic means. Making these observations required a broad knowledge of the underlying complex elements of photography. 

It also drew attention to the fact that highly sensitive plates capable of photographing the wavelengths of red and infrared light could not be purchased 

commercially. Preparing their own plates, Bureau spectroscopists under 

Dr. Meggers made a systematic study of the spectra of some 50 of the 

chemical elements, and in 1917 began photographing stellar and solar spectra 

to determine their composition. 

With the war, the spectroscopy section turned to military problems of 

aerial photography. By then physicists both here and abroad were using 

plates at least four times as sensitive and fast as the best commercial 

orthochrornatic (sensitive to blue, green, and yellow) and panchromatic 

(sensitive to all colors) plates in use by the military. The Bureau phyicists were also using new dyes of British manufacture, devised to replace German 

aniline dyes, and following a series of experiments offered their adaptation 

of these dyes to the Air Service, for use in photographing battle terrain 

through haze and smoke and detecting military works under camouflage. 

Extensive experiments with the red-sensitive plates were carried out at 

Langley Field in the spring and summer of 1918, but 'because of the fixed 

idea of the military that the Bureau plates were still in an experimental 

stage, they were never used overseas. Before the war ended, however, 

their practical use had been completely demonstrated, and with the design 

and construction of new photographic lenses for use with red light, the 

importance of red-sensitive plates in military photography was fully 

acknowledged.74 

Bureau scientists also designed a new airplane camera using film 

instead of plates, and at the time of the armistice had under construction for 

Ordnance a special camera that photographed the inside of machine-gun barrels to determine their degree of deterioration—a piece of technology enormously important in gunmaking and maintenance.75 Sharing its laboratory 

space, the Bureau provided facilities to the Engineers, the Geological Survey, 

and the Navy for camera and lens designing and testing and for camera mechanism testing by the Signal Corps. Among the guest scientists in the optical 

laboratories was Albert A. Michelson, Stratton's former superior at Chicago, 

who came on his first visit to the Bureau to work on new long-range binoculars 

he had devised for the Navy, and later returned to test the optics of the short- 

"War Work," pp. 202—207; NBS Annual Report 1918, pp. 83—84; Annual Report 

1919, pp. 115—118; letter, SWS to Capt. Edward J. Steichen, Air Service, SOS, France, 

Dec. 3, 1918 (NBS Box 14, IPO). 

"War Work," pp. 186—187; NBS Annual Report 1919, pp. 141—142. 
NEW THINGS IN RADIO COMMUNICATION 191 

base Michelson rangefinder, another instrument he had designed for the 

Navy.76 

It was a time of crash programs, of improvisations, of hurried application of basic principles, of hastily contrived instruments and equipment. In 

optics as in other areas of research the Bureau worked in largely untried 

ground. Some of its efforts saw service, some came too late. The same 

experience befell the scientists and technicians in the nearby radio 

laboratories. 

"NEW THINGS IN RADIO COMMUNICATION" 

When the war came, the Bureau radio laboratories under Dellinger 

and Kolster, as well as the adjacent Navy radio laboratory and that operated 

by the Signal Corps, were still relatively small affairs and for the most part 

more concerned with basic radio phenomena than with their practical applications. How far behind other nations the United States was in radio com- munications became known when the French scientific mission that arrived 

in the spring of 1917 left with the Bureau some of the scientific apparatus in 

use overseas. Included was a great variety of radio equipment developed 

around the electron tube. 

Although the electron or vacuum tube amplifier was the invention of 

Fessenden and De Forest in this country, its use was practically unknown 

to our military departments, which still used damped wave apparatus that 

limited them to code telegraph.77 A decade of patent litigation centering 

around the vacuum tube had blunted the growth of radio here at home. (It 

happened again with color television in the 1950's and 1960's.) The French, on the other hand, with government control of rights to the vacuum tube, 

used it in all their radio apparatus, in wire telephony, and in their radio 

telephone. 

Outraged by the stifling consequences of the litigation, Strattton ex- claimed to Congress: "It is time we should be working out the new things in 

radio communication instead of depending on foreign countries for scientific 

developments." 78 But even the Bureau had been helpless as the experimental 

Letter, SWS to Chief, Navy Bureau of Ordnance, Aug. 8, 1918 (NBS Box 4, AGC). 

Report attached to letter, SWS to War Production Branch, Mar. 5, 1919 (NBS Box 15, 

IRG), also notes an optical striae investigation made by Michelson at the Bureau. See 

NBS S333 (Michelson, 1919). 

Southworth, Forty Years of Radio Research, p. 38; "War Work," p. 233. 78 Hearings * * * 1919 (Jan. 25, 1918), p. 978. For an account of the litigation involving De Forest's audion tube, the British and American Marconi Companies' Fleming 

valve, the General Electric audion of 1913, and Western Electric's audion of 1917, see Schubert, The Electric Word, pp. 126—131. 
192 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

and commercial exploitation of the vacuum tube remained locked in the 

courts. 

The impasse was broken on April 7, 1917, when by Presidential proclamation all commercial radio, comprising some 60 stations serving maritime commerce, was handed over to the Navy Department, and all other 

stations, amateur and privately owned, were closed down for the duration. 

The Navy, long anxious to secure better equipment for its ships, its coastal 

stations, and the radio chain it operated across the Pacific, immediately 

assumed all liability for patent infringements, and companies sprang up over- night to manufacture radio equipment, vying with the big three, General 

Electric, Westinghouse, and Western Electric, already in the field. 

That event, together with the visit of the French commission and the 

requirements of the Army Signal Corps and the Navy, provided the major 

stimuli for the attack on the wartime radio problems facing this country: 

the training of technicians, civilian and military, in a complex and rapidly 

changing subject; the establishment of a high-powered transatlantic radio 

system (clearly of foremost importance not only for itself but in the event 

the enemy cut the telegraph cables); the development of low-powered radio 

equipment for battlefield communication; radio means for locating enemy 

radio stations, airplanes, ships, and submarines; equipment for communication with submarines when submerged; and portable radio apparatus.79 

In the Navy laboratory at the Bureau, Dr. Austin, who in his longdistance transmission research had recently begun an investigation of the 

reenforcement of signals from the upper layer of the atmosphere, now took 

up the development of new radio apparatus for his service. In the Bureau 

laboratories the most immediate consideration was the training of thousands 

of men in radio communication for the Signal Corps to meet battlefield needs. 

To available training material and set up better courses of radio 

instruction, a conference of university representatives was called at the Bureau 

in late December 1917. Following the conference, a Bureau group under 

Dr. Dellinger rushed preparation of a treatise on radio principles, measurements, and theory—subjects not covered by any publication then available— 

to supplement Signal Corps training pamphlets. Circular 74, "Radio instruments and measurements," with 318 pages of text, a bibliography, index, and 

224 illustrations, came off the presses in March 1918, as a much needed 

reference book for radio instructors in the Army and Navy schools and the 

universities. It appeared later in hard covers as a commercial publication 

and its continued usefulness led the Bureau to issue a revised edition in 

1924. Frequent reprints made this bible of radio engineers and amateurs 

available through the next two decades. 

""War Work," pp. 223—225. 

194 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

read," it was reprinted when Army and Navy schools and a number of 

colleges later adopted it as a standard radio textbook.8° 

From the beginning of hostilities, the Bureau and the military services 

were bombarded with ideas for using radio as a weapon of war. Most 

notable perhaps was Thomas Edison's proposal to establish a transmitting 

station near Ostend, in British-held Flanders, to interfere with radio com- munication between German submarines and their bases. The Bureau had 

to tell him that a single station probably would not be sufficient. And even if it were, interfering signals sent out from even that one station in Flanders 

might well spread along the whole of the Western Front and confuse all radio 

communication there.8' 

A more practicable approach to the U-boat menace seemed possible 

through Kolster's radio direction finder, still in the experimental stage when we entered the war.82 With the incorporation of a French electron tube 

amplifier and a new coil aerial, replacing the former antenna, a more com- pact unit with greater range of usefulness at once became possible. It was seen not only as an aid to air and sea navigation but as a potential means of 

locating enemy radio sending apparatus and, therefore, the enemy himself, 

whether in the trenches, in the air, or under the sea. Essentially a simple 

rotating coil that detected transmitted radio waves and then narrowed down 

the direction from which they were sent, the improved direction finder under 

ideal conditions achieved a pinpointing accuracy of close to 1 percent. 

One application of the radio direction finder, largely the work of 

Kolster's technical assistants, Willoughby and Lowell, appeared particularly 

significant. So far as was known, no navy had developed a radio system 

for use in submarines, in the belief that sea water could not be penetrated 

by radio waves.83 Before its first underwater tests, the Bureau had deter. 

mined that with exceedingly sensitive amplifiers the coil aerial of the finder 

might act as both a transmitting and receiving device. Next, the Bureau 

began underwater tests of the coil and found, surprisingly, the signals almost as strong as with the coil in the air. Experiments on cruising submarines 

followed, and in final tests off New London in June 1918, the apparatus picked 

80 See chap. III, p. 138. Southworth, Forty Years of Radio Research, pp. 36—38; "War 

Work," pp. 227—229. 

Still another Signal Corps publication prepared at the Bureau was Vacuum Tubes: 

Theory and Use, a compilation of all available information on the subject for the use of 

Army and Navy radio engineers. NBS Annual Report 1918, p. 47. 

8tLetter, SWS to Thomas Edison, Dec. 7, 1917 (NBS Box 1O,.IEW). 

82 The basic idea of the direction finder was an Italian invention, to which the British 

secured rights in 1912. Kolster's invention appears to have been an independent discovery and sufficiently different to raise no question of patent infringement. Schubert, 

The Electric Word, pp. 139—140; conversation with Percival D. Lowell, Mar. 4, 1963. 82 War Work, p. 231. 
The submarine at New London, 

Conn., equipped by the Bureau with special antenna for underwater radio reception and transmission. 

In place of the large antenna 

used in his original direction 

finder, Kolster found that with 

the more sensitive amplifiers that had become available, a simple coil aerial was equally 

effective for receiving and transmitting radio waves. 

Neither here nor abroad had 

navies developed a successful radio system for underwater use when late in 1917 one of Koister' s direction finder coils was tested, first under water, then in a submerged submarine, and in both instances picked up clear signals from as far away as Europe and our own west coast. 

'0 V., 
196 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

up clear signals transmitted from Germany, from Paris, Rome, and California. Still later tests proved it possible to transmit as well as receive radio 

messages in a submerged submarine, although the sending range, about 12 

miles, was shoit84 

Experiments with the radio direction finder as an aid in aviation began 

in 1918 soon after the Post Office Department started a daily airmail service 

between New York and Washington. Night flights of the mail were still 3 

years away, 'but presenting an immediate and comparable hazard was the 

problem of flying in daytime rain and fog. The pilot's compass guided him 

toward his landing field but gave him no indication when he was over it. 

At the request of the Post Office, the Bureau took up the problem and made 

two adaptations of the direction finder that answered it, one employing 

magnetic induction, the other a radiofrequency current. Either of these 

enabled the pilot to hear a signal when he was directly over the field. A 

crude device and effective only at altitudes up to a mile, it was nevertheless the 

forerunner of modern instrument landing techniques.85 

No invention factory, the Bureau was drawn into these and other 

experiments as the organization best equipped to handle such problems 

for other Government agencies.86 In radio research, its mission of providing and maintaining basic measurements was better exemplified in the 

constant and careful reassessments made of its standards of inductance and 

capacitance on which standards of radiofrequency or wavelength were based, 

84 Work, pp. 229—232. 85 Letter, SWS to Postmaster General, Nov. 29, 1919 (NBS Box 10, JEW); "War Work," 

pp. 232—233; NBS Annual Report 1919, PP. 66—67. One of the prime functions of the Bureau, the solution of problems relating to measure- ment, inevitably led to a number of patentable materials, processes, and products. 

From about 1910 on, members of the Bureau were granted a steady stream of patents 

for new or improved instruments and devices, including a new type of thermopile 

by Coblentz (1913), Kolster's decremeter (1913), Schlink's improvements in weighing 

scales (1916), Kolster's radio direction finder (1916), Whittemore's element for airfoils (1918), Willoughby and Lowell's submarine radio (1919), porcelain 

for spark plugs (1919), Priest's inferential dilatometer (1919), Ingberg's fire-resistant 

column cap (1920), and Emley's pla4tic gypsum (1920). A more complete list appears 

in NBS Box 71, AB—2105. 

Although other Government agencies permitted and even encouraged their employees to take out patents in their own names and exploit them, under Stratton it was an unwritten but inviolable policy of the Bureau that patents of its employees were to be 

assigned to the use of the Government and the free use of the public. (Letter, SWS to Commissioner, Bureau of Navigation, May 21, 1913, and letter, SWS to W. D. 

Shoemaker, Patent Office, Aug. 28, 1919, in NBS Box 4, AGP.) No evidence appears 

in Bureau records that industry ever objected to this policy, but Bureau inventors 

were not always happy with it and on occasion rebelled. See Coblentz, From the 

Life of a Researcher (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), pp. 141—143, and foot 

note ch. VI, pp. 348—349. 
NEW THINGS IN RADIO COMMUNICATION 197 

the standards themselves "handled with a care and reverence that was comparable with that given to the prototype platinum-iridium standard 

meter bar." 87 Basic too was the Bureau work on the new electron or 

vacuum tube. 

With patent litigation suspended, radio manufacturers turned out large 

numbers of these tubes as generators,. detectors, amplifiers, and modulators of radio waves and other electrical currents. (Some of the early tubes 

were as large as the wall telephones then in use.) Most of them went into 

the radio communication apparatus constructed in the Signal Corps and 

Navy radio laboratories at the Bureau and produced in quantity for these 

services by the electrical industry.88 The Bureau measured the characteristics of both experimental and production tubes, devised test methods and 

apparatus, standardized certain types of tubes, and made studies of their 

behavior in a variety of circuits.89 

Of special importance in its work with vacuum tubes were the first 

Bureau studies of such phenomena as the effects of diurnal fluctuations, 

solar activity, and atmospheric electricity on radio communication. Out of 

this work in the postwar years came wholly new concepts of the dimensions 

of radio, as well as new standards of radio measurements.9° 

Wartime research on the electron tube, which had previously been 

little more than an artifact of the radio experimenters in this country, made 

possible reliable long-distance wire telephony, as well as speech communication between ground stations and airplanes. Incorporating the vacuum tube 

in the direction finder made it a convenient and portable apparatus that was to prove as useful in detecting transmitting stations violating radio laws as it was in guiding planes and ships through fog. In its role as an amplifier, 

the vacuum tube permitted for the first time very small antennas, and by 

greatly extending the range of radio communication ushered in the age of 

radio. 

That age did not, as might have been expected, begin with the armistice. It was delayed first by the threat of Government ownership and then 

by renewal of the patent wars of the radio industry. Under the widely held 

87 Southword, Forty Years of Radio Research, p. 34. 88 For the wartime Navy research at the Bureau in long-distance communication, see report of L. W. Austin in J. Franklin Inst. 193, 437 (1922), and NBS Letter Circular 

(LC) 194 (Mar. 10, 1926). 

A discovery made at that time in the idiosyncrasies in vacuum tubes, since known as the "Miller effect," was first published in John F. Miller's "Dependence of the 

input impedance of a three-electrode vacuum tube upon the load in the plate circuit" 

(S351, 1919). See also NI3S Annual Report 1919, pp. 65—66, and F. Langford Smith, 

ed., The Radiotron Designer's Handbook (Sydney, Australia: Wireless Press, 3d ed., 

1940), pp. 46—48. "War Work," pp. 233—242. 
The use of the three-electrode (triode) electron tube was practically unknown to our military forces prior to 1917, and all of their apparatus was of the damped-wave type. 

The Bureau began testing electron tubes, as shown here, a month after we entered the 

war, and reported testing 467 of them up to mid-1919. 

assumption that radio was essentially an instrument of navigation and of 

national defense, and therefore must be under Government control, as it was 

in Europe, bills to that end were offered in Congress on behalf of the Navy 

Department in January 1917 and again late in 1918. On both occasions 

Congress, ever fearful of outright Government control or ownership of any. 

thing, tabled the proposals.91 

Rebuffed, yet concerned for the development of its radio system, the 

Navy Department urged General Electric, largest of the radio manufac. 

turers, to buy out the British-backed Marconi Co. whose commercial radio 

system had been taken over by the Navy in 1917 and was, with the end of 

the war, to be returned. The result was the formation in October 1919 of a General Electric subsidiary, the Radio Corporation of America, which at one stroke became owner of virtually all the commercial high.power radio 

facilities in the country.92 

Secretary of Commerce Redfield and Dr. Stratton both favored Government control, 

either under the Navy or, better, under Commerce. See Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 

1918), p. 946, and correspondence in NBS Box 10, JEW 1918—20. 

Rupert Maclaurin, Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry (New York: 

Macmillan, 1949), p. 99. 

198 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 
FROM GAGES TO GAS MASKS 199 

But the moratorium on. patent litigation also ended with the war, 

and since no one had an important infringement-free radio patent, tie ex- pectations of commercIal radio were checked. Except for laboratory ex- perimentation, the wartime work on vacuum tubes, radio circuits, and 

transmission apparatus remained out of reach to all. Until that impasse 

was breached in 1921, no radio manufacturer could safely make anything 

but crystal sets for the public. The Bureau continued its research and 

waited.93 

FROM GAGES TO GAS MASKS 

The mass production of guns, ammunition and other ordnance material, 

with components made in almost 8,000 plants across the country, reached a scale in World War I never before attempted in any machined produèt. The 

manufacture of interchangeable parts and components in widely separated 

factories depended upon the accuracy of hundreds of thousands of gages, and 

of the master gages on which they were based. Construction of a single 

round of artillery ammunition, for example, required gaging of 80 dimensions, necessitating the use of over 500 different gages. To standardize these 

shop gages required 180 master gages.94 

The work of standardizing and testing master begun under an 

urgent deficiency appropriation of June 1917, soon outstripped the facilities 

Stratton had set up 2 years before at the Bureau, and branches were established in New York, in Cleveland, and at The 4 laboratories 

handled over 60,000 gages used in making America's munitions.95 The 

magazine Science was to say that "The national provision for master-gauge 

standardization was one of the most important contributions of the war." 96 At the height of its activity the Bureau gage section numbered 225 

engineers, physicists, master gage experts, inspectors, toolmakers, technical 

assistants, and administrative aides. Besides testing and calibrating gages, 

the section trained gage inspectors for Ordnance plants, Navy yards, arsenals, 

and commercial manufacturers. It also carried out an extensive salvage 

"Memo, SWS for Secretary of Commerce, Sept. (NBS Box 10, IEW). 

Crowell, America's Munitions, pp. 25, 124—125. Including the gages used by Government inspectors, almost 800 gages were necessary in the manufacture of a single complete 

round. 

"These comprised plain gages (plain plug, snap, and ring gages), profile gages (ternplets, chamber and fixture gages), and screw-thread gages. Originally set up in the 

Stucco building (erected early in 1918 for the testing of building materials), the gage 

laboratory moved to larger quarters in Northwest building later that year. Of more than 

$4 million spent by the War Department for gages in 1917—18, Stratton reported, over $550,000 came to the Bureau (Hearings * * * 1921, Jan. 2, 1920, pp. 1583—1584). 

°' "The work of the Bureau of Standards during 1918," Science 39—40 (1919). 
200 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

program as large numbers of gages in Ordnance factories became obsolete 

when designs were changed or wore out. The Bureau shops rebuilt nearly a thousand gages for serviceable use again and constructed almost 500 new 

master and inspection gages as replacements.97 

The invention that perhaps contributed most to the manufacture of 

interchangeable parts was the famous set of precision gage blocks made by 

the Swedish engineer Carl Edvard Johannson in 1904. For many years these 

were the only satisfactory standards of their kind available for the manufacture and inspection of closely machined parts. Prior to the war their 

sole source was Sweden, and so exquisite was their workmanship that production never kept up with demand.98 When this country began tooling up, 

they were not to be had at any price. 

Late in 1917 an inventor, William E. Hoke, came to the Bureau proposing a method for the mechanical manufacture of precision gage blocks 

that promised to be near equivalents of the Swedish blocks. Persuaded 

that their manufacture was feasible, the Bureau obtained the sum of $375,000 

from the Ordnance Department to make them and after several months 

produced a satisfactory set of the blocks. Altogether, 50 sets were made, 

each comprising 81 blocks, ranging from 0.05 inch to 4 inches, and each 

block accurate to within 0.000005 inch. Their value, apart from the fact that 

nothing comparable could be had, Stratton declared, far exceeded the amount 

of the allotment made for their production.99 

Allied with the gage work was that of the National Screw Thread 

Commission, established by congress in July 1918 with nine members from 

the War, Navy, •and Commerce Departments, the American Society of 

Mechanical Engineers, and the Society of Automotive Engineers, under the 

chairmanship of Dr. Stratton. The Commission sought to simplify the variety of threads, sizes, types, and systems then prevailing in industry,, and 

standardize those having the most extensive use and utility. Among other 

things, standardization of threads (and hence interchangeability) would 

facilitate repair or replacement of machines and their parts, as well as of all 

machine-made threaded products from nuts and bolts to hose couplings. 

"War Work," pp. 116—117; report, Van Keuren, "Progress of munition gage testing 

at the Bureau of Standards" [ca. Sept. 1918], in NBS Historical File. 

°8Joseph V. Woodworth, Gages and Gaging Systems (New York: Hill, 1908), p. 229, 

described the first set of Johannson's blocks seen in this country. Combinations of the 

blocks, ranging in thicknesi from 0.1001 to 4 inches, made possible at least 80,000 sizes. 

For 'Johannson's description of the blocks, see NBS Standards Yearbook, 1931, pp. 14—15. (Johannson was then an engineer with the Ford Motor Co,) 

Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918)', p. 952; letter, SWS to Ch, Inventions Section 

WD, Dec. 23, 1918 (NBS Box 19, IWG); NBS Annual Report 1919, pp. 37, 148-449; 

interview with Irvin H. Fuilmer, Mar. 23, 1962. 
FROM GAGES TO GAS MASKS 201 

It was an almost impossible task to undertake in the midst of war. 

Congress twice extended the term of the Commission, to 1920 and then to 

1927, in order that it might implement its plans to "reduce the variety of screw threads in general use, facilitate manufacture in case of war, make 

the best use of labor in our industries in time of peace, increase the safety 

of travel by rail, steamship, and aeroplane, and in general * * * increase 

the dependability of all mechanisms." 100 It would take the coming of another 

war before progress became visible. 

Besides its work on threads and gages and the extensive investigations 

in substitute materials, in aeronautics, optical glass, and radio, the Bureau 

responded to calls for help with literally hundreds of other wartime problems 

submitted by industry and the sciences. Only mention can be made of the 

almost continuous testing carried out on protective coatings, from experi. 

ments in electroplating techniques to tests of bituminous materials, varnishes, 

enamels, fire-retarding paints, and special paints for projectiles.'01 The 

Bureau established safety standards for military plants and factories. It 

'°°NBS M42, "Progress report of the National Screw Thread Commission" (1921), p. 5. 101 "War Work," pp. 66—67, 208—220. 

The Hoke precision gage blocks used in the manufacture of closely machined parts, 

shown here being used to determine the dimension of a limit gage. Any desired dimension can be obtained by combining various sizes of blocks, as in the three used here to test the limit gage in the jig. 
202 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

investigated the protective properties of goggles and glasses for laboratory 

workers and those used by oxyacetylene cutters and welders against injurious 

ultraviolet and infrared radiations.'°2 

It made studies in the use of radium and other self-luminous materials 

for illuminating aircraft instruments, gunsights, marching compasses, 

watches, and navigation instruments. In addition, almost 500 preparations 

of radium, for use in surgery and dermatology, were measured and certified 

in the Bureau's radium laboratory. An investigation of X-ray protection 

in this laboratory for the Surgeon General's Office demonstrated that many 

of even the most expensive X-ray shields then on the market were practically 

worthless. And with the X-ray apparatus acquired for these studies, the 

Bureau also began its preliminary study of techniques for the radiographic 

detection of flaws in aluminum and steel, which were to succeed where in 

many cases magnetic testing failed.'03 

The Bureau developed an improved blasting machine for the Corps 

of Engineers, worked on rockets and illuminating shells with the Trench 

Warfare Section of Ordnance, and helped design signal lamps for daylight 

transmission of messages in the trenches or between planes in flight.'04 The 

colorimetrists and photometrists of the Bureau supplied scientific data for a high-priority searchlight investigation made by the Engineers. Dr. Harvey 

L. Curtis spent much of the war devising and operating his complex electrical 

circuits for measuring velocity and other ballistic characteristics of proj ectiles 

for the Navy.'05 

Investigations of sound-ranging and sound-detecting equipment, for 

locating distant or concealed enemy began soon after the French mission brought to this country some of the apparatus in use, overseas. Designing and constructing improved sound-ranging apparatus, as well as geophones 

and seismicrophones, to detect enemy mining operations in the trenches, and 

special microphones for the detecting of underwater sounds, occupied the 

Bureau's electrolysis (sic) section until, well after the armistice.'°6 The only 

death of a Bureau staff member on the battlefield occurred in this group. 

Dr. Ernest E. Weibel, who with Dr. Eckhardt and Burton McCollum made 

important developments in a new sound-ranging device, entered the Army as a captain in the spring of 1918 in order to take the equipment overseas 

and test it in the trenches in the British sector near Ypres. In a mustard-gas 

'°' "War Work," pp. 261—263, 246; NBS Annual Report 1918, p. 103. 103 "War Work," pp. 251—255, 298—299; NBS Annual 1918, p. 52; Annual Report 

1919, p. 74. 104 "War Work," pp. 107—112, 124—127. 

Crowell, America's Munitions, pp. 389—391; "War Work," pp. 263—265; NBS Annual 

Report 1918, p. 41; Curtis, Recollections of a Scientist, pp. 39—51. 1110 Crowell, America's Munitions, pp. 384-387; "War Work," pp. 265—271; NBS Annual 

Report 1918, pp. 67, 104—105. 
FROM GAGES TO GAS MASKS 203 

attack on that front in April he was badly gassed and died of complications 

several weeks later.'°7 

Almost the whole of the legacy of science and technology that seemed so rich in promise at the turn of the century was, in that holocaust in Europe, 

reworked into weapons and agents of war. None was more frightening than 

the chemical poisons first introduced on the battlefield in 1915. Although 

it is difficult to believe, America entered the war years later knowing 

little or nothing about the gas war in Europe. The Bureau first encountered 

its challenges when a special mission arrived with models of the protective 

gas masks then in use in France. Besides its investigations for American 

gas masks, the Bureau also worked with the Bureau of Mines, the Chemical 

Warfare Service, the Geophysical Laboratory, and the universities on a 

number of tests and experiments preliminary to this country's production of 

war gases and smokes.108 

Two new gases were introduced in the field by the Germans as the AEF 

arrived in France in the summer of 1917. The first was mustard gas, for 

which no satisfactory defense was ever devised, the other, diphenylchloroarsine, a sneeze gas. The arsenical sneeze gas—actually not a gas but 

an irritant smoke—even in minute quantities readily penetrated all gas 

masks then in use, producing uncontrollable coughing and sneezing, and. 

forced removal of the mask, to expose its wearer to the lethal gases that 

were fired simultaneously with the sneeze gas.109 

In the Bureau paper mill and at a commercial mill a group under Dr. 

Philip V. Wells made numerous special crepe paper filters to prevent mask 

penetration of . the smokes, testing them in a gas chamber erected on the 

grounds. But the filter, added to others already in the mask, so increased 

the difficulty of breathing while wearing the mask as nearly to immobilze 

the soldier. As a result, neither this country nor the Allies produced 

more than a handful of cannisters incorporating this paper, and sneeze gas 

casualties continued high to the end of the 

war years but a new problem in detection or a solution to an old one was presented to the Bureau. None 

Redfleld, With Congress and Cabinet, pp. 222—223. Lt. Arthur J. Fecht, member 

of the Bureau with Weibel, survived the gassing and served in the sound-ranging section 

of the 29th Engineers to the end of the war. Interview with Dr. Silsbee, Nov. 27, 1962. 

Crowell, America's Munitions, p. 405; NBS Annual Report 1918, pp. 104, 159; 

Annual Report 1919, p. 149. 

Studies of chemical substances in suspension were carried out in the Bureau's 

dispersoid section set up in the optical division. 

Letter W. K. Lewis, Research Division, CWS, to SWS, July 31, 1918 (NBS Box 6, 

IC); "War Work," pp. 72, 199—200. Almost a third of AEF battle casualties resulted 

from gas, most of them from mustard gas or phosgene, following concentrations of 

sneeze gas. See Col. H. L. Gilchrist, A Comparative of World War Casualties 

From Gas and Other Weapons (Washington, D.C., 1931), p. 19. 
204 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

certainly exercised the scientific and inventive talents of the Nation more 

when we entered the war than did the menace of the U-boat. Submarine 

detection was widely held to be "the most pressing of all problems" that 

fateful spring as month by month the toll of merchant tonnage sent to the 

bottom steadily rose. It was estimated that for a time one-quarter of the 

leading physicists in this country were working on the submarine problem, and Edison's proposal to interrupt German submarine radio com- munication was but one of thousands of solutions suggested.'11 As obvious 

aids in sub hunting, and most capable of rapid development, the National 

Research Council urged the Bureau to devise special goggles, colored lenses, 

and special binoculars for better visual detection of submarines and their 

periscopes. But before these and more complicated means of detection got 

beyond the experimental stage, the convoy system with destroyer escort had 

been inaugurated and shipping losses began to abate."2 

As pressing as enemy submarine detection was detecting the presence 

of dangerously combustible gases, hydrogen in particular, in our own submarines. Elmer R. Weaver of the gas chemistry section pioneered the 

development of thermal-conductivity measurements for the detection and 

analysis of such gases that later became the basis for a muitimillion-dollar 

instrument company."3 

Thermopiles or bolometers, for the detection of ships and planes by 

the radiation of heat from the smokestacks and exhausts, and electrical 

inductance devices, for detection of metallic mines laid by the enemy, 

were endlessly tested. None proved practical. Out of the work, however, 

came a device employing the thermopile principle that made it possible to 

send out infrared rays as signals without fear of detection. The Bureau 

felt it might have far-reaching applications, since these signals, unlike radio 

signals at the time, could be directed and could be operated without interference.h14 The device was a forerunner of the World War II snooperseope, m Interview with Dr. Dellinger, Jan. 26, 1962. Even Dr. Stratton offered a device, 

based on a series of wire hawsers suspended from ships' sides that would offer sufficient 

resistance to deflect torpedoes from their course. Letter, SWS to Ch, Bur. Const. and 

Repair, Navy Department, May 23, 1917 (NBS Box 11, IG). 

112 "War Work," p.. 273. Some of the "target-finding torpedoes," one-man submarines, 

and electrical devices suggested to the Bureau for locating or destroying U-boats, 

often reached, Dr. Rosa said, into the realm of superscience. See correspondence in 

NBS Box 7. 

S334, "New forms of instruments for showing the presence and amount of corn- bustile gases in the air" (Weaver and Weibel, 1919) ; T249, "Thermal-conductivity 

method for the analysis of gases" (Palmer and Weaver, 1924) ; Science, 126, 161 

(1957). 

114 "War Work," pp. 133—139, 247; NBS Annual Report 1918, p. 146; letter, Millikan, 

Chief of R&D Division, NRC to SWS, Jan. 25, 1918 (NBS Box 14, IPR) - 
FROM GAGES TO GAS MASKS 205 

Dr. Goddard obtained 

his first rocket patent 

in 1914, in 1919 

stated the princi pit 

of multistage rockets, 

and in the next decade developed liquid 

fuels and gyroscopic 

stabilizers Jo r h is 

rockets. His recoilless launcher demonstrated for the Bu- reau in 1918 fired a 

two-foot-long powderloaded rocket. 

The historic liquidfueled rocket of the 

1920's, pictured 

above, rose only 41 

feet. With stabilization and better fuel 

the rocket flew 7,500 

feet up just a decade 

later. Goddard's interest was not in weaponry but in methods of raising recording 

apparatus beyond the range of sounding balloons, in order to explore the upper 

atmosphere. 

which was to detect reflections from infrared light projected by the scope 

itself. 

At least two inventions that came to the Bureau in World War I proved 

to be 20 years ahead of their time. Late in 1916, Dr. Robert H. Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University, Worcester, Mass., went to Dr. C. G. 

Abbot, Secretary of the Smithsonian and head of the Astrophysical Laboratory, with an idea for a rocket device theoretically capable of firing shells 

"far outdistancing rifled cannon." 

The principle of the rocket was of course centuries old, and in modern 

times its "red glare" had illuminated the bombardment of Fort McHenry, 

in th.e port of Baltimore. By increasing its thermodynamic efficiency and incorporating new power principles, Goddard believed he had found a way to 

control and enhance the flight characteristics of the rocket. Dr. Abbot 

agreed and called in Dr. Edgar Buckingham, the aerodynamics specialist 

at the Bureau. After studying Goddard's data they concurred on "the 

probable great military value of this rocket" and recommended that the 

Bureau assign $5,000 of its Signal Corps funds for development. 

By January 1918 two models of Goddard's rocket gun had been 

designed, one with a potential range of 7 miles, the other of 120 miles. 

Buckingham reported that a working model of the former, preliminary to 
206 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

large-scale production, might be readied within 3 months if the work was pushed, and Stratton, with Abbot's accord, assigned another $10,000 for its 

construction. Goddard, meanwhile, had designed still other rocket weapons: a launching device for firing a sequence of rockets, a rocket trench mortar, 

and a "hand-supported recoilless gun"—prototyp.e of the bazooka—capable 

of firing shells from a tube for distances of 400 to 700 yards. 

Reports of the first tests of the rocket gun in July 1918 were good, but 

Dr. Stratton's efforts to find scientists and technicians through the Smithsonian to assist Goddard with further development were unavailing. Other wartime projects, with more immediate prospects of utilization, occupied every 

trained man in sight.'15 Goddard's project was shelved. 

Destined for the next war too 'was the automatic rifle invented by 

John C. Garand. Originally submitted to Thomas Edison's Naval Consulting Board, the model was referred to Army Ordnance who sent it' to the 

Bureau "to look over" in the summer of 1918. As received, it was "exceedingly crude and inoperative," Stratton said later, but its conception was sound, it had been made by "an excellent mechanician," and Stratton him. 

self took personal charge of its development. After more than 6 months 

of work in the Bureau shops, the rifle was successfully fired. At that point 

litigation over the patent rights arose and with the war over the War Department lost interest. The Bureau returned the rifle to Mr. Garand"6 - Day-to-day life at the Bureau during the war was hectic and dominated by a sense of urgency, but the brevity of this country's involvement and 

the distance from the battlefield prevented rise of the tensions that were to 

mark life in the Second World War. Except for the hush-hush designing of 

the Liberty engine, of Dr. Briggs' stable-zenith device for the Navy (to 

synchronize the training of.big guns, independent of the pitch and roll of the 

ship), and of some aspects of sound.ranging apparatus, the Bureau was concerned with few classified projects. Apart from observing routine security 

measures, the Bureau staff and visitors came and went with a minimum of 

surveillance. 

Although the Bureau had an officer of the day and a watch, the absence 

of vigilance was illustrated in an unscheduled visit made by the President and 

Mrs. Wilson, accompanied by Secretary Redfield, out Connecticut Avenue 

one Sunday afternoon to see the novel all-metal airplane sent to the Bureau 

for structural tests. The doors of West building where it sat were locked, 

" Letter, C. G. Abbott to SWS, July 25, 1918, and attached correspondence (NBS Box 10, 

IG). See Goddard's classic monograph on rockets, "A method of reaching extreme 

Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections (Pubi. 2540), 71, 1—69 (1919) - 116 Memo, SWS to Secretary of Commerce, Mar. 25, 1921, and attached correspondence 

(NBS Box 12, IN). 
THE BUREAU AND THE METRIC SYSTEM 207 

but the Secretary found an unfastened window and all three climbed in to see the plane.117 

And the Bureau found time to play. An avid reader of detective and 

mystery novels, the President one morning sent a messenger to the Bureau 

with an envelope bearing his seal. He had read the night before that such a letter could be opened and resealed without any sign of tampering. Could 

the Bureau do it too? A day later the President had his sealed letter back, 

apparently intact. Inside was a note and the lead disks from which the 

fraudulent seal replacing his seal had been made overnight.'18 

THE BUREAU AND THE METRIC SYSTEM 

The war not oniy forwarded the Bureau's efforts to induce American 

industry to accept scientific measurements and methods in its operations; it 

also for a time brought hope that its long endeavor to secure general adoption of the metric system in this country might at last succeed. To its 

proponents the simplicity of the metric system in common measures and its 

advantages in scientific mensuration were overwhelming; to its opponents 

the cost to industry of conversion and the inconvenience to the public seemed 

insuperable. For years, a band of ardent antimetricists, supported by representatives of engineering and textile interests and by a merchant-minded 

Congress had repeatedly defeated metric legislation. Their success con- vinced Dr. Strattton that only through education of the public might sufficient 

pressure be generated to sway the lawmakers. The war offered an unexpected 

opportunity to further that education. 

On January 2, 1918, a War Department General Order announced that 

the General Staff of the AEF in France had adopted the metric system and 

that guns, munitions, and certain other materials produced in this country 

and destined for the AEF would conform to metric measurements: 

The metric system has been adopted for use in France for all firing 

data for artillery and machine guns, in the preparation of operation orders, and in map construction. Artillery and machine-gun 

material intended for service abroad is being graduated accordingly. 

Instruction in the metric system will be. given to all 

Alerted by the War Department, the Bureau at once ordered reprints 

of a descriptive pamphlet of the international metric system and of a large 

graphic wall chart derived from this pamphlet, both published by the Bureau 

Redfield, With Congress and Cabinet, pp. 98—99. 118 Letter, Secretary of Commerce to President Wilson, Jan. 26, 1918 (NBS Box 10, IG). 

War Department G.O. 1, Jan. 2, 1918, was based on AEF G.O. 65, Nov. 21, 1917. 
208 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) some years earlier.'20 A circular prepared in 1914, "Units of weights and 

measures: definitions and tables of equivalents," went to press again, as well as a 30 cm (12-inch) comparison scale, printed on paper, that permitted 

direct visual translation from centimeters and millimeters to inches and 

fractions of the inch. Large numbers of each of these were soon on the way 

to the technical services of the military here and abroad for instruction 

purposes.12' 

The most widely distributed metric aid was a soldier's manual, 

especially prepared at War Department request shortly after the general 

order appeared. A 16-page booklet, precisely 10 by 15 cm in size, small 

enough to fit the pocket, and issued as NBS Miscellaneous Publication No. 

21 was pointedly entitled: "Metric manual for soldiers—The soldier's primer 

of the metric system—An international decimal system of weights and meas- ures adopted as the legal standard by France and thirty-three other nations, 

and in world-wide use." 

The manual described the rapid wartime progress of the metric system, particularly in industry, and its "necessity for efficiency in warfare." 

It offered graphic examples of the units, showing the length of the meter in 

terms of the soldier's 1903 or 1917 rifle, cited dimensions of other objects 

familiar to the average soldier, and included a sketch of the origin of the 

metric system, brief tables of equivalents, and a glossary. After printing 

and distributing over 100,000 copies for military personnel here and abroad, 

the plates were made available to the Army and Navy for printing special 

editions.122 With the American armies indoctrinated and a considerable 

segment of American industry working in metrics, the long-deferred legislation seemed at last in sight. 

The interest of the Bureau in promoting the metric system went back 

to the act of 1866 that legalized its use in this country and the subsequent 

ratification of the Metric Convention in 1878, making the United States 

party to the creation and support of the International Bureau of Weights and 

Measures. Yet legislation to put the metric system into general and com- mercial use had not followed. Despite our decimal system of coinage, the 

fact that our common measures derived from the meter and kilogram, that 

almost all scientific measurement was based on the metric system, and that 

it was the only system of weights and measures specifically legalized by the 

U.S. Congress, opposition had arisen at once and could not be overcome. 

120 NBS M2, "The international metric system of weights and measures" (1906) ; M3 

(chart, 1908). Over 10,000 copies of the M2 had been distributed since 1906 and 22,000 

copies of M3 between 1908 and 1915. 

Between 1915 and 1917, 10,500 copies of NBS C47 were printed; another 15,000 were issued in 1918. For printing data, see Annual Reports, Bureau of Publications, Department of Commerce. 

Work," pp. 220—221. 
THE BUREAU AND THE METRIC SYSTEM 209 

Beyond all practical considerations—and they were many but not insuperable—the opposition appeared bound as much by emotional principles as by practical ones: the common measures were soundly Anglo-Saxon in 

origin; they had mystic biblical connotations; above all, they were a kind 

of badge of our isolation from the aflairs of Europe.'23 

The leading advocates of the metric system were of course the 

scientists and scientific institutions of this country. Three times at the 

turn of the century, in 1896, 1901, and 1903, they had mobilized to support 

metric legislation introduced in Congress, only to see it faiL'24 During the 

hearings in 1900 that led to the establishment of the National Bureau of 

Standards, the subject of metric legislation came up but fortunately was not 

pressed. - As Dr. Stratton confessed not long after, had Congress known 

that the proposed bureau was favorable to the adoption of the metric system, a great many there would have opposed its establishment.125 

Evidence of Bureau interest in the metric system—and perhaps as a demonstration of its application in the construction industry—appeared in 

the seeming irregular dimensions (that is, in terms of feet and yards) of 

North and South buildings and their laboratories, which resulted from their 

computation in metrics.'25 Regrettably, no correspondence has been found 

to indicate the reaction of either the architects or the builders to fitting con- ventional materials to unaccustomed dimensions. 

From its very beginning, the Bureau took an active part in supporting 

metric legislation. It secured the cooperation of those who had assisted in 

Two of the most dedicated of the antimetricists in the early century were Frederick 

A. Halsey and Samuel Dale, spokesmen for the textile industry and authors of one of the 

ablest of the antimetric books, The Metric Fallacy (New York: Van Nostrand, 1904). 

For the considerable correspondence of Samuel Dale with the Bureau in the period 

1904—23, see NBS Boxes 20, 21, 55, 58. Typical of the temper of antimetricists was the 

remark of Samuel Russell, clerk to Senator William H. King of Utah, who wrote in an 

8-page letter on the subject: "Metricitis, like socialism and Christian Science, is a mental Aberration" (letter to Secretary of Commerce Hoover, Apr. 8, 1921, NBS Box 

20, MS). 

Letter, SWS to Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Apr. 4, 1904 (NBS Box 21, MS). 

See also Hearings before Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, Jan. 30, 1896 

(L/C: QC91.U46), and Annual Report, Secretary of the Treasury, 1899, p. lxxvii. 

A good account of early metric legislative efforts appears in William Hallock and 

Herbert T. Wade, The Evolution of Weights and Measures and the Metric System 

(New York: Macmillan, 1906), pp. 133—134. Still the most authoritative general work 

available on weights and measures, it devoted more than half its 300 pages to the origin, 

development, and uses of the metric system. 

Hearings before the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, May 3, 1900, pp. 

7—8; letter, SWS to E. L. Corthell, Minister of Public Works, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 

Aug. 16, 1901 (NBS Box 21, MS). 

126 See Rosa, "Plans of the new buildings * * Science, 17, 137 (1903); Cobleutz.. 

From the Life of a Researcher. 131. 
210 . THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

establishing the Bureau and it participated in the hearings in the House and 

Senate. On one occasion, early in 1902, Dr. Stratton spoke before a con- gressional committee for over an hour on behalf of a metric bill then under 

consideration.127 

Altogether, nine measures relating to the metric system or to. some other "decimal" system were introduced in Congress in the first decade of 

the century, but even with the strong support of such international luminaries as Lord Kelvin and Alexander Graham Bell, none could be enacted.'28 

Although Dr. Stratton participated in every metric 'hearing in that decade 

and the next, he did not always support the measures proposed. Some he 

felt were not well drawn, some were too drastic. He. was aware of the difficulties of any sudden or complete conversion of systems and once declared 

that the Bureau "never advised or favored the introduction of any bill 

making the metric system compulsory for all purposes." It was the Bureau's 

position that it was "desirable to work toward a decimal and international 

system of weights and measures * * * [and] gradually extend the metric 

system into common work." 129 The qualification was ignored by critics of the Bureau, who saw any 

effort on behalf of the metric system as. a threat to all domestic tranquility. 

It was indictment enough that "the Bureau of Standards under the administration of Dr. Stratton has been the seat, of propaganda for many 

years. The doctor himself is known as a hobbyist, not to say lobbyist, for 

the metric system." 

Upon the entry of the United States into the war, committing our 

armies in France to the metric system, hope rose that metric legislation might 

finally be passed. War fervor and the AEF requirement were believed to 

have weakened the resolve of many former objectors. New industries, like 

munitions and aeronautics, and older ones, like the electrical industry, were 

working with the metric system in supplying the Allies and other nations 

Hearings on H.R. 2054 8 * * before the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, Feb. 6—Mar. '6, 1902, PP. 151—165 (L/C: QC91.U48). 128 Kelvin's testimony appeared in supplementary hearings before the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures, Aug. 24, 1902 (L/C: QC91.U481); Bell's appears in 

his article, "Our heterogeneous system of weights and measures," National Geographic, 

17,158 (1906). 129 Letter, SWS to editor, American Industries, Aug. 10, 1920 (NBS Box 20, MS). Dr. 

Burgess reaffirmed this position on the metric system in NBS Annual Report 1923, 

pp. 25—27. Stratton was confident, as he told Congress, that American industry would sooner or later "have to come to it" because of foreign trade. He "always felt that the 

request {for general use] should come from the public [and not be initiated in Congressi, 

and that the public should be educated more into the system before it was introduced." 

Hearings * * * 1921 (Jan. 2, 1920), p. 1594. 

Letter, Samuel Russell to Secretary of Commerce Hoover, Apr. 8, 1921 (NBS Box 20, 

MS). Hoover replied (Apr. 23, 1921) that he was "inclined to favor the metric system as the only possible substitute for our present system." 
THE BUREAU AND THE METRIC SYSTEM 211 

abroad, and Stratton predicted with confidence that it would be in common 

use "in a comparatively short time." 131 He was not a good prophet. 

In support of the first metric bill presented after the war, General 

Pershing himself attempted to set at rest public fears by reporting that the 

troops overseas "were able readily to change from our existing system of 

weights and measures to the metric system." He urged its adoption "to the 

greatest extent possible * * * [as] the only system with a purely scientific 

basis." 132 Again the measure failed. Said a disappointed Stratton, "The 

opponents of the metric system see to it that every Congressman is reached, 

and Congress does not see that it originates practically from a single 

source." 133 Almost certainly he referred to the American Institute of 

Weights and Measures, founded in 1917 by the antimetricists Samuel Dale 

and Frederick A. Halsey. With the support of the National Association 

of Manufacturers and less than a dozen other trade organizations, Dale 

had founded the institute for the sole purpose of opposing metric legislation—and had succeeded.134 

Another metric proposal followed a year later, but the era of normalcy was at hand and Stratton had to admit that the political climate was no longer 

favorable. Moreover, past experience had shown that neither inducing 

prominent personalities to appear before Congress, soliciting petitions, nor 

lending the Bureau's own prestige were sufficient. More was needed. The 

Bureau must adopt a policy of wider education and secure the conversion 

of members of Congress through their constituents. 

Between 1920 and 1930, 23 metric bills were introduced in Congress. 

Science in industry and iiidustry itself, with an eye on foreign trade, inclined 

more and more to the metric system.135 But the great depression saw foreign 

131 Remarks of SWS reported in minutes of meeting, Standards Committee, Society of 

Automotive Engineers, Feb. 16, 1917, pp. 3-4, 20 (NBS Box 20, MS). 

Letter, John J. Pershing to W. Mortimer Crocker, Nov. 24, 1919, transmitted to SWS 

(NBS Box 20, MS). 

133 Confidential letter, SWS to Fred R. Drake, Drake & Co., Easton, Pa., Dec. 29, 1920 

(NBS Box 20, MS). 

See miscellaneous documents of the A.I.W.M. in L/C: QC81.A347 and A349. The 

counterpart of the American Institute is the British Weights and Measures Association, 

active since its founding in 1904 in opposing introduction of the metric system "as a British standard." 

135 NBS C593, "The Federal basis for weights and (R. W. Smith, 1958), p. 19. 

How "vital and timely" the subject seemed just after World War I is evident in the 

special report prepared by the National Industrial Conference Board, The Metric versus the English System of Weights and Measures, Research Report No. 42 (New 

York: Century, 1921). 

In support of a metric bill introduced in 1921, Stratton reported 102,842 petitions 

ceived at the Bureau, 15,501 of them from engineers and manufacturers, and 98.87 

percent of the total number favorable (memo, SWS for Secretary of Commerce Hoover, 

Oct. 29, 1921, NBS Box 20, MS). , 
212 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

trade fall away and a growing sense of isolation fill the Nation. In the 

decades after, interest in the metric system was revived periodically but the 

tide of congressional and public sentiment remained against conversion. 

"THE LEGACY LEFT TO US" 

On this side of the Atlantic it seemed that the war ended as as it began. Newspaper accounts of the fighting in France all through 

October 1918 indicated no weakness in the German armies anywhere. After 

the first week of the Meuse-Argonne battle, AEF advances were measured in 

meters as, under simultaneous pressure from the French and British to the 

west and north, the German armies gave ground slowly. Military intelligence reported that they were probably withdrawing to their prepared 

Meuse-Antwerp line, where they would hold through the winter. 

Pershing's plans for a renewal of his offensive in the spring of 1919, 

with victory that summer, were summarily shelved upon the sudden political 

collapse of Germany in early November. Here at home, industry, finally 

coming into full-scale production after a year's preparation, awoke to find 

the war over. Production lines stopped, contracts were canceled, and all war 

emergency measures suddenly came to an end. 

On November 20, 9 days after the armistice, Secretary of Commerce 

Redfield wrote Stratton asking him what activities of the Bureau would 

be discontinued as military and naval operations ceased, and what reduction in force might be expected as a result. Neither discontinuance nor re- duction was contemplated, Stratton replied. On the contrary, as a result of 

the wartime experience, he expected greater demands than ever to be made on the Bureau by the military services, both for specifications and increased 

standardization of their purchases and for the development of new devices 

and materials. "One of the great lessons taught by the war," said Stratton, 

"is the need for engineering and scientific work in connection with our 

defenses." Such research must never again be left until we were at war. 

Furthermore, the development of substitute materials and the rise of new 

industries called for expanded Bureau assistance: "There was never a time 

when the need for industrial research was greater than the present." And 

he asked Secretary Redfield for help in persuading Congress to lend assistance 

both to the military and civil departments of the Government and to industry 

for this research.136 

Dr. Burgess, concerned with the fact that War Department funds for 

research automatically terminated within 6 months of the end of hostilities, 

proposed further action by the Director: 

Letter, Redfield to SWS, Nov. 20, 1918, and reply, Nov. 30 (NBS Box 2, AG). 
THE LEGACY LEFT TO US 213 

With the curtailment of military appropriations to the Bureau by 

Congress, it becomes necessary for the military bureaus to provide 

funds for the investigations in which they are interested. 

He asked Stratton to seek special funds from Navy Ordnance to continue 

the Bureau investigation of light armor plate steels and Army Ordnance funds 

to continue the study of machine gun corrosion.'37 A score of other investigations would need similar financing. 

The Bureau thus sought help through a wartime measure, the Over. 

man Act, passed by Congress on May 20, 1918.138 In the interest of economy 

and greater efficiency, the act authorized, among other things, the transfer of funds from one Government agency to another, where an agency 

with funds but lacking the staff or facilities for an investigation, survey, 

or other service that it required, might turn the necessary funds over to 

the investigating agency. Under the act the military services had transferred well over half a million dollars to the Bureau in 1917 and 1918 (apart 

from military funds directly appropriated by Congress to the Bureau), to 

carry out wartime research for them. 

The device of interagency fund transfers, although never officially 

sanctioned before the Overman Act, had prevailed for a number of years 

among Government agencies. Stratton had not approved of it. Seeking 

additional funds from Congress at a hearing in 1910, he rejected a suggestion that he avail himself of this custom, insisting that the Bureau 

"should not be under obligation to any individual or any department when 

it undertakes testing." 139 Now suddenly the Bureau was alarmed. It had a plant more than 

twice its prewar size. The end of hostilities left it stranded with many investigations for the services far from completed. Particularly important, 

the Bureau felt., was its research on radio vacuum tubes and coil aerials for 

the Signal Corps, its testing of rubber compositions and tires for the Motor 

Transport Service, structural materials testing for the Navy Bureau of 

Yards and Docks, and the work on airplane fabrics and aviation engines. 

Upon strong pleas by Stratton, President Wilson on March 4, 1919, au- thorized the transfer of $100,000 from unobligated funds of the Quartermaster Corps to the Bureau to complete some of these investigations.'40 

Memo, Burgess for SWS, Nov. 25, 1918 (NBS Box 5, FPG) - " For passage of the Overman Act, possibly the most important piece of legislation 

enacted for the prosecution of the war, see Paxson, American Democracy and the 

World War, II, 225—226.. 

Hearings * * * 1912 (Dec. 2, 1910), p. 273. 

Letter, Secretary of War to Secretary of the Treasury, Mar. 4, 1919; letter, Secretary 

of Commerce to Secretary of War, Apr. 10, 1919, and attached corrrespondence (NBS 

Box 5, FPG). Further correspondence on tranferred funds appears in NBS Box 7, 

ICG 1918—22. 
214 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

As appropriations to the military plummeted after the war, the Bu. 

reau's transferred funds fell to $62,000 in 1921 and $3,000 in But 

the precedent for transferred funds had been established and with no 

alternative Stratton accepted it. "We would rather handle [all 

search] * * as far as possible, on our regular funds," he told the House 

Appropriations Subcommittee, "but I see no objection [under the 

cumstances]. * * * I believe it would be a good thing." A paragraph on transferred funds that Stratton prepared and read to the committee was, with 

minor changes, accepted for inclusion in the Bureau budget. Appearing 

in the appropriation act of May 20, 1920, and repeated annually thereafter, 

it stated that— 

the head of any department or independent establishment of the 

government having funds available for scientific investigations and 

requiring cooperative work by the Bureau of Standards on scientific 

investigations within the scope of the functions of that Bureau and 

which it is unable to perform within the limits of its appropriations, 

may, with the approval of the Secretary of Commerce, transfer to 

the Bureau of Standards such sums as may be necessary to carry on such investigations.'42 

Dr. Stratton's successors were often to find it easier to interest other 

Government agencies in supporting research at the Bureau than to obtain 

increased funds' from Congress.'43 Not Stratton, whose Bureau could not 

wait for proffered funds. At the second postwar hearing before the House 

Subcommittee on Appropriations, he requested what one of his auditors pro. 

tested as "practically double the appropriation asked for last year." It was over a million dollars, Stratton admitted, actually represented only a 60 

percent increase. Item by item he explained his needs, and most of the re- quest was The appropriation bore witness not oniy to the 

powers of Stratton's persuasion but to the esteem the Bureau had won for 

itself in Congress. ' ' - By far the largest item in the new Bureau budget was for industrial 

141 These sums apparently represent direct transfers of funds for other departments. 

The blow was softened, however, by the transfer of additional departmental funds 

through congressional action in 1921, 1922, and 1923, and are included with special 

appropriations to the Bureau. See app. F and NBS Annual Reports for those years. 

'42Hearings * * * 1921 (Jan. 2, 1920), p. 1598. The provision as enacted in 41 Stat. 

683, is cited in Weber, The Bureau of Standards, p. 73. See also letter GKB to Air 

Service, WD, June 22, 1923 (NBS Box 41, FPG). 

Transferred funds to the Bureau rose from $60,870 in 1923 to approximately $418,600 

in 1930, or almost 15 percent of total funds. They maintained the 1930 level until World 

War II. After World War II, transferred funds at times constituted as much 85 percent of total Bureau working funds. 

144 Hearings * * * 1921 (Jan. 2, 1920), p. 1525. 
THE LEGACY LEFT TO US 215 

research, unconnected, as it had been earlier, with Government testing. Back 

of Stratton's arguments for this research was the realization, crystallized by 

the wartime experience, that the recent alliance of science and industry was certain to continue in the postwar years. Nor had it escaped notice that 

most of the wartime triumphs in physics and chemistry were of European 

In the coming years the great industrial organizations of this 

country must, to remain competitive, increase their research activities, and in 

doing so would make unparalleled demands upon the Nation's scientific 

resources. 

Foreseeing this, in 1918 the National Research Council and the Rocke. 

feller Foundation had raised the question of establishing a permanent re- search institution devoted to pure research, to which industry after the war 

might look for leadership in the physical sciences. "Is the Federal Government," George E. Vincent, president of the Rockefeller Institute, wrote 

to Robert A. Millikan of the Council, "in a position to create a separate institution on the analogy of certain research units in the Department of Agricul. 

ture and in the Geological Survey? Is the Bureau of Standards capable of 

extension into a national research institution?" 145 The questions remained, 

but hope of implementing them ended with the armistice as Congress turned 

its back on war and all its prerogatives and the wartime organization of 

science and scientists melted away. 

Although Stratton, as an executive member of the National Research 

Council, certainly knew of the questions under consideration, no correspond. ence has been found to indicate what part, if any, the Bureau took in them. 

Quite apart from the interest they must have aroused, it is more than likely 

that Stratton had already determined on the postwar course of the Bureau. 

As nothing else could have, the war opened to the Bureau new vistas of its 

role in the Nation's commerce and industry. When first called on to meet 

the Nation's war needs, industry had shown itself both fearful and resentful 

of Government interference.146 Within months, as the magnitude of the 

task stood revealed, industry came to realize that only the Federal Government could mobilize and marshal the Nation's resources and command the 

scientific assistance that industry must have to produce the materials of 

war. And it discovered in the Bureau not only technical assistance and 

Letter of Feb. 5, 1918, quoted in The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan, pp. 180- 

181. See also Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, pp. 323—325. 

Clarkson in Industrial America in the World War (pp. 318, 427, 449); speaking of 

the early efforts of the War Industries Board to harness industry to the war needs of 

the country, said the Board repeatedly found that "business and patriotism were confined to separate compartments." Besides industry's foot-dragging in meeting specifications, 

Government war purchases for a time were attended by "a saturnalia of high' prices." 
216 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

necessary measurements but a source of the scientific principles upon which 

its operations must depend.147 

The Bureau itself realized for the first time what could be done when 

its 2- and 3-man sections became 50-man sections and were supported with 

adequate funds and equipment. It was no more than a glimpse, for Bureau 

accomplishments, by comparison with the tasks laid before it, seemed few. 

There had hardly been time to state the problem, acquire the equipment, 

or find the staff before the armistice came. But it was a turning point in 

the outlook of the Bureau. If it could not be the hoped for center for pure 

research, the Bureau would undertake the applied research for industry 

that industry could not do for itself. 

As Stratton and Secretary Redfield told the House subcommittee late 

in 1918, "Practically all of the military work [conducted by the Bureau] 

has an industrial value," and that research must be continued and expanded on behalf of industry.148 Other nations realized the extraordinary role science 

in industry had played in the conflict, and as a result Canada, Japan, and 

Australia were already planning national laboratories to look after their 

industrial development. In beating swords into plowshares, Stratton told 

Congress, the Bureau must continue its research on airplane engines and 

instruments and take up much needed studies of automotive engines as well. 

The study of problems raised by the war in optics and optical instruments, 

in radio, and in acoustics had only begun.149 

Much of the proposed peacetime research that Stratton and Redfield 

outlined to Congress was to be carried on, the latter said, in "the legacy 

left to us," the Bureau's great Industrial 'building, clearly destined to become 

"the center and home of the scientific studies of' the Government for the 

A historian-scientist in the glass industry was to say twice within 20 pages of that 

period: "Much of [the subsequent] increase in knowledge was the direct product of the 

enforced extension of the optical glass industry during the war. ' [There wasi * * * an awakened realization by the glass industry * * * that the soundest foundation for a strong industry is the understanding of its fundamental scientific principles." George W. 

Morey, The Properties of Glass, pp. 5, 26. 

Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), p. 958. A year later Stratton noted that the 

Bureau "has gotten practically 100 percent salvage value out of all of its scientific 

research for the War Department." Hearings * * * 1921 (Jan. 2, 1920), p. 1531. 

The new emphasis on research for industry and standardization in industrial production, 

manufacturing, and distribution were subjects of many articles shortly after the war, 

among them G. K. Burgess, "Science and the after-war period," Sci. Mo. 8, 97 (1919) 

E. B. Rosa, "The Bureau of Standards and industrial standardization," Am. Federationist, 25, 1029 (1919); "Work of the Bureau of Standards during 1918," Science, 

49, 39 (1919)); P. G. Agnew, "The work of the Bureau of Standards," Ann. Am. Acad. 

Pout. Sci. 82, 278 (1919) ; "The Bureau of Standards and the war," Nature, 103, 

197 (1919); C. H. Claudy, "Science in the war," Sci. Am. 120, 653 (1919). 

Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), p. 957. 
THE LEGACY LEFT TO US 217 

benefit of the industries of the country." 150 There the Bureau would con- tinue to foster the new industries born of the war, the manufacture of 

scientific instruments, of aeronautical instruments, of automotive power 

plants, and the science of electrodeposition. Redfield pointed to 'three 

others that had grown out of recent Bureau investigations: The making of 

chemical porcelain, never before produced in this country; the making of 

hard-fired porcelain, for which we had been wholly dependent on Germany, 

Austria, and Great Britain; 'and the making of pyrometer polarimeters 

and other scientific instruments, previously obtained from Germany. In 

applying science to industry, declared Redfield, "We have begun to do the 

thing that Germany did 35 years ago." 

Still other industries in which research had just begun included the 

making of precision gages, dyes and chemicals, petroleum products, the 

rare sugars, the platinum metals, rubber, paper, leather, and ceramics.152 

The fields of metallurgy, photographic technology, and construction and 

building materials must be examined anew. And Redfield promised that 

"we will put in [the Industrial building] a small woolen mill, a cotton mill, 

etc.," to investigate some of the basic problems in cloth manufacture that 

engaged so much effort during the war and found little solution.'53 

But the real legacy left to the Bureau was not a building or a program 

but a series of intangibles: the closer relation that had arisen between the 

Bureau and industry; the beginning of recognition of what scientific methods 

could contribute to industrial technology; and perhaps more important, the 

realization by industry that fundamental science, which seemingly produced 

nothing, might have far-reaching, consequences at some. future time. Industries that had set up their own laboratories before the war doubled and 

Ibid, p. 958. 151 Ibid., pp. 932—933, 940. Redfield's remark is quoted in letter, Elizabeth Minor King, 

"New York Evening Post," to Redfield, Mar. 22, 1919 (NARG 40, Box 119, file 67009/63). 

152 In a memorandum to the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Dec. 16, 1918, 

Stratton listed as new things produced on a commercial scale since 1915, in many 

instances with Bureau help: manganin, a special alloy for use in electrical work; high. 

grade volumetric glass apparatus; high-grade optical glass; four types of photographic 

dyes; fused quartz of optical quality; chemical glassware (Pyrex); oxygen cbntrol apparatus; improved design in aeronautical instruments; burned shale aggregates for 

concrete ships; cotton airplane fabric; photographic paper; cigarette paper; and fine 

grades of artifical abrasives (NBS Box 10, IG). 

Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), p. 958. Acquired in 1918, the wool and 

cotton mills were moved into the Industrial building upon its completion early in 1920. 

See letter, Textile Research Co., Boston, Mass., to SWS, June 7, 1919, and attached cor- respondence (NBS Box 4, AP). The woolen mill was never set up. Realizing its 

need for scientific assistance, the textile industry, working in close cooperation with the 

Department of Agriculture and the Bureau, organized its own research laboratories in the 

1920's. About 1930 the cotton mill, no longer necessary, was dismantled. Conversation 

with William D. Appel, Mar. 4, 1963. 
218 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19) 

tripled their'scièntific staffs, and others that had formerly considered research an expensive frill-now for the scientists and engineers they began 

to enlist.154 '' 

For the Bureau's industrial research, Stratton asked a special con- gressional appropriation of $363,000, half again as much as the combined 

sums requested for' its' previous largest programs, structural materials testing 

and the testing of' Government materials. Iii addition, he asked for more 

than four the past for public utility investigations. 

The war had pressure on the utilities, dramatizing, he said, 

their and 'economic problems." Not 'only gas and electric 

companies, but telephone and telegraph companies had been overtaxed by the 

service demands of the war industries, war workers, and military camps. 

Hardest hit, the telephone company in the District of Columbia had been 

forced to file a petition for both traffic and financial relief.155 "The public 

utilities of the country are trembling in the balance," Redfield told Congress, 

and if the Bureau did not undertake the necessary research to provide 

practical standards and scientific data on their behalf, then eac'h of the 48 

States would have to establish separate laboratories to do this work.'56 Con. 

gress agreed that it was a Bureau responsibility. 

For a peacetime America, it was an immense and expensive program 

the Bureau projected. With the increase in staff, statutory salaries for 

Bureau test and research personnel had gone up from less than $300,000 in 

1916 to nearly $500,000 for fiscal year 1920. In the same period, special 

appropriations, which included salaries for 'the additional staff, rose from 

$300,000 (for 9 projects) to $1,310,000 (for 25 projects). Of the projects 

under special appropriations, four alone—iñdustrial research, public utilities, 

structural materials, and testing o'f Government materials—accounted for well 

over half the total of special appropriations and more than one-third of total 

Bureau income. 'Convinced' of the peacetime worth of these investigations 

begun with public or military funds during the war,' Congress made cuts in some but voted to continue them all. Their benefit to industry was beyond 

question. ' A year after Vincent and Millikan raised the question of extending 

the functions of the Bureau of Standards on behalf of industry, Dr. Stratton, 

in the introduction to his annual report' 'for 1'918—19, accepted the, challenge 

in a significant restatement of Bureau policy. The relation of the Bureau's 

work to the public, to the Government and to science remained unchanged, 

154 Where in 1920 there had been' 300 research laboratories in this country, a decade later there were 1,625, staffed by than 34,000 people. Dupree, Science in 

the Federal Government, p. 337. ' ' "War Work," pp. 274—276. ' -' "° Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), p. 941; NBS Annual Report 1918, PP. 52—53. 
THE LEGACY LEFT TO Us 219 

but henceforth the Bureau declared itself "fundamentally concerned, either 

directly or indirectly, with the improvement of methods of production or the 

quality of the output" of industry. It thus occupied "somewhat the same 

position with respect to the manufacturing interests of this country that the 

bureaus of the Department of Agriculture do to the agriculture interests." 

Such was the intention of the Bureau when, with the incoming Harding administration, Herbert Hoover became the new Secretary of Commerce. 

NBS Annual Report 1919, p. 21. 

The Exchecquer standard wine gallon of 

Queen Anne, 1707. 
The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt at Charlottenburg, Germany. It was, said Dr. Rosa after a visit there, "an illustrious example of how 

much can be accomplished where research and testing are combined in one institution." (MS speech in NBS Box 22, PRA 1901-03.) 
THE TIDE 

OF COMMERCE AND 

INDUSTRY (1920—30) 

CHAPTER V 

THE POSTWAR WORLD 

The United States emerged from its brief participation in the war by far 

the world's richest and most powerful Nation. Disillusioned with the chronic 

sickness of Europe and rejecting the power a world in chaos offered, America 

deliberately turned its back and set about building a national structure of 

self-sufficiency and plenty on the broad industrial base and the techniques 

of mass production it had acquired during the war. In the mid-1920's a social historian spoke simple truth when he said that "A dynamic history of 

the period might give a volume or two to the automobile and a foot-note to 

affairs of state." 1 New industries born of the war were soon to make the Nation independent in nearly every manufactured necessity. The revolution in the 

coking industry and the confiscation of German patents upon our entrance 

into the war made possible the production of many of the dyes, medicines, 

and industrial solvents formerly obtained from Germany, and led to such 

important new industries as the making of synthetic plastics and fibers.2 The new chemistry and advances in metallurgy joined with electric power to 

revolutionize the extraction and refining of copper and iron ores, the cracking 

of petroleum, and to make giants of the automobile, motion picture, radio, 

and telephone industries. With the introduction of the closed car at popular 

prices in 1922, the automobile by itself almost created a new industrial 

revolution through its mass consumption of steel, nickel, lead and other 

metals, plate glass, leather, textiles, rubber, gasoline, and oil, and its demand 

for roads and highways, gas stations, garages, and roadside accommodations. 

Surpassing even the growth of the automobile and electrical industries 

in the decade after the war was the building and construction industry. 

Government construction of streets, highways, and public buildings alone are 

'Robert L. Duffus, "1900—1925," Century, 109, 488 (1925). 

'Preston W. Slosson, The Great Crusade and After: 1914—1928 (New York: Macmillan, 

1930), p. 18. The Trading-with-the-Enemy Act of Oct. 6, 1917 permitted the President 

to license the use of German patents by American firms, under the administration of the 

Federal Trade Commission. Frederic L. Paxson, American Democracy and the World 

War, II, 132. 

221 
222 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

said to have "used more capital and employed more men 'than in any single 

line of private enterprise." At the same time, private construction, con- suming vast quantities of brick, steel, stone, tile, cement, lumber, hardware, 

and plumbing supplies, changed metropolitan skylines and pushed up row 

houses and apartments along ever-lengthening radii out of the cities. 

Technology and the plant facilities to make consumer products were 

far in advance of demand. "For every hundred people in American cities 

in 1920 there were only thirteen bathtubs and six telephones. One Amer. 

ican in every thirteen had an automobile, but not one in ten thousand had a radio. Almost no farmhouses, and but one in every ten city homes, were 

wired for electricity; only in such homes, therefore, were there potential 

customers for washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, floor lamps, 

incandescent bulbs, fans, and flatirons." In city and suburb, technology 

thus stood ready to invade the home as the automobile, radio, telephone, 

bathroom plumbing, and kitchen appliances became essentials of the good 

life. Wages rose steadily, but not fast enough to sustain the buying power 

needed by the pace of mass production, and advertising and installment buy. 

in'g became giant adjuncts of industry to maintain mass consumption.5 The 

promise of the decade appeared in the extraordinary boom that followed the 

end of wartime controls as industry, enriched by research and mechanization, 

sought to satisfy pent-up demands.6 There was to be a severe postwar 

depression but it was delayed until late in 1920. 

'Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of 

Industrial America (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 298. Highway, road, and street 

construction expenditures, for example, rose from just over a half billion dollars in 

1920 to a billion in 1921 and close to two billion by 1928. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 

Historical Statistics, p. 382. 

Ibid., p. 309. All these appliances, as well as air conditioners, electric ranges, water 

heaters, and garbage-disposal units, though some were yet crude and costly, were on the 

market before the end of the decade. 

In the 28 million homes in the United States at the end of 1928, it was estimated that 19 

miilkn wired for electricity, 17 million had an automobile outside the door, 13 

million had a telephone, 13 million a phonograph, and 9 million had factory-built radio 

sets. Dellinger, "Radio," in A. B. Hart and W. M. Schuyler, eds., The American Year 

Book, 1929 (New York: Am. Year Book Corp., 1930), p. 460. 

Between 1900 and 1920 the volume of manufactured products went up 95 percent while 

population increased only 40 percent. Duffus, "1900—1925." 6 In its haste to convert to peacetime production, industry often neglected new materials or sources developed during the war. Pointing specifically to the renewed but now unnecessary importation of German clays for glassmaking, Dr. Stratton deplored the 

"tendency on the part of manufacturers to revert to the old order of things just as soon as they could * * * [following] the path of least resistance and of the least financial 

risk." Letter, SWS to A. V. Bleininger, Feb. 3, 1919 (NBS Box 14, IR). 
THE POSTWAR WORLD 223 

At the National Bureau of Standards the boom seemed for a time 

more like disaster. With the war over, it expected the exodus of the scientists detailed from other Government agencies and those on leave from 

colleges and universities. But it found irreplaceable its loss of regular 

Bureau members to the siren call from industry for trained investigators. 

Attracted by salaries which in many instances were twice those available at 

the Bureau, over 78 percent of the total force of appointed staff members left 

in the 7 months following the armistice. Some positions had a succession of 

occupants; in others replacements simply could not be found.7 

Subprofessionals (aids, apprentices, and mechanics) entered the 

Bureau at as little as $720 a year and could hope for no more than $2,740. 

Most, with length of experience, were caught in the $1,140—$1,240 

bracket. with degrees and experience came in at $1,440. 

Some the key members were getting as little as $2,240, most were at 

$4,000, and/only a few of the division chiefs had attained the maximum 

possible, $,800. 

was at a time when a bookkeeper in downtown Washipgton could 

make $100 a month, "with meals." University salaries were sufficiently 

higher thin those paid by the Government for Dr. E. W. Washburn to turn 

down the maximum of $4,000 that the Bureau had to offer. (He came 6 

years in 1926, at the division chief level.) Industry paid close to 

twice tWe Bureau salary at every level of training and experience.8. 

1The cost of living in 1920 was relatively high and left little for amenities. /!A Bureau apprentice making $65 a month before taxes could find 

room and breakfast within a mile of the laboratories for $20 a month. 

Not far away, a front room rented for $25, and meals were another $30. 

For a family, a four. or five-room furnished apartment with steam heat and 

eleciricity could be found on the way downtown for $110, or 2 miles north 

of the Bureau, in Chevy Chase, for $100. 

Men's suits were fairly expensive, running from $25 to $85 for all wool 

and $15.50 to $25 for Palm Bcach or mohair, with tropical worsteds in 

between. Hats were $4 to $8 and shoes $7 and up. Although probably 

15 or 20 on the Bureau staff owned a car by 1920, it was seldom driven 

except on weekends and almost everyone still rode a bicycle to work or 

7NBS Annual Report 1919, p. 279. For a list of the physicists who left the Bureau for 

industry in the 1920's, see letter, LJB to Secretary, American Institute of Physics, Feb. 

24, 1936 (NBS Box 395, ID-Misc.). 

Interview with Dr. William Blum, Oct. 15, 1963. By the end of the decade, salaries 

at the Bureau had gone up by almost one-third. Living costs (a room with two meals a day was $45 to $55 a month) had risen only slightly. See NBS M94, "Scientific 

and technical positions in the NBS" (1929). 
224 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

came by streetcar. Some of the prices for new automobiles that year read 

like Bureau salaries. While the Ford runabout was only $395, the sedan 

cost $795. The Dort "fourseason" sedan was $1,870, the Auburn sedan 

$2,775. Nor could used cars have been very popular when a 1919 Chevrolet 

cost $550 and an Overland $1,000. For the sporty youth on his own, 

however, there was that Stutz 6-cylinder roadster, vintage not given, going 

for Few below the scientific grades in the laboratories could afford 

any of them, just as few could afford to stay at the Bureau. 

A loyal nucleus that included most of the key members of the staff 

remained, even though mapy of those in the lower grades who elected to 

stay were, Dr. Stratton said, being paid "less than a living wage." In its 

search for replacements, all that the Bureau had to offer was "a reasonably 

good entrance salary to young men just out of college." 10 With industry 

bidding for them, too, even recent graduates could not be found in any 

numbers and the Bureau staff fell from 1,150 members in July 1919 to 981 a year later, and 850 by 1921. Few eligibles appeared on the civil service 

registers and answers to advertising appeals grew meager. The Bureau 

turned to industry itself in an effort to restaff its laboratories. 

Dr. Stratton some years earlier had warned that the schools were not 

turning out even a tenth of the scientific and technical men needed in in. 

dustry, and as a consequence industry raided the Bureau in its search for 

trained men. In 1916, as industry expanded to feed the war machines in 

Europe and Bureau losses of skilled workmen went up, Stratton proposed to 

Congress that in order to relieve the pressure on his staff the Bureau make 

its facilities available to industrial specialists, technical experts, and re- searchers, and by setting them to work on problems in which both they and 

the Bureau were interested, "train them up for the industries." He cited as example a linoleum company which had recently asked to send a chemist to 

the Bureau who after 6 months' training would return and set up a laboratory 

in the plant where he worked. Without authorization or funds for this 

type of employment, the Bureau had to deny the request.11 

Although he brought up the matter at hearings each year thereafter, 

Congress said no. By the summer of 1919 what Stratton had previously 

called "more or less a notion of mine" had become stark necessity, and he 

turned to the trade associations served by the Bureau, proposing that where 

they needed specific researches on important problems affecting their industry, they send qualified men to the Bureau to do this research. It was 

0 Advertisements in the "Washington Evening Star," April and October 1920. 10 NBS Annual Report 1920, p. 279; Annual Report 1921, p. 272. 

Hearings * * * 1918 (Dec. 1, 1916), p. 4.83. 
THE POSTWAR WORLD 225 

agreed that these "research associates" would be paid by industry, and since 

their work was for the industry at large, rather than for any single company. 

the results would be published by the Bureau and so made available to all.12 

Two years later, in 1921, six associates in metallurgy were appointed 

by the Director. By 1923, 21 associates, representing 18 industries, were at 

the Bureau, and by 1925 a total of 61 associates, maintained by 36 organizations, were at work, most of them sponsored by trade associations but also 

among them a number from private research firms, science foundations, and 

Government agencies.'3 

At the heels of the staffing crisis came the brief but severe depression 

of 1920—21. Overnight at the end of the war, President Wilson's War Industries Board and other emergency regulatory agencies had been dissolved, 

ending nationwide Government control of the economy. For a time unfettered business boomed, but as prices soared out of sight, production and em- ployment fell off and thousands of new companies, notably in the automobile 

industry, collapsed. Soon there was widespread criticism of the high cost 

of living, which since 1916 had seen the dollar reduced in purchasing value 

to 45 cents; of the new income tax and surtaxes, seriously felt for the first 

time since their imposition in 1913; and charges of inefficiency, extravagance, 

and overdevelopment throughout the Government.'4 

Reacting to "the avalanche of disapproval" aimed at the Wilson administration, Congress lashed out at "the army of clerks * * * and cro- cheting stenographers" said to be infesting every department of the Government, and at appropriations hearings hacked away funds, research and 

operating alike. The cuts that could not be compromised were annoying but 

not deep. The Bureau closed several of its branch offices and began saving 

its cinders to make cinder-concrete paths between the buildings. As Stratton 

12 Hearings * * * 1919 (Jan. 25, 1918), p. 984; letter, SWS to Managing Director, National Industrial Conference Board, June 26, 1919 (NBS Box 10, IG). Most responsive were industries which had small research laboratories or none at all, and had less to fear from patentable discoveries, as in dental materials, terra cotta, tile, and other 

building materials, pottery, textiles, and color research. 

"NBS Annual Report 1921, p. 240; Annual Report 1923, pp. 4—5; NBS C296, "Research 

associates at the Bureau of Standards" (1925). The plan further solved staffing difficulties when a number of the research associates subsequently left industry and came to 

work for the Bureau, among them Dr. Paul D. Merica, Dr. John R. Cain, R. G. Waltenberg, Dr. I. G. Pr:est, N. S. Osborne, Dr. H. F. Stimson, N. D. Booth, J. A. Dickinson, 

Dr. Deane B. Judd, Dr. F. G. Brickwedde, T. S. Sligh, Jr., and Dr. A. V. Astin (see list 

of associates in C296). 

14 The top rate of tax on personal income, set at 7 percent in 1913, was slightly reduced 

during the 1920's. By 1932 it was up to 25 percent, and during the depression years it 

reached a high of 63 percent. 
226 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

later reported to Congress, "In the program of economy adopted, some re- trenchments were made." 15 Stirred by the debates in Congress and the attacks in the press and 

periodical literature on Federal spending, Dr. Rosa, with Dr. Stratton's 

approval, cleared his desk and began work on a series of studies in the cost 

and efficiency of the Federal Government, in answer to the outcry. For 

their view of the question of science in Government, particularly as it 

affected the Bureau, some of Rosa's arguments in these papers are worth 

summarizing. 

Pointing to the wartime exhaustion of raw and manufactured materials, the rising demand for consumer goods in short supply, inflation of 

currency and credit, and postwar profiteering as among the causes for continued rising prices, Rosa declared that more Government, not iess, was 

necessary to protect the public. He warned of "economic and political disturbance or even disaster," asserting that the Government must again, as it 

had during the war, induce the Nation "to economize in the use of staple 

commodities and luxuries, reduce the waste of raw materials, make use of 

cheaper materials, increase the efficiency of men, of machines, and of proc. 

esses, on a nationwide scale and at an early date." 16 By "more" Government 

Rosa made clear he did not mean reimposition of wartime controls but better 

education of the public in the cost of Government, more efficient operation 

of Government, and greater assistance to those Government agencies whose 

recognized function it was to work directly in the public interest. 

Answering the charge of extravagance in Federal spending, Rosa 

showed that in the budget for 1920 interest on the national debt as a result 

of past wars consumed 67.8 percent of Federal income, the military services 

received 25 percent, the cost of running the Government came to 3.2 percent, 

public works 3 percent, and research, education, and development 1 percent.17 

Hearings * * * 1922 (Dec. 20, 1920). p. 1235; Hearings * * * 1923 (Feb. 1, 1922), 

pp. 424, 425, 452. 

In a letter in March 1920 to a former Bureau member who had gone into industry, Stratton discussed the coming economy wave: "Ipersonally know most of the leaders of the 

party in control and the chairman of the committees directly interested in our work." 

They had initiated the economy program and intended to push it, said Stratton, and 

there were no exceptions. Nevertheless, he was "working with the Senate committee 

and hoped to persuade it to restore some of the more funds" (Letter, SWS to 

F. C. Clarke, Mar. 17, 1920, NBS Box 10, IG). 

'° Rosa, "The economic importance of the scientific work of the Government," J. Wash. 

Sci. 10, 342 (1920). 

"J. Wash. Acad. Sci., pp. 346—349. The percentages were based on total revenues of 

approximately $5.68 billion. (Between 1914 and 1921, the national debt rose from 

$1,188 million to $23,976 million.) 

In his final study, "Expenditures and revenues of the Federal Government," Ann. Am. 

Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 95, 1—113 (1921), Rosa included revenue and expenditure data for 
THE POSTWAR WORLD 227 

He rivetted attention on that 1 percent, representing little more than 50 cents 

out of the approximately $50 per capita 18 collected by the Government from 

all sources, for it was the key to industrial recovery and to reduction in 

the high cost of living. Out of that 50 cents, agriculture received 62 percent; 

• public health, and labor bureaus received 25.6 percent; the Bureau 

qf Mines .and Geological Survey 5 percent; and the Bureau of Foreign and 

Commerce, Bureau of Standards, Bureau of Fisheries, and Coast 

• and Survey together 10.5° percent or little more than S cents per 

capita. Considering these facts, said Rosa, the distribution of Government 

income left little room for extravagance. 

The charge of inefficiency in Government, on the other hand, was 

more valid, 1a4-gely because Government pay, based as it was on a statutory 

salary scale established prior to 1914, failed to attract and hold experienced 

and competent people., Federal employees from scientists and administrators to clerks and laborers shared the same scale proportionately. As the 

Secretary of Commeróe was to point out to Congress, leading physicists 

in universities and industrial laboratories were getting between $8,000 and 

$25,000 a year, while tOp physicists at the Bureau of Standards could make no more than $4,800.19. The ° consequence was an inordinate turnover of 

personnel at every level.2° The remedy was revision of the civil service 

system and its wage scale, to make Government employment more attractive; and establishment of a budget bureau that would plan and coordinate 

the work of the Government and its agencies, to assure the best use of its 

employees.2' 

Returning to the subject of Federal research, Rosa pointed out that 

where the expenses of the Department of Agriculture amounted to about 

$1.50 for every $1,000 of the national value of agricultural and animal 

products, those of the Bureau of Standards came to $0.15 for every $1,000 

of manufactured products, and less than half that amount was spent 

by the Bureau for the development of manufactures. Agriculture might 

still be "the most important industry in the Nation," but revival of the 

economy depended on the recovery of manufactures, by more efficient 

utilization of raw materials and labor and expansion of production.22 

the years 1910-19. His adjusted figures for 1920 did not materially change the validity 

of his conclusions and the earlier figures are therefore used here. 18 Based on a '1920 population of approximately 110 million. 19 Hearings * * * 1923 (Feb. 1, 1922), p. 14. 

'° Address By Rosa before ASME, "The scientific and engineering work of the Government," Dec. 2, 1920, P. 20 (NBS Historical File). It required at least a year 

to train a laboratory assistant at the Bureau, yet almost everyone hired in the postwar 

period left positions after 1 to 3 months. NBS Annual Report 1920, p. 30. 21 Ann. Am Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci., pp. 73, 88, 90, 94. 

22J Wash. Acad. Sci., pp. 342, 350—352. 
228 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

Unlike agriculture, industry spent generous sums of money on research, 

but only for its own commercial advantage. Bureau research, on the other 

hand, reverted to the advantage of the public, for it led directly to decreased 

costs of commodities, improved service, better quality and performance, and 

reduced misrepresentation and exaggeration, all "constructive and wealth. 

producing contributions to the economy." Rosa declared that raising the 

per capita share of the Bureau appropriation by a single cent would yield 

returns a hundredfold, and raising it fivefold "would accomplish wonders." 23 Among the many studies at the time in the causes and cures for the 

depression, Rosa's analysis was one of the most thorough and was widely 

studied.24 The Bureau of the Budget which he urged and which had been 

under discussion for almost a decade was formally established in June 1921. 

Much-needed civil service reform, including a slight upward adjustment of 

salaries, came in July 1924. And Rosa's "wonders" in the national economy 

were to be accomplished, but in ways and to a degree he could not have 

foreseen. 

A new and fabulous era in the Nation's history was about to begin. 

The early years of President Wilson's administration had seen a continuation 

of Federal efforts, begun under Roosevelt and Taft, to curb corporate mo- nopolies and give a measure of Government back to the people. That reform 

impulse had ended with the war, and the disillusionment of the postwar 

period, climaxed by the severe depression, led to a massive rejection of the 

age of idealism, of political experimentation, that swept the President and all 

his policies off the scene. The period of Republican ascendancy that followed, it has been said, 

represented not the high tide of laissez faire but of the 

deliberate pursuit by Government of policies favorable to large business 

interests.'5 The trusts of the early century were to rise again in the mergers 

of the twenties, and the soaring wealth of the Nation reflected kiting of values as often as it did new capital investment. The consolidation of industries 

and utilities, moreover, exercised measurable control over prices and production, so that the cost of living, after a slight decline from its awful peak in 

1920, was to hold steady to the end of the decade.26 Salaries in the middle- 

"J. Wash. Acad. Sci., pp. 373—374; Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci., p. 107. 24 See "New York Times," May 30, 1920, sec. VII, p. 4. John F. Sinclair, in the 

"Washington Evening Star," Mar. 19, 1924, p. 6, called Rosa's reports "the most 

comprehensive and most intelligent survey from the plain citizen's viewpoint of Government finances which was ever undertaken." 25 Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914—1932, p. 103. 

'° The cost of living index, based on 1913= 100, had by 1920 reached 286. By 1926 it 

had subsided to 241 and remained at that approximate level to the end of the decade. 

Historical Statistics, p. 127. 
HERBERT HOOVER AND THE BUREAU OF STANDARDS 229 

income bracket went up, and installment buying and liberal credit terms 

became new measures of personal wealth. But the farmer, the professional 

man, and the laboring man, unless he was in the automobile or radio industry, 

had small share in the new wealth. 

If the aura of prosperity of the golden twenties resulted principally, as management was to claim, from increased mechanization of industry, 

greater efficiency through scientific management, industrial research, and the 

rising output of workers, no Federal Government ever before provided more 

assistance to industry or a happier climate for free enterprise. Economies in 

Government spending, a balanced budget, lower taxes, a high protective 

tariff, and a supremely able and energetic Department of Commerce all acted 

to accelerate the tide of commerce and industry. 

HERBERT HOOVER AND THE BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

The most capable man that came in with the Harding administration was the new Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Clark Hoover. Considered 

by many for a time the best man for the Presidency itself and tentatively 

claimed by both parties, Hoover, by his efficient handling of the wartime 

Food Administration and of Belgian relief had made his name a household 

word. His enginering background and knowledge of industry were needed as the Nation slid into depression. But by nature autocratic, often dogmatic, 

and almost wholly apolitical, he was not the man party leaders sought. 

When he subsequently accepted the Cabinet post it was with reluctance 

and only on his own terms. His friend Oscar Straus, Commerce and Labor 

Secretary from 1907 to 1909 under Theodore Roosevelt, once told him that 

the office required only a couple of hours of work a day and "no other qualification than to be able to put the fish to bed at night and turn on the lights 

around the coast." 27 Hoover thought otherwise. He was quoted in the 

press as saying that the department, composed of uncorrelated scientific and 

semiscientific bureaus, had too long "been a Department of Commerce in 

name only." 28 With Harding's promise to stand behind him, he intended to 

expand foreign commerce through organized cooperation with industry, 

aiming at lower production costs; and to assist domestic commerce in imEugene Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President (New York: Doubleday, 1948), p. 219. 

Cf. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: the Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920—1933 (New 

York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 42. (Hereafter designated as vol. II of the Memoirs.) 

"New York Times," Feb. 25, 1921, p. 1. 
230 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

proving its industrial processes, abolishing waste, establishing better labor 

relations, and better business methods. With his knowledge, experience, 

-and driving power, the "New York Times" editorialized, Hoover seemed 

destined to make his office in the Cabinet "second oniy to that of the Secretary of State." 29 The "Times" may have overestimated the position but it 

underestimated the man. 

The Department of Commerce in 1921 comprised the Bureaus of 

Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Lighthouses, Navigation, the Coast and 

Geodetic Survey, the Bureaus of the Census, Standards, and Fisheries, and 

the Steamboat Inspection Service. In 1922 Congress was to add a Building 

and Housing Division to Commerce, and in 1925 Hoover secured by Executive order the transfer from Interior of the Bureau of Mines and the Patent 

"New York Times," Feb. 25, 1921, PP. 2, 10. The editorial spoke of Hoover's "dictatorial temper." 

Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce, it was predicted, would make his department 

"second only to that of the Secretary of State." He did just that, and by making all 

interests of commerce and industry the provitice of the Bureau, further expanded its 

scope of activities and range of research. 
HERBERT HOOVER AND THE BUREAU OF STANDARDS 231 

Office3° In 1926 a congressional act added an Aeronautics Division and 

in 1927 a Radio Division to Commerce. 

On taking over the Department, Hoover seems to have been under 

the impression that "the Bureau of Standards had hitherto been devoted 

mostly to formal administration of weights and measures," and that, as he later said in his Memoirs, by greatly enlarging its research not only 

in "abstract knowledge but * * * [in] its application in industry," the 

Bureau under his direction became "one of the largest physics laboratories 

in the world." In all fairness, the Bureau under Stratton had already 

achieved that eminence. It is true that in the period 1921-28 it expanded from 

9 divisions with a total of 68 sections to 13 divisions with 85 sections, but 

staff and appropriations actually increased very little in those 7 years, from 

850 to 889 members and from $2,209,000 in operating funds to $2,540,000.32 

As for any limitation on Bureau research interests, it was quite otherwise. 

Under Stratton and Rosa, little that was measurable in the home, in the 

market, in commerce, industry, science, or Government but had at one time 

or another become a subject of investigation at the Bureau, and as often as not a sustained investigation.33 

By 1920, in addition to several score investigations and test programs 

conducted under statutory funds, the Bureau had some 16 other investigations going with special congressional appropriations. That year Stratton 

secured more special funds to begin another nine studies. Three were 

short.term investigations, in industrial safety standards, Government ma- terials testing, and platinum and rare metals research. The other six, 

metallurgical research, high temperature studies, railroad scale testing, sound 

research, standardization of equipment, and a new huge industrial research 

The transfer of the Bureau of Mines to the Commerce Department concentrated the 

oil testing and ceramics work of Mines and Standards in the latter bureau, with a heavy 

clay products section located in Columbus, Ohio. The transfer added 52 employes to 

the Bureau staff. NBS Annual Report 1926, P. 44; Annual Report 1927, p. 2; NBS Blue 

Folder Box 3, file AG—138c. 

"Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, II, 73. 

See apps. F and H. "In retrospect Hoover was proud of the fact that despite its 

increased activity the department grew little in size or cost under his charge." Dupree, 

Science in the Federal Government, p. 340. 

"So reported a committee of electrical manufacturers appointed by Hoover in 1922 to 

advise the Bureau on electrical research. The committee, apparently piqued by some of the current public utility recommendations of the Bureau, called "attention to the fact 

that the Bureau's activities have been very widely extended into various fields not con- templated by the act creating the Bureau, through the medium of * * * special Congressional appropriations, and * * * we [are] not ready to accept this means of enlarging 

the Bureau's sphere of activities as a safe procedure, and especially since it is apparent 

that when an activity of this kind is initiated by such appropriation it is apparently con- sidered a function of the Bureau from that time forward." Letter, Chairman, Electrical 

Manufacturers Council, Committee on the Bureau of Standards, to Secretary HooverOct. 2, 1922 (NBS Box 2, AG). 

L_ 

 
232 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND iNDUSTRY (1920-30) 

program, were to continue for more than a decade before being merged 

in the regular work of the Bureau.34 

The nine were among the last of the special appropriations made to the 

Bureau. Coming into office on an economy wave, Hoover in a public an- nouncement declared: "This is no time to ask for appropriations to undertake new work. It is the time to search for economy and reorganization, for 

effective expenditure on essentials, the reduction of less essentials, and the 

elimination of duplication." u The same regimen held true for the general 

economy. Recalling the scene of widespread unrest and unemployment as he took office, Hoover was later to say: "There was no special outstanding 

industrial revolution in sight. We had to make one." His prescription for 

the recovery of industry "from [its] war deterioration" was through "elimination of waste and increasing the efficiency of our commercial and industrial system all along the line." 

To do this, Hoover divided the direction of his bureaus between two 

special assistants, "except Foreign and Domestic Commerce and Standards, 

which I took under my own wing." These two bureaus represented ideal 

instruments for jogging a lagging economy and putting industry back on its feet. The "wing" actually proved to be Assistant Secretary J. Walter 

Drake, brought to Washington from the Detroit automobile industry. But 

Hoover himself was to give Bureau interests his wholehearted support, and 

in his annual encounters with Congress at the side of Dr. Stratton pled the 

Bureau's need for better salaries and for its research funds. 

Where to commence jogging the economy was not difficult to see. Wholly inadequate as a result of the war and beset by excessive costs, home 

construction offered the most immediate means of reviving the greatest num- ber of industries and providing work for the largest numbers of unemployed. 

Because its stimulation would depend upon personal organization and mas- sive publicity, Hoover organized the division of building and housing in 

"See app. G. 

A member of. Great Britain's National Physical Laboratory, visiting the Bureau in 1921, 

found it "very considerably larger" in every sense than the Teddington plant, its chemical, 

spectroscopic, and metallurgical work particularly on "a totally different scale than anything at NPL." Impressed by the ceramics, refractories, and optical glass work at the 

Bureau, the visitor reported that the effort at NPL in these fields, by comparison, "becomes 

almost insignificant." NPL Annual Report 1922, pp. 197—199. For a comparison of the 

Bureau with the German PTR in the 1930's, see ch. VI, p. 310. 

Another comparison with NBS research, made by a member of the Bureau's National 

Hydraulic Laboratory after a year's study of hydraulic programs in the laboratories in 

Europe, appears in a report attached to letter, LJB to Martin A. Mason, June 28, 1939 

(NBS Box 430, ID—Misc.) 

""New York Times," Mar. 11, l92l,.p. 3. 

"The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, II, 61. 

Ibid., II, 42. 
HERBERT HOOVER AND THE BUREAU OF STANDARDS 233 

his own office. The necessary scientific, technical, and economical research, 

simplification and standardization of building materials, and revision of 

municipal and State building codes required by the program he made the 

responsibility of the Bureau of Standards, where a division similarly named was activated. 

At the end of 1921, with the housing program well launched, Hoover 

established a division of simplified practice at the Bureau, on the model of 

Baruch's wartime Conservation Division, to work with and encourage the 

technical committees then operating in most trade and industrial associations 

to eliminate waste in industry. Like the former Conservation Division, 

simplified practice aimed at reduction of varieties and sizes in commodities 

and greater standardization of materials and products. Further extending 

these aims, two more units, a specifications division and a trade standards 

division, were set up at the Bureau to reinforce and promote the demand 

anticipated for standardized and simplified products. 

The new divisions insured the fullest exploitation of Bureau plans for 

industrial research, but to Dr. Stratton's dismay, their direction was centered 

in the Commerce building downtown. Although the whole of the scientific 

and technical research required by the housing and standardization programs was to be financed out of Bureau appropriations, the administrative 

staffs of the four divisions were under Secretary Hoover's personal direction.38 It may be guessed that the divided control and responsibility rankled. 

Outwardly, relations between Dr. Stratton and Secretary Hoover were cordial and even close, as correspondence between them and Stratton's letters 

to members of Hoover's family make abundantly clear.39 Although Hoover 

is said to have visited the Bureau rarely, he kept in close touch and consulted 

Stratton frequently on Department matters; and as the senior administrator 

in the Commerce Department, Stratton often spent afternoons downtown 

when the Secretary was out of the city, signing Department correspondence as Acting Secretary of Commerce.4° 

Just when Dr. Stratton first thought of leaving the Bureau is uncertain. 

It was doubtless an accumulation of events that occurred in that 20th year of 

the Bureau's founding. On the afternoon of May 17, 1921, Dr. Rosa, not 

quite 60, died suddenly at his desk in East building. Two months later 

Stratton's long.time chief of weights and measures, Mr. Fischer, died at his 

38 The roles of the divisions at Commerce and their counterparts at the Bureau are 

distinguished in memo, Secretary of Commerce Hoover for GKB, May 23, 1923 (NBS 

Box 40. AG) 

See correspondence in NBS Box 10, IEW—1922; letter, Mrs. Hoover to SWS, Sept. 1, 

1922, and other correspondence in Stratton Papers at MIT. See also Dr. Stratton's 

speech at 25th Anniversary of the NBS, Dec. 4, 1926 (NBS Blue Box 3, APN—301c). 

'° Interview with Dr. Lyman J. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1961; communication to the author from 

the Hon. Herbert C. Hoover, Dec. 14, 1962 (NBS Historical File). 
234 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

home, and 8 months after, Dr. Waidner, chief of the heat and thermometry 

division, was gone. The deaths of three of his division chiefs within less 

than a year affected him profoundly. They had been with the Bureau since 

its establishment, had been his most intimate associates, and understood 

his ways. Other division chiefs, coming later and without the bond of the 

early years, sometimes found Stratton's autocratic ways difficult and his 

concern with the minutiae of every laboratory and Bureau operation 

With the loss of his closest associates and amid a faint undercurrent of unrest, 

of which he could not be unaware, Dr. Stratton may have felt that the Bureau 

might never again be the same.41 

There were considerations, too. In the 20 years that he had 

been Director, Dr. Stratton's salary had risen from $4,000 to $6,000, the 

maximum permitted for the position under civil service rules, even though 

the staff he directed had increased more than sixtyfold. As Secretary Hoover 

told an appropriations committee, it was a ridiculous sum by comparison with 

salaries paid outside the Government. The work and responsibilities of the 

position, said Hoover, were fully equivalent to those of a university president 

receiving $25,000.42 

Although a bachelor, Dr. Stratton had heavy expenses. In an age 

more sedulously social than our own, he delighted in entertaining members 

of the staff and his circle of friends in Washington. His elaborate Christmas 

and summer parties for the children of the staff became festive traditions.43 

Entertainment of visiting scientists and businessmen and his colleagues from 

the national laboratories abroad he had long met out of his own pocket, as he 

had the expenses of membership in the social and scientific clubs required 

by his position. 

Besides his lifelong interest in his private workshop at the Bureau, 

which entailed some personal expense, Stratton as a result of his frequent 

official trips to Europe developed a collector's interest in tapestries, fine 

crystal, polished glassware, instruments, and ingenious mechanical devices 

which he found in the shops abroad. The interest was constrained, for 

many of these things were far beyond his means and likely to continue so. He was in his 60th year, had no private income or other prospect but his 

41A brief rebellion of some of the staff several years earlier against certain Bureau 

administrative policies is recorded in letters from six Bureau members to Stratton, 

Mar. 29, 1917, and letters from 19 members to Secretary Redfield, Jan. 25 and Feb. 7, 

1918, with attached correspondence (NARG 40, Secretary of Commerce file 76694). 

The Secretary recommended appointment of an assistant director at the Bureau to lighten 

the Director's administrative burden, and this was done (letter, Redfield to SWS, Mar. 19, 

1918, and attached correspondence, NARG 40, file 67009/66). 

42 Hearings * * * 1923 (Feb. 1, 1922), p. 14. 

A good characterization of Stratton and of life at the Bureau at that time appears in 

G. K. Burgess, "Dr. Samuel Wesley Stratton," Tech. Eng. News (MIT) 3, 146 (1922). 
HERBERT HOOVER AND THE BUREAU OF STANDARDS 235 

meager retirement pay. Nor, in 1922, did it seem likely that Congress would 

remedy the salary scale anytime in the foreseeable future. 

Dr. Stratton may well have voiced these feelings to his friends at the 

Department of Commerce, and when Secretary Hoover told him that the 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology at Cambridge, which had been without a President for more than 2 years, had approached him to recommend a candidate, Dr. Stratton consented to the recommendation.44 

Stratton had had similar offers before, but he had been building the 

Bureau then and could not be tempted. In 1913 the Russian Imperial College 

at St. Petersburg had sought him for an executive post at a large salary and 

under his own conditions. And in 1916 he was offered an administrative 

position at Columbia University at $10,000 a year. He had turned both 

down.45 This time he accepted the invitation, and on September 19, 1922, 

the Executive Committee of MIT appointed Dr. Stratton as its ninth president. 

He took office on January 1, 1923. 

in his notice to the press of Dr. Stratton's departure, Secretary 

Hoover sounded a recurring complaint of Government department heads: 

While the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to be con- gratulated on securing Dr. Stratton, one cannot overlook the fact 

that the desperately poor pay which our Government gives to great 

experts makes it impossible for us to retain men capable of performing the great responsibilities which are placed upon them. 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an educational institution, finds no difficulty in paying a man of Dr. Stratton's calibre 

three times the salary the Government is able to pay him. 

Dr. Stratton has repeatedly refused large offers before, but the 

inability of the scientific men in the Government to properly support themselves and their families under the living conditions in 

Washington, and to make any provision for old age makes it 

impossible for any responsible department •head to secure such 

men for public service at Government salaries.46 

The severance was softened by Secretary Hoover's appointment of Dr. 

Stratton to the Visiting Committee to the Bureau, succeeding Dr. Joseph S. 

"Communication from the Hon. Herbert C. Hoover, Dec. 14, 1962. 

On the death of President McLaurin of MIT in 1920, Hoover himself was sought for 

the position. See "New York Times," Feb. 1, 1920 (letter to editor), sec. III, p. 1, and 

May 27, 1920, p. 2. 

The Imperial College offer is referred to in a pencil notation on letter, Frederic A. 

Delano, Smithsonian Institution, to SWS, Jan. 10, 1928 (offering Stratton the secretaryship of the Smithsonian) ; and the Columbia offer is in letter, Treasurer, Columbia University, to SWS, May 5, 1916, both letters in Stratton Papers at MIT. 

'° "Boston Herald," Oct. 12, 1922, p. 1; "New York Times," Oct. 12, 1922, p. 14. 
236 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

Ames of the Johns Hopkins University. The appointment was to become 

effective on the date of his termination of service as director.47 

In a very real sense, Dr. Stratton never left the Bureau. As he told a Bureau member who wrote to him soon after his arrival in Cambridge, * * I can never cease to be a member of the Bureau which has been 

practically my life work, and I shall never hesitate to give counsel and suppOIt whenever the opportunity may afford itself." 48 Both as member of the 

Visiting Committee and as creator of the Bureau, Stratton's counsel and 

concern were to be frequent and voluminous and continued so throughout 

his tenure at MIT. Most of his correspondence was with Dr. Burgess, apprising him of details of Bureau operations, advising on Bureau procedures 

in cooperating with industry and Government agencies, and forwarding 

inquiries sent to him at MIT. Planning to buy a radio set in the fall of 

1923, Stratton wrote asking about the latest radio developments at the 

Bureau. He recommended new members for the Visiting Committee, and 

was active in securing lecturers for the Bureau, writing Burgess on one occasion that he had invited the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, to come to 

the Bureau. In turn, Dr. Burgess discussed problems of Bureau appropriations with Stratton, sent him new publications for comment, and frequently 

mailed slides and other material for lectures and addresses Stratton 

planned.49 

An able administrator at MIT, Stratton nevertheless seems to have 

regarded the Institute as another Bureau of Standards, or as an extension of 

the Bureau. In training scientists and technologists for industry, the Insti. 

tute offered complementary services to those of the Bureau. Stratton had 

exchanged one campus for another. Within a year after assuming the presidency, he began work on a reorganization and expansion program at Cambridge, much of it closely modeled on the Bureau, which undertook to 

establish at the Institute new departments of aeronautical engineering, automotive engineering, building construction, fuel and gas engineering, hydraulics, physical metallurgy, municipal and industrial research, public health 

engineering, and ship operation. 

Throughout his tenure at Cambridge, Stratton's addresses and talks 

were filled with his memories of the Bureau. In the several score manuscripts and reading copies that survive, mention of the Bureau by name seldom occurs, but striking to anyone acquainted with its activities is the 

Letter, Hoover to SWS, Nov. 1, 1922 (NARG 4.0, Secretary of Commerce, file 67009/5). 

Letter, SWS to Walter A. Hull, Jan. 5, 1923 (Stratton Papers at MIT). 

Correspondence from 1923 on between Stratton, Burgess, and the assistant director, 

Fay C. Brown, will be found in NBS Boxes 42, 43, 46, 48, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 

70, 75, 81, 82, 174, 184, 185, and 214, and in NBS Blue Folder Boxes 4 and 8. 
GEORGE KIMBALL BURGESS 237 

frequency with which Bureau investigations and undisguised Bureau ences were drawn on for illustrative material. At the banquet he attended 

in Washington in 1926 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of 

the Bureau, he said, "I think of you still as members of my staff." 50 GEORGE KIMBALL BURGESS 

In his letter in November 1922 appointing Dr. Stratton to the Visiting 

Committee, Hoover asked that Stratton at once take up with the Committee 

the question of his successor, "as I'd like to have their advice on the subject." 

Stratton offered two names to his future colleagues on the Committee, that 

of Dr. Lyman J. Briggs, recently promoted from the aviation physics section 

to chief of the engineering physics division, succeeding Stratton himself who 

had held that position; and of Dr. George K. Burgess, chief of the metallurgy 

division.5' 

Although as chief physicist and senior in point of service and experi- ence Dr. Burgess seemed the logical choice, both the Visiting Committee and 

the Secretary of Commerce, in deliberations that seem less than flattering, 

delayed decision.52 For almost 4 months, until April 21, 1923, Dr. Fay C. 

Brown, technical assistant to Dr. Stratton, served as acting director of the 

Bureau, On that date President Harding's appointment of the new Director, 

Dr. Burgess, became effective.53 

Dr. Burgess (1874—1932), who on the death of Dr. Rosa became the 

chief physicist at the Bureau, was born in Newton, Mass., and graduated 

from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He went abroad for gradu. 

ate training, receiving his D. Sc. in physics with highest honors from the 

Sorbonne in 1901. Histhesis was on a redetermination of the constant of 

gravitation, but courses he took under Le Chatelier in high-temperature 

measurements aroused a greater interest and led him to translate his teacher's 

classic work On the subject. A decade later, as a result of his own investigaSpeech, Dec. 4, 1926 (NBS Blue Folder Box 3, APW 301c). A brief biographical 

sketch of Dr. Stratton appears as app. M. 61 Letter, Hoover to SWS, Nov. 1, 1922, and interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1961. 

Announcement of Dr. Burgess' appointment in Am. Machinist, 58, 680 (1923), said 

it "followed several months of futile search on the part of Secretary Hoover for an outstanding physicist who had not been connected with the Government service, with sufficient means to allow him to make the sacrifice of income * * * [in accepting] a Bureau 

directorship." 

"In his letter of congratulation to Dr. Burgess, Prof. Joseph S. Ames, director of the 

Physical Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, wrote: "I heard with interest of your silent and 

theatrical way of announcing your appointment, by quietly sitting down in the Director's 

chair" (letter, Apr. 25, 1923, NBS Box 43, IDP). 
238 

Unlike Stratton, Dr. George K. Burgess, second Director of NBS, is said to have administered the Bureau from his desk and seldom toured the laboratories. The Bureau, "a 

vertiable city of science," had grown, he felt, too large for intimate supervision and 

he liberally delegated his authority over its detailed administration. 
GEORGE KIMBALL BURGESS 239 

tions in the field of high temperatures, he rewrote the book completely, making 

extensive revisions and additions.54 

In 1903, following a year as instructor at the University of California, 

Dr. Burgess came to the Bureau as an assistant physicist ip. the heat and thermometry division. His first assignment was an investigation of the use of 

optical pyrometers in industry. Not long after, he began the work with 

Dr. Waidner, chief of the division, that was to lead to the present internationally adopted Waidner-Burgess standard of light. in 1913, soon after the 

Bureau undertook its investigation of railroad track and wheel failures— 

largely a problem in the physics of metallurgy, concerning the thermal behavior of metals in the manufacturing process—Dr. Burgess organized the 

Bureau's division of metallurgy. It pleased him later to say that he had 

never had a course in metallurgy in his life, which was quite possible, since 

it was so new a field that there may not have been half a dozen metallurgists 

in the United States at that time.55 

Ten years after the establishment of the division, Dr. Burgess, as a result of more than a hundred technical papers on heat measurement and 

metallurgy, had won international recognition. His staff comprised some 50 experts, largely trained by him, inquiring into almost every aspect of 

modern metallurgical technology, from the melting and casting of metals and 

alloys to their physical and chemical testing. 

Few men ever came to know Burgess intimately, either as division 

chief or Director of the Bureau. A sociable man in working hours, he was nevertheless reserved, and as impeccable in manner as he was in dress. He 

has been described by those who worked under him as "quiet," "warmhearted," "very pleasant," "a nice person," yet a man "you couldn't get to 

know." 56 Recreation is said to have meant to him a good book—preferably a good detective or mystery story—and a plentiful supply of tobacco, or a long drive in an open car.57 Of his private life little more was known. In 

1901 he had married, in Paris, the daughter of a French Protestant family, 

but neither he nor his wife was gregarious and seldom entertained. They 

had no children. 

Lyman J. Briggs and Wallace R. Brode, "George Kimball Burgess, 1874—1932," Nat!. 

Acad. Sci., Biographical Memoirs, 30, 57 (1957). See Henri L. Le Chatelier, High 

Temperature Measurements, tr. G. K. Burgess (New York: J. Wiley, 1901); rev, and 

enl. 2d ed., 1904; rewritten as G. K. Burgess and H. Le Chatelier, The Measurement of 

High Temperatures (Wiley, 1912). 

Letter, Burgess to president, Carnegie Institute of Technology, Mar. 21, 1924 (NBS 

Box 77, IDP). 

Nail. Acad. Sci., Biographical Memoirs, above; interviews with Dr. Briggs (Nov. 

1, 1961), Mrs. William Meggers (May 8, 1962), and Dr. Kasson S. Gibson (June 1, 

1962). 

L. J. Briggs, "George Kimball Burgess," Science, 76, 46 (1932). 
240 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

If Dr. Burgess was perhaps less impressive in figure or manner than 

Stratton, he was considered a better scientist. Yet as he saw the need for 

better technology in the field of metallurgy, he turned increasingly to the 

practical application of his earlier research.58 As Director he was to be as 

concerned as Stratton in promoting Bureau cooperation with industry in 

solving its scientific and technical difficulties. 

To the surprise of many, Dr. Burgess in the Director's chair displayed a marked talent for enlightened management. Unlike Stratton, who found 

it difficult to believe that the growth of the Bureau had put it beyond a personally directed operation, Dr. Burgess delegated authority widely. He 

worked from his office and his desk, but his door was always open. Dr. 

Hobart C. Dickinson, who succeeded Dr. Waidner as chief of the heat division, was to say that the Bureau under Dr. Burgess "became a democracy 

* * Meetings of the Division Chiefs for the free exchange of ideas under 

[his] skillful chairmanship * * * became the order of the day. Appointments, promotions, and salaries became matters of common knowledge. The 

needs and welfare the individual employees became more and more 

important as compared with those of the institution as a whole." 

At the same time, the Bureau seems to have become a somewhat more 

rigid institution under Burgess. Stratton's encouragement of individual 

initiative and of new projects had permitted the wide latitude of research 

that characterized the work of Rosa's division. Similarly, when Dr. Paul 

Foote and Dr. Fred Mohier, members of the heat division, became interested 

in spectral phenomena in atomic physics, Stratton let them forget about 

pyrometry and pursue their research in a section set up in his own optics 

division. And Raymond Davis, who came to the Bureau in 1911 to establish a photographic service, after devising on his own time a number of 

ingenious photographic instruments, was rewarded with a new section, photographic technology. It was generally understood that if you had a good idea 

you could go ahead with it, even if it wasn't your particular job.6° 

Burgess on the other hanil was inclined to be a stickler for academic 

orthodoxy, venerated the graduate degree and its symbol of competence, 

and had a strong sense of propriety. Despite the success of his own enterprise that had led to the metallurgy division, as Director he tended to disReferences to important research results of Burgess and his group appear in H. M. Boy!- 

ston, An Introduction to the Metallurgy of Iron and Steel (New York: John Wiley, 

2d ed., 1936), pp. 416, 492n, 517, 543n, 544. 

Nat!. Acad. Sci., Biographical Memoirs, above; MS, memorial address, H. C. Dickinson, "Dr. George Kimball Burgess" (Feb. 8, 1936), p. 18 (NBS Historical File). 

'° Interview with Dr. Mohier, Oct. 9, 1962; interview with Raymond Davis, Dec. 1, 1961. 

As Dr. Coblentz (From the Life of a Researcher, p. 132) said, Dr. Stratton gave 

promising men of his staff "an opportunity to pursue research unhampered, and with a freedom beyond all expectations." 

242 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND iNDUSTRY (1920-30) was to result in small but steady increases in Bureau appropriations throughout his tenancy. Apparently acting on a hint provided by a member of the 

House Subcommittee, who had requested that the Director include in his 

presentation a list of Bureau publications of the previous year, Burgess at his 

first confrontation with Congress early in 1924 deluged it with statistics. 

Annually thereafter he compiled imposing catalogs of Bureau operations, 

Bureau economies effected on behalf of other Government agencies and of 

industry, and current scientific and technological accomplishments of the 

Bureau, some of his presentations running to a hundred pages or more and 

much of it in fine print.64 

One other influence on Bureau operations may be noted, that of the 

Visiting Committee, invigorated by the presence of Dr. Stratton.65 The 

Committee had originally been set up to keep the Secretary of Commerce 

informed of "the efficiency of * * * [the] scientific work [of the Bureau] 

and the condition of its equipment." Perhaps to reassure Congress, or even with the thought of extending the influence of the Committee, Stratton 

had said soon after the first visitors were appointed: "The visiting committee we shall make an advisory board." 66 In the 1920's, more than ever 

before, the Committee became that board. 

By 1923 the staff and plant of the Bureau of Standards made it the 

largest physical laboratory of its kind in the world. Dr. Burgess was fully 

conscious of the enormous responsibility over which he presided. He 

intended no further expansion of functions or of avenues of research. He 

was content to carry on the work and Stratton. A cautious man, 

isis was to be, as Dr. Briggs said, "a wisp administration." 67 

04 Still other tabulations included the 82 advisory committees on Bureau research, the 

56 conferences held at the Bureau in the past year, and a selection from a single random 

day's mail that comprised almost a hundred specific requests for services of .one kind or another. Altogether, the tabulations spanned pp. 209—319 of Hearings * * * 1925 

(Feb. 12, 1924). A year later Burgess included work-in-progress as well as accomplishments of the divisions, section by section, and added an impressive chart of the total 

value of products produced by each industry served by the Bureau, arranged according to Bureau appropriations for its work in those industries. Hearings * 1926 (Jan. 5, 

1925), pp. 157—159. 

° Few references to the Visiting Committee appear in the annual reports prior to 1924. 

With NBS Annual Report 1925 (p. 38) and its announcement of the forthcoming NBS 

M63, "Report of the Board of Visitors * * * Nov. 1924," the recommendations of the 

Committee became a matter of public record. But the same economy that reduced 

the Bureau's annual report from 330 pages in 1923 to 38 pages in 1924 also ended the 

separate Visiting Committee report, and summaries of its recommendations thereafter 

appeared only in the Bureau's annual report. 

Hearings * * * 1903 (Jan. 28, 1902), p. 146. 

Interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1961; Briggs, "George Kimball Burgess," Science. 

76,46 (1932). 
The Visiting Committee of the Secretary of Commerce to the Bureau in the mid-1920's. 

Left to right: Dr. Stratton, president of MIT; Ambrose Swasey, founder of Warner & Swasey; Dr. Burgess, Director of NBS; W. R. Whitney, director 

of research, General Electric Corp.; W. F. Durand, professor of mechanical engineering at Leland Stanford University and president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering; and Gano Dunn, president of I. G. White & Co. 
244 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

Within a year after the war most of the research projects diverted or 

laid aside in 1917 had been resumed. They were increased now by con- tinuing weapons research for the military, by the optical glass and gage 

work, investigations on behalf of industry and the public utilities, and the 

programs in housing technology, specifications, and simplified practice re- cently established by the Secretary of Commerce. 

in certain areas, as in textiles, automotive engineering, and utilities, 

Bureau plans for research were to be modified as the decade progressed, owing to the organization or expansion of industrial research laboratories as the trade association movement grew, to increased research by 

public utilities, and to the rise of private research organizations.68 Where this 

occurred, the Bureau entered into cooperative investigations with technical 

committees set up by the associations. Further assistance was rendered by 

accepting increasing numbers of research associates to work in the Bureau 

laboratories. 

Despite its steady expansion of interest in industrial research, the 

Bureau both before and after the war carried out considerable basic re- search, much of it in determination and refinement of physical constants, 

NBS Annual Report 1924, p. 22, was to say that the ceramic industry, for example, 

had begun doing much of its own plant development and practical research, permitting 

the Bureau to pay "more attention to the fundamentals required by the industry." 

Dr. Paul R. Heyl of the mechanics and sound division making observations for his 

redetermination of the constant of gravitation, probably in the block house constructed 

behind West building for the project. 
GEORGE KIMBALL BURGESS 245 

and often of more immediate interest to science than to industry. Such was 

the work of Vinal and his associates from 1912 to 1916 which resulted in 

more precise knowledge of the limitations in accuracy of the silver voltam-. 

eter (the reference standard for defining the International Ampere), requisite 

to the later absolute determination of the ampere.69 A fine achievement also was Heyl's redetermination of the Newtonian constant of gravitation (G) and 

later of the value at Washington of the local acceleration of gray. 

ity (g), completing as it did a "true weighing of the earth." 70 Significant too were Buckingham and Dellinger's work on a method of computing 

the constant of Planck's equation for the radiation of a black body,71 Gibson 

and Tyndall's determination of visibility factors of radiant energy,72 and 

Coblentz's new standards of thermal radiation, also involving Planck's equation, the latter published in a 75-page report on which Coblentz worked from 

1909 to 1912. The values of those standards remain unchallenged to the 

present day.73 

Although astronomers at the time, as Coblentz, said, would have 

seriously questioned the possibility of detecting "the heat of a candle 52 

miles away," the series of highly sensitive radiometers which he devised for 

his research made possible new measurements of the heat of stars and planets. 

His instruments were destined to extend the fields of spectroscopy and colorimetry and find application in the biological and agricultural sciences.74 

In one investigation Burgess joined Coblentz, when both became interested in the international research going on in the high-temperature opticalpyrometer scale and the laws of radiation upon which to base such a scale. 

68 S218 (Vinal and S. J. Bates, 1914); S285 (Vinal and Rosa, 1916). 

'° The work spanned almost 20 years. See letter, SWS to Superintendent, C. & G. S., 

Feb. 20, 1917 (NBS Box 2, AG); NBS Annual Report 1923, p. 200; Annual Report 

1927, p. 6; RP256 (Heyl, 1930); RP946, "The value of gravity at Washington" (Heyl 

and Cook, 1936). 

S162 (1911). Other work at the Bureau involving Planck's constant was reported 

in S259 (Foote, 1916), S287 (Dellinger, 1917), S304 (Roeser, 1918), and Foote and 

Mohler, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 2, 96 (1919). 

Planck had modified the earlier Wien equation for black-body radiation to better fit the 

experimental data of Rubens, Coblentz and others. It was his search for a theoretical 

explanation of this equation which led to his famous postulate of the energy quantum, 

hv, which laid the foundation for his quantum theory. His equation involving the con- stant c2 gives the spectral energy distribution of the heat radiation emitted from a so-called black body at any temperature. Among many applications, the constant can be used to predict the light output of incandescent lamps, cooling time of molten steel, 

heat dissipation of a nuclear reactor, the energy radiated from the sun, or the temperature 

of the stars. 

'2S475 (1923). 

S204 (1913) and S227 (1914); Coblentz and Stair, "The present status of the standards of thermal radiation maintained by the Bureau of Standards" (RP578, 1933). 

Coblentz, From the Life of a Researcher, pp. 14.8, 154, 168—173. 
246 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

"A certain amount of prestige and glamour surrounded the iwork] in this 

field," Coblentz wrote later, and there was a good deal of friendly competition with the investigations in progress in the national laboratories abroad.75 

Certain phases of this research were to lead to the establishment of the present-day International Practical Temperature Scale. 

The international scale had its inception in 1911 when the national 

laboratories of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States proposed that 

they adjust the minor differences in the temperature scales each was maintaining and that, in place of the practical values in use, they establish absolute values for their points. More than a decade passed. The absolute 

temperature scale they sought proved experimentally difficult to achieve. 

Finally, in 1927 the three laboratories proposed adoption of an "international temperature scale" that might be more readily realized than the absolute—a practical scale ranging from the temperature of liquid oxygen to that 

of luminous incandescent bodies—that would at least serve the immediate 

needs of industry. Agreement on the basic fixed points and the series of sec- ondary reference points on this scale was reached a year later. For the first 

time it became possible to certify temperature measurements for a wide variety 

of industrial purposes.76 

The early work on the temperature scale coincided with an investigation that began in 1913, to provide scientific data to the refrigeration 

industry in this country for the better construction of its cooling plants and 

machinery.77 The Bureau's success in determining the specific heat of ice, 

the properties of ammonia, and other physical constants required by the industry led Stratton to request a special appropriation from Congress to con- tinue Bureau research in physical constants. For a time Stratton dreamed 

of an American "Landolt," as a new and more practical engineering reference 

book of physical constants than was currently available in the German work 

by Landolt and Börnstein78 The appropriation was small and short-lived; 

the research was too fundamental for Congress. Using statutory funds the 

Ibid., pp. 134—135. 

Burgess, "The International Temperature Scale" (RP22, 1928); Science, 68, 370 

(1928). Cooperation and exchange of information with national standard laboratories 

abroad and with the International Bureau of Weights and Measures has been continu- ous throughout the existence of the Bureau. Except in particular instances, the history 

of that exchange is not elaborated in the present work. The scope of cooperation is to be found in the annual reports of the Bureau. That for 1930, for example (pp. 3, 7, 

9, 10), describes NBS exchanges of information and equipment relative to new intercomparisons of meter bars, the international temperature scale, standards of capacitance, 

resistance standards, and standards of candlepower during the previous year with the 

IBWM, NPL, PTR, and Japanese and Russian standards laboratories. 

See ch. III, p. 130. 

Letter, SWS to W. R. Whitney, General Electric, Jan. 6, 1920 (NBS Box 10, IG). For 

Stratton's first proposal, see Hearings * * * 1917 (Feb. 2, 1916), pp. 986—98L 
GEORGE KIMBALL BURGESS 247 

Bureau nevertheless continued limited research on physical constants all 

through the 1920's and into the thirties, improving its ammonia tables, publishing steam tables for turbine engineering, petroleum tables, a series of 

papers and a book on the properties and constants of water in all its phases, 

and establishing new points on the international temperature scale.79 

A note of considerable interest to physicists appeared just before 

the first of the airplane ignition troubles arrived in the electrical division 

in 1917 when Dr. Silsbee published a salient observation he had made on electrical conduction in metals at low temperature. It was well known that 

resistance to electrical current vanishes in certain metals at very low temperatures, resulting in electrical superconductivity. In 1911 the Dutch 

physicist, Kamerlingh Onnes, had found in separate experiments that this 

phenomenon of superconductivity was destroyed if the current exceeded a critical value, and was also destroyed if an external magnetic field of 

more than a critical value was applied. 

Dr. Silsbee saw that these two effects were not independent. The 

result was the Silsbee hypothesis, "that the effect of electrical current on the 

critical temperature of a superconductor is caused by the magnetic field 

produced by the current"—a valuable clue to a more satisfactory theory 

of the superconductive state and of metallic conduction in general.8° 

Two publications illustrated the progress of 8 years of Bureau research 

in polarimetry and saccharimetry under Frederick J. Bates. The seven.page 

circular of 1906 on the simple verification of polariscopic apparatus became a 140.page work by 1914, establishing the basic principles of modern 

polarimetry.81 In that period the sugar industry acquired through the 

Bureau a variety of improved instruments, better apparatus, and a wealth 

of fundamental data; and Bureau investigations of the rare sugars, in critical supply during the war, were to lead to a wholly new industry in this 

country—of which more later. 

For almost a century before the founding of the Bureau, analysis 

of chemical elements through their emission spectra had been the subject 

(1) C142, "Tables of thermodynamic properties of ammonia" (1923). (2) RP691, 

"Tables for the pressure of saturated water vapor in -the range 0° to (Osborn 

and Meyers, 1934); NBS Annual Report 1939, p. 53. (3) RP11O5 "Supercooling and 

freezing of water" (Dorsey, 1938) ; Dorsey, Properties of Ordinary Water-Substance 

(New York: Reinhold, 1940). (4) C57, "U.S. standard tables for petroleum oils" 

(1916); M97, "Thermal properties of petroleum products" (Cragoe, 1929). (5) RP1189, "International Temperature Scale and some related physical constants" 

(Wensel, 1939). 

'° S307 (1917); interview with Dr. Silsbee, May 21, 1963. For later studies in superconductivity, see NBS Annual Report 1948, p. 207, and ch. VIII, pp. 466-467. 

C12 (1906) and C44 (1914; 2d ed., 1918). By 1942 the latter circular had been 

superseded by C440, a tome of 810 pages. 
248 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

of studies in Europe. It was well known that each chemical element or com- bination of elements has distinctive spectra, either by emission or absorption, 

that are as characteristic of the element as the fingerprints of humans. Yet 

in that time practically none of the spectra of the elements had been comrn pletely described, although their importance, both theoretical and practical, was increasing more rapidly than the knowledge of them advanced. Except 

in astrophysics, there had been little application of spectroscopy, and in 

analysis the "wet" chemists continued to reign supreme. 

Upon his arrival at the Bureau as a young laboratory assistant in 1914, 

Dr. William F. Meggers began the measurement of wavelengths of light and 

their application to an understanding of the spectra of chemical elements. 

By the sheer weight of accumulated evidence he was to establish standards of 

spectrographic measurement that were to gain worldwide acceptance. Some 

of the masses of spectrographic data that he and his assistants compiled over 

the next three decades for the analysis of chemical elements and compounds, 

noble gases, common and rare metals and their alloys, had to await the 

development of electronic computers for their resolution and final form. 

Out of the routine analyses made in the Bureau's spectroscopic laboratory of 

the thousands of samples of materials submitted for testing came new methods 

of quantitative analysis, some of them sensitive to amounts of impurities so small that they completely escaped detection by chemical methods. 

The publication in 1922 of Dr. Meggers' paper with Kiess and Stimson on "Practical spectrographic analyses" drew attention to the simplicity and 

practicality of making chemical identifications and quantitative determinations by spectroscopic means. That paper, Dr. Meggers was to say, "finally 

put applied spectroscopy on its feet." 82 The tool of science became a tool 

of industry, owing much to Dr. Meggers' continuing research in improved 

methods of spectrochemical analysis. At the same time, he was to contribute 

materially to atomic physics studies going on at the Bureau through his 

search for better description of atomic and ionic spectra. 

A chance assignment first launched the Bureau into areas of atomic 

physics well beyond its early investigations of radium and radioactivity when 

Professor John Tate, physicist at the University of Minnesota, came as a guest worker in the heat division during the war. Professor Tate had recently 

returned from Europe where he learned about the exciting work being done 

at Göttingen in the spectral analysis of mercury and other metal vapor atoms. 

At the Bureau he aroused the interest of Dr. Paul D. Foote and Dr. Fred L. 

Mohier, two youngsters in the heat division, in this work that appeared to 

support Bohr's theory of atomic processes. 

82 S444 (1922) and interview with Dr. Meggers, Mar. 13, 1962. Today there are more than 3,000 spectrometrical laboratories in the United States alone. 
BUiLDING AND HOUSING 249 

Although it was entirely outside the scope of the division, Stratton 

allowed Foote and Mohier remarkable freedom (though no funds) to pursue 

this atomic research. Their studies—described in the annual report of 1918 as "investigations in electronics" 83—in experimental phenomena of the 

quantum theory of spectra, that is, the excitation and ionization potentials of 

simple molecules and photoio'nization of alkali vapors, culminated in their 

book published in 1922, The Origin o'f Spectra, a survey of recent experimentatiOn in atomic physics as related to atomic theory. 

The year the book came out, Stratton set up an atomic physics sec- tion, consisting of Foote and Mohier, in the optics division, where it remained 

until after World War 11.84 All through the 1920's, Dr. Mohier, with Dr. 

Foote and later with Dr. Carl Boeckner, continued their electrical and spectroscopic measurements of critical potentials of atoms, ions, and molecules. 

In the 1930's, as chief and sole member of 'the section, the smallest at the 

Bureau, Dr. Mohier began his pioneer investigations in the then sparse field 

of plasma physics, a field that was to have far more meanizig three decades 

later than at that time. 

The quiet islands of fundamental research at the Bureau in physical 

constants, in radiometry, spectroscopy, and atomic physics, particularly in 

the years immediately after the war, were in marked contrast to the din of 

industrial research going on almost everywhere else at the Bureau. 

BUILDING AND HOUSiNG 

Ready with a program more appropriate to the Chief Executive than 

to the Secretary of Commerce, Hoover entered office determined to recover 

the Nation, singlehandedly if necessary, from its wartime splurge, its conse- quent depletion of resources, and the general economic demoralization into 

which it had plunged. Recovery, by raising as rapidly as possible the level 

of productivity, was the first essential; reconstruction would follow. 

Hoover's plan for recovery, in order to open employment offices again 

and start up the wheels of industry, was to stimulate building and housing, 

lend direct assistance to both new and established industries, and minister 

'3NBS Annual Report 1918, p. 70. This appears to be one of the earliest uses of the 

word "electronics," although not in its present connotation. It did not come into' general use until just before World War II. 84 Apparently challenged to justify such research, Stratton in the annual report for 

1922, pp. 85—86, declared that a thorough understanding of the nature of collisions between atoms and electrons might well lead to the development of more efficient illumi. 

nants, better "radio-bulb" design, and extension of the range of X-ray spectroscopy. 

Foote and Mohier's first acquisition of equipment, including an ionization chamber, a beta-ray chamber, electroscopes, and a 1,500-pound electromagnet, waited until 1925 

(NBS Annual Report 1925, p. 36). 
250 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

to the new aviation and radio industries. Reconstruction, providing longrange benefits to the economy, aimed at a progressive elevation of the standard of living, principally by a campaign to eliminate economic wastes. 

Although the building trades themselves badly needed reconstruction, 

they offered the most likely means of achieving immediate and massive results 

in reviving depressed industry and providing maximum employment across 

the Nation. The housing shortage as a result of the war was estimated at 

more than a million units. Stimulate homebuilding, and the brick, lumber, 

glass, hardware, plumbing, appliance, textile, and furniture industries and 

all that served and supplied them would revive. 

Poor home designs, high labor and material costs, antiquated and 

obstructive building codes and zoning regulations, and tight mortgage money 

were among the targets of the division of building and housing set up by 

Hoover under Dr. John M. Gries in the Department of Commerce on July 1, 

1921. Dr. Gries also headed the administrative unit (subsequently raised to 

divisional status) at the Bureau, to take advantage of its experience with 

municipal and State codes and to coordinate its numerous investigations 

useful to the building industry in the electrical, heat, chemistry, structural 

engineering, metallurgical, and clay products divisions. 

A whirlwind campaign was planned, in which the Bureau's role was to publish material on the economics of home building and home ownership, 

and recommend revisions making for greater uniformity in local building 

and plumbing codes and city zoning regulations. The Bureau was also to 

urge adoption of standards of building practice looking to better construction 

and workmanship, and seek simplification and standardization of building 

materials and dimensional varieties in order to reduce costs.85 

The program was launched amid nationwide publicity. Chambers of 

commerce, women's clubs, and better homes and gardens organizations 

throughout the country participated, and Secretary Hoover himself headed 

the national advisory council of the Better Homes in America movement 

that was organized in Washington early in 1922. Volunteer committees 

crusaded for Better Homes in every State of the Union. At Commerce, the 

housing division consulted with building officials, architects, fire chiefs, engineers, building material experts, and the professional societies and asso- ciations connected with the building industry. It amassed information and 

statistics, and acted as liaison between Hoover's advisory committees on building, plumbing, and zoning codes, and the technical divisions at the 

Bureau.8° 

The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, II, 92—93; NBS Annual Report 1922, p. 260; 

Hoover remarks at Hearings * * * 1924 (Nov. 16, pp. 171—73. 

NBS Annual Report 1923, pp. 304—305. 
BUILDING AND HOUSING 251 

The spring of 1922 witnessed the first surge in home construction, 

and the Bureau issued its first publication in the campaign, on "Recommended minimum requirements for small dwelling construction." Plumbing, zoning, building code, and city planning primers followed. A Bureau 

investigation of the seasonal irregularities in building activity, which kept 

building trades workers unemployed for 3 or 4 months out of each year, 

disclosed that most of the lagging resulted more from custom than climate, as 

generally believed. Slowly the custom began to yield to the campaign of 

publicity and persuasion launched against it.88 The number of new homes 

built that year, more than 700,000, was almost double that of the previous 

year. 

"How to own your home," a Bureau handbook for prospective 

home buyers, appeared in the fall of 1923 and sold 100,000 copies the first 

week and more than three times that number by the end of its first year. 

It was reprinted in magazines and serialized in newspapers across the 

country.89 Eight years later its inevitable companion piece, "Care and 

repair of the house," came out and was similarly serialized.90 In the fore- 

:°' Building and Housing publication No. 1(BH1, 1922). 

9°NBS Annual Report 1924, p. 26. A survey of the Bureau's building and housing 

activities appears in the series of articles by Delos H. Smith, "Our national building 

standards," House Beautiful, 1926—27. 89 BH4, superseded by BH17 (1931). The "New York Sun" serialization, for example, 

spanned January and February of 1932. A supplement to BH4 appeared as BH12, 

"Present home financing methods" (1928). 9° BH15 (1931). LC366, LC381, and LC383, all in 1933, covered "Bringing your home 

up to date." 

N0TE.—Letter circulars, numbered from LC1 (1921) to LC1O4O (1961), have been 

reproduced at the Bureau to make information available to the public prior to formal 

publication, to supplement information in formal reports prior to their revision, to 

supply information too brief for publication, or to excerpt material from Bureau publications for which there was a continuing or voluminous demand. In some instances LC's 

also reproduced information from reports of the American Society for Testing Materials 

and the American Standards Association. 

Until recently when mimeographed lists of publications (LP) began to appear, perhaps 

the largest single category of LC's were bibliographies of the published work of Bureau 

sections (e.g., LC5, "List of communications of the gage section") or of special areas 

of research, whether done at the Bureau or elsewhere (e.g., LC35, "Publications pertaining to petroleum products"). 

Some of the subjects that have eluded formal publication include "Good gasoline," 

"Cellophane," "Color harmony," "Neon signs," "Motorists' manual of weights and 

measures," "Dry ice," "Metric and English distance equivalents for athletic events," 

"Matches," "Horology," "Porcelain and pottery," "Abrasives," and "The legibility of 

ledgers." Others are cited elsewhere in the present history. 

The only known complete set of these ephemeral letter circulars, as well as LP's, is 

presently located in the Office of Technical Information and Publications at the Bureau. 
252 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

word to Vincent B. Phelan's 121-page handbook, Secretary of Commerce 

Lamont impressed on the reader that its data came "from the people's own science laboratory, the National Bureau of Standards." The accolade 

in no way lessened the howls that went up from the service trades at the 

idea of Government encouragement of do-it-yourself repairs. But the twentycent handbook, which sold over half a million copies between 1931 and 

1. Footings. 2. Basement floor. 3. Foundation waIL 

4. Buttress. 

5. Steps. 6. Platform. 

7. Porch column. 

8. Porch cornice. 

9. French doors. 

10. Frame wall. 

11. Eaves cornice. 

12. Gable end. 

13. Rake cornice. 

14. Flnial. 

15. Valley. 16. Chimney flashing. 17. Shingle battens. 

18. Ridge board. 19. Common rafter. 

20. Hip rafter. 

21. Purlin. 

22. Collar beam. 

23. Jack rafter. 

24. Chimney cap. 

25. Chimney. 26. Corner post. 27. Plate. 

28. Diagonal sheathing. 29. Sheathing paper. 30. Shingle. 31. Balcony. 32. Veranda. 

33. Piers. 

34. Water table. 

35. Underpinning. 36. Clean-out door. 

37. Subfloor. 

88. First-floor Joists. 

39. FInish floor. 

40. Column base. 

41. Plaster partition. 42. Column cap. 43. Iron column. 

44: Girder. 

45. Window sill. 

46. Pilaster. 

47. Ground course. 48. Brick wall. 

49. Sliding door. 

50. Wainscoting. 51. Stair somt. 

52. Metal lath. 

53. Platform. 

54. Newel post. 55. Hearth. 

56. Fireplace. 57. Casement window. 

58. Rough head. 

59. Bridging. 60. Rough sill. 61. Truss over opening. 62. Ceiling joists. 63. Studding. 64. Second-floor jo1sts. 65. Ribbon board. 

66. Gutter. 

67. Balustrade. 

68. Leader head. 

69. Dormer window. 

70. Handrail. 

71. Drain. 

72. Lattice. 

The first pages of the publication, "Care and repair of the house," took the owner on an inspection tour of the essential parts of his dwelling, it was a fine lesson in terminology but an exhausting tour, and the potentialities for repair were guaranteed 

to awe any home owner with the he had assumed. 

FIGURE 1.—Essen.tial parts of a house 
THE CRUSADE FOR STANDARDIZATION 253 

1940, remained available to the public until the early fifties, when a new 

reprinting threatened sales of similar commercial publications in the bookstores.91 

Construction of new homes reached a peak in 1925 when 937,000 

units were completed. At the start of the program it had been estimated 

that a minimum of 450,000 homes a year would be necessary to overcome 

the postwar shortage. New construction in the 8 years of the program, 

through 1929, actually averaged 750,000 homes annually.92 

The housing emergency long past, the building division at the Bureau 

became an early casualty of the depression. By June 1933 the staff, which 

had numbered 36, was down to 2. In 1934 its code sections and the safety 

standards section in the electrical division were merged with the Bureau's 

specifications division and transferred from Commerce out to the Indus. 

trial building at the Bureau.93 There the regrouped division continued the 

research that was to serve the New Deal low-cost housing program organized 

in the late 1930's. 

"THE CRUSADE FOR STANDARDIZATION" 

In 1920, while President of the Federated American Engineering 

Societies, Hoover initiated a survey to determine the extent of wasteful use 

of materials and wasteful operations in industry. Twenty-five percent of the 

costs of production could be eliminated, the report disclosed, without affecting wages or labor. In six typical industries, wasteful practices accounted 

for almost 50 percent of materials and labor.94 

If waste was most prevalent in industry, industry had no monopoly on it. Owing as much to long.established custom as to the wake of war, 

it was to be found throughout the economy. The great reconstruction program that Hoover proposed upon taking over the Department of Commerce 

had for its objectives: (1) Elimination of waste in transportation; (2) 

elimination of waste of natural resources; (3) husbandry of fuel and labor 

The service trades had some justification, for upon its publication in 1931 the Bureau 

distributed posters and other advertising matter for the handbook to hardware and 

paint dealers and put up displays at trade conventions. See monthly reports, Div. XI, 

1931 (NBS Box 334, PRM). The trades also had to contend with Doubleday, Doran's 

publication for Better Homes in America of a hard cover edition of "Care and repair" 

that same year, 1931. For the outcome of the handbook, see ch. VIII, pp. 481—582. 

°' The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, II, 96. 

"NBS Annual Report 1934, p. 73; Annual Report 1935, p. 83. 

Waste in Industry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1921), briefed in H. P. Daizell, A. B. 

Gait, and. R. M. Hudson's "Simplification data for survey of 'Recent economic 

changes'," July 2, 1928 (NBS Box 253, PA). See also NBS Commercial Standards 

(CS-0), 1930, p. 2. 
254 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

through greater electrification; (4) curtailment of the swing of business 

cycles and of seasonal unemployment; (5) improvement of the distribution 

of agricultural products; (6) reduction of waste arising from litigation and 

from labor disputes, and two areas within the special province of the Bureau, 

{ The] reduction of waste in manufacture and distribution 

through the establishment of standards of quality, simplification 

of grades, dimensions, and performance in non-style articles of 

commerce; through the reduction of unnecessary varieties; 

through more uniform business documents such as specifications, 

bills of lading, warehouse receipts, etc., 

and through 

Development of pure and applied scientific research as the foundation of genuine labor-saving devices, better processes, and sounder 

methods.95 

Certain that industry and commerce succeeded best when acting in their own interests, Hoover sought no enforcement legislation. The Commerce Department would supply guidance, information, and assistance, but compliance 

would be voluntary. Alarmed by the depression, industry expressed itself 

eager to cooperate. 

"Elimination of waste," as a phrase, did not lend itself to sloganmaking as did the word "standardization," but with some loss of clarity and even objectives, they became synonymous. Long advocated by the Bureau, 

made imperative during the war by the necessity for mass production, and now elevated to something close to national policy, "the crusade for standardization," became a three-pronged attack on waste in commerce and 

industry. It comprised standardization of business practices and of materials, machinery, and products; specifications to insure good quality of products; and simplification in variety of products.97 Where the wartime effort 

had been to achieve mass production through standardization, the postwar 

effort sought to achieve standardization by establishing mass production techniques—as Henry Ford was doing in the automobile industry—in every field 

of commerce and in the company office no less than in the shop or factory. 

The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, II, 29, 62—63. Hoover was to single out Dr. 

Stratton for his assistance in organizing the program and Dr. Burgess for his contributions to its achievements (ibid., pp. 62, 185). 

The phrase first appeared in Burgess' article, "Science and the after-war period," 

Sci. Mo. 8, 97 (1919). It is the title of Hoover's article in National Standards in a Modern Economy (ed., Dickson Reck, New York: Harpers, 1956). 

Norman F. Harriman, Standards and Standardization (New York: McGraw-Hill. 

1928), pp. 78, 116—17, 129. NBS Annual Report 1922, p. 6, described the phases of 

standardization as those of nomenclature, of variety or simplification, of dimension or interchangeability, and of specifications. 
THE CRUSADE FOR STANDARDIZATiON 255 

The machinery for committing industry to standardization had been 

set up in 1919 upon the reorganization of the American Engineering Standards Committee. Associated with the Bureau since its establishment in 1909, 

the AESC learned during the war how vital standardization was to production and how little had been accomplished up to that time. The War Industries Board, dealing with businessmen through their trade associations 

to simplify enforcement of its rules, had also demonstrated the need for 

greater cooperation between Government and industry.98 

In the spring of 1919, therefore, Stratton, Rosa, and Burgess proposed 

to the AESC that it become the central agency required to "provide a better 

connection * * * between the agencies of Federal, State and municipal government and the technical and commercial organizations concerned with en- gineering and industrial standards." Securing the agreement of the tech. 

nical societies, trade and business organizations, and professional organizations it spoke for, the AESC that fall adopted a new constitutior, broadened 

to include representation of government agencies and other national organizations.99 

As its executive secretary the AESC chose Dr. Paul G. Agnew, a 

member of the electrical division of the Bureau since 1906, and as assistant 

secretary, Frederick J. Schlink, former technical assistant to Dr. Stratton. 

Dr. Agnew had been the Bureau representative at the meetings of manufacturers and industrialists that had wrestled with the technical aspects of Gov- o' Beginning with the formation of the National Association of Manufacturers in 1895, 

trade organizations by the thousands arose throughout industry. Each acted for the 

mutual benefit of its particular industry by collecting and distributing information on prices, methods of production, standardization, shipping problems, credit ratings, public 

and employee relations and the like, by setting up codes of fair practices, and by lobbying on behalf of State and National legislation affecting its industry. 

Although frequently charged with monopoly and restraint of trade in the age of reform, 

when war came the trade associations proved indispensable to the war effort, providing 

central agencies through which whole industries could be reached. Thefavorable climate 

of the l920's saw over 400 new associations formed, so that by the end of the decade 

there were almost 7,000 in the country. See Paxson, American Democracy and the 

World War, II, 123—24; John D. Hicks, The Republican Ascendancy, 1921—1933 (New 

York: Harper, 1960), p. 50; Bining, The Rise of American Economic Life, p. 586. 

Rosa, "Reorganization of the Engineering Standards Committee," Eng. News-Record, 

82, 917 (1919); and the symposium on the new AESC in Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 

82 (1919). Among the organizations then associated with the AESC were the American Society for 

Testing Materials, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the Society of Automotive Engineers, the Illuminating Engineering Society, the Institute of Radio Engineers, 

the Electric Power Club, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American 

Society of Chemical Engineers, the American Society of Mining and Metallurgy, the American Chemical Society, and the American Railroad Association. 
256 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

ernment purchases during the war and became the leading spirit in urging 

the reorganization. He was to serve the AESC for almost 30 years.10° 

The American Engineering Standards Committee thus became the 

national clearinghouse for engineering and industrial standardization 

throughout the country. Officially accredited to the Committee by 1927 were representatives of 365 national organizations—technical, industrial, and 

governmental—including 140 trade associations and 60 or more agencies in 

the Federal Government. Its title long since a misnomer, in 1928 the AESC 

was renamed the American Standards Association.101 

By then, standardization had become "the outstanding note of this 

century," its influence pervading "the remotest details of our industrial 

regime," tapping "all sources of scientific knowledge and [affecting] every 

phase of design, production, and utilization." So trumpeted the opening 

paragraph of the "Standards Yearbook," a new Bureau publication first 

issued in 1927, to furnish key information on standardization to manufacturers, industrialists, engineers, and governmental purchasing agencies. Its 

392 pages described the fundamental and working standards of the United 

States, the organization and work of the Bureau, of the national and international standardization agencies abroad, those of the executive departments 

and independent establishments of the Federal, municipal, and State governments, the central agencies for industrial standardization in this country, and 

those supported independently by technical societies and trade associations. 

Succeeding issues of the "Yearbook" detailed the annual accomplishments 

of all these agencies and described their current activities.10' 

The rage for standardization in the l920's was not confined to this 

country. It swept every nation with any degree of industrial development, as the Bureau's compendious "Bibliography on Standardization" bears wit100 NBS Report 6227, "American Standards Association, Inc." (December 1958), app. I. 101 P G. Agnew, "Work of the AESC," Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 137, 13 (1928). 

By 1941, according to NBS M169, "Standardization activities of national technical and 

trade associations," issued that year, more than 3,000 national and interstate trade 

organizations and 450 technical societies were carrying on standardizations and simplification activities. 

The "Yearbook" was issued as NBS M77 and revised annually for the next 6 years 

as M83 (1928), M91 (1929), M106 (1930), M119 (1931), M133 (1932), and M139 

(1933). The brief notice of consumer testing in the "Yearbook" was expanded in 

M90, "Directory of commercial testing and college research laboratories" (1927), superseded by M125 (1936), M171 (1941), and M187 (1947). A similar need for better coverage prompted M96, "Organizations cooperating with the NBS" (1927) —there were a total of 212. A decade after the last "Yearbook," a revision of its most generally 

useful sections appeared as M169, "Standardization activities of national technical and 

trade associations" (1941). 
THE CRUSADE FOR STANDARDIZATION 257 

ness.103 In most countries abroad standardization was Government-directed; 

here it was largely an industrial effort, the work of technical committees in 

each industry determining, as a matter of profit and ioss where standardization of processes and products and adherence to specifications most benefited 

them. 

Among the earliest results ascribed by the Bureau to standardization was the reduction in price of incandescent lamps from $1.30 to $0.16, and 

reduction of the cost of Army and Navy shoes from $7 to $8 to $3 or $4.104 

Another kind of standardization, said to have been hailed by the building 

trades, established a new standard for an inch board. Where formerly it 

had varied anywhere from to 11/4 inches, by industrywide agreement, a dressed board was set at a uniform 2%2 of an inch.'05 Despite the misnomer, 

it was at least a consistent "inch board." 

As fundamental as standardization itself were specifications of quality, 

first established by the Bureau in 1909 in its standard samples of metals, minerals, and chemicals. The first official U.S. Government specification, authorized by Presidential order, was published as a Bureau circular in 1912 and 

applied to portland cement, which then as later constituted probably the 

largest volume purchase of a single' item by the Federal Government. Often 

revised, the original specification declared that an acceptable cement must 

take an initial set in 45 minutes and after 7 days possess a tensile strength of 

500 pounds per square inch. An earlier specification, in 1907, for incandescent lamps purchased by Government agencies, ruled that any lot in 

which 10 percent of the lamps was found with defects in workmanship or serv- ice threw out the lot. The specifications for weighing and measuring devices, 

published in 1916, permitted, among other things, a deficiency of no more 

than one-eighth ounce in a pound or 4 drams in a quart. And those for 

oils and paints, in 1919, set minimum percentages each of pigment, oil, thinner, and drier in their composition, as determined by quantitative analysis. 

One of the first acts of the Bureau of the Budget upon its establishment in 1921 was to create the Federal Specifications Board, to unify 

specifications already available to some 40 Government purchasing agencies 

and effect greater economies in the quarter of a billion dollars worth of 

'°'M136 (1932). 

General Electric's simplified line of "bread and butter" lamps (standard household 

sizes) set up in 1925 made it possible to reduce the price of the 100-watt lamp from $1.10 

(1920) to $0.50. By 1942 it was $0.15. The single bulb shape in 6 voltages replaced 

45 different types and sizes. Paul W. Keating, Lamps for a Brighter America (New 

York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), pp. 143, 145, 191. 

'°6Hearings * * * 1923 (Feb. 1, 1922), p. 521; Hearings * * * 1925 (Feb. 12, 1924), 

pp. 6—7. 
258 THE TiDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

supplies bought annually by the Government. Thereafter, Bureau of Standards specifications accepted by the Board became official standards, binding on all departments of the Federal establishment.106 

In immediate charge of Federal specification work at the Bureau was 

Norman F. Harriman. In an adjacent office Dr. Addams S. McAllister maintained liaison with the AESC, through whose offices drafts of Federal specifications went out to industry and differences of opinions on requirements were ironed out. Between 1921 and 1924 the Bureau alone prepared 72 specifications. Among them was one for fire hose, insisting it contain 75 percent of new wild or plant rubber. That for pneumatic tires required at least 70 percent new rubber on their tread. Glass tumblers had to withstand 6 hours in 

boiling water. Threads on wood screws were to extend two-thirds of their 

length. Red ink was given fixed proportiOns of crocein scarlet to distilled or rain water. Bull and buffalo hides could not be used in sole leather. And precise proportions of ground cork, burlap, and binder were fixed for light, 

medium, and heavy battleship linoleum. 

Preparing specifications and revising those already promulgated became so extensive an effort at the Bureau that it soon proved "a serious drain on nearly all of the appropriation units of the Bureau." 107 The drain con- tinued as the Bureau between 1925 and 1928 prepared over 150 new specifications, covering supplies as diverse as huck towels and cheesecloth, pneumatic 

hose and wire rope, asphalt and firebrick, quicklime and chinaware, ice bags 

and friction tape, plumbing fixtures and builders' hardware. 

In September 1925 the Bureau, in cooperation with the AESC and 

associated industrial representatives, issued its "National directory of com- modity specifications," 3 years in the making, listing 27,000 specifications 

for 6,650 commodities. This was Hoover's "Buyers' Bible," as he called it, 

Memo, N. F. Harriman, "Organization and work of the FSB," Oct. 29, 1923 (NBS 

Box 42, ID) ; report, Burgess to Secretary Hoover [1924], p. 11 (NBS Box 96, PRA) 

NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 3; Burgess, "Relation of public purchases to the national 

standardization movement," MS report, 1925 (NBS Box 116, IDS—AESC). Another 

Burgess report dated Jan. 9, 1925 is in Box 139, PA. 

The Federal Specifications Board, consisting of representatives of the 10 executive 

departments, the Panama Canal authority, and the General Supply Committee, with 

Dr. Burgess its ex officio chairman, utilized the staffs of the Bureau of Standards, Bureau 

of Mines, Bureau of Chemistry and other Federal and civilian scientific agencies for the 

preparation of its specifications. By 1924 the Board had 65 technical committees 

engaged in their preparation, 24 headed by members of the Bureau of Standards. 

Letter, GKB to Secretary Hoover, Sept. 13, 1924 (NBS Box 72, FPE). A list of 

commodity experts at the Bureau, responsible for almost 200 commercial products, is 

attached to letter, GKB to Assistant Secretary of Commerce, Oct. 27. 1923 (NBS Box 

41, AP). 
THE CRUSADE FOR STANDARDIZATION 259 

intended to systematize both industrial and Federal purchasiiig.108 

Because its results were most readily understandable and lent themselves to impressive statistics, the aspect of the standardization program that 

captured the greatest public interest was simplified practice. A Bureau study 

made in the spring of 1921 found "many sizes and styles of material and 

devices [in use], not through any real demand for such a variety * * * but 

through the undirected natural expansion of * * business." The collective waste in commerce and industry from this source alone was said to 

represent an annual "loss of 30 percent of America's energies." 109 Under Ray M. Hudson and later Edwin W. Ely, the division of simplitied practice, organized in December 1921, got some startling results. The 

hrst 2 recommendations issued reduced paving bricks from 66 to 7 sizes, and 

metal and wood beds from a score or more varieties to 4 widths of one 

procrustean standard 

Begun with a congressional appropriation of $52,000 made in 1920 

for "the general standardization of equipment," by 1925 the simplified practice program alone was spending twice that amount annually. Adopted 

recommendations had reduced hotel chinaware from 700 to 160 varieties, 

files and rasps from 1,351 to 496 types, milk bottles from 49 to 9 different 

designs, and book and magazine paper from 267 to 11 sizes.111 Recommendations on the verge of acceptance ranged from warehouse and 

voice forms to painthrushés and paper bag sizes. Totting up the rewards as leaders in the crusade, representatives in nine important industries co- operating with the division estimated that their annual savings through 

simplification already exceeded $293 million.112 The figure, rounded off 

to $300 million, received wide publicity. 

108 Hearings * * 1925 (Feb. 12, 1924), p. 216. The "bible" was M65, superseded by 

M130 (1932) and M178 (1945), the latter a volume of 1,311 pages. It was followed by a subject index to U.S. Government master specifications, issued as M73 (1926), superseded by C319 (1927), C371 (1928), and C378 (1929). Three volumes of a planned 

multivolume "Encyclopedia of Specifications," covering products of wood-using industries 

(1927), nonmetallic mineral products (1930), and metals and metal products. (1932) 

came out before the project was canceled. NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 39; Memoirs of 

Herbert Hoover, II, 67. 109 NBS Annual Report 1921, pp. 22—23; Annual Report 1922, p. 265. 118 NBS Annual Report 1922, p. 266. NBS Simplified Practice Recommendations run from Ri in 1923 through numbers above R250 in the 1960's. 110 Science, 57, 649 (1923), reported that simplified practice in the American instrument industry had eliminated 1,800 of 3,200 items in its apparatus catalogs, including 

99 out of 227 items of chemical porcelain, 123 of 190 forms of gas analysis apparatus, 70 

of 148 types of gas burners (some of them over 50 years old), and 107 of 199 sizes and 

types of funnels. 112 NBS Annual Report 1925, pp. 23—24; Daizell, Gait, and Hudson, pp. 42—43; pam. 

phiet, "Simplified practice: what it is and what it has to offer" (Washington, D.C., 

1924); "Saving millions by standardization," Lit. Digest, 98, 62 (1928). 
260 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

A year later, in 1926, a total of 3,461 individual acceptances of rec- ommendations, involving more than 60 commodities, had been received 

from trade associations, manufacturers, and distributors. Special surveys 

made in 12 commodities that year indicated an adherence to published rec- ommendations of 79.5 percent.113 This was a matter of some congratulation, 

for it was expected that some people would insist on longer beds than the 

standard, and there were always bound to be manufacturers reluctant to 

discard a serviceable form or die. 

By 1928 acceptances had almost tripled as the program spread from 

large manufacturers and distributors to smaller firms, to hotel, hospital and 

other institutional supply firms, and to city, county, and State purchasing 

agencies. Manufacturers reported savings in reduced inventories, in interest charges, in reduced obsolescence, and in payrolls among the benefits of 

simplified practice, and in at least two reported instances (concrete blocks 

and shovels), prices to the trade had been reduced by as much as 25 

The culmination of the standardization program came with Hoover's 

establishment in 1927 of the division of trade standards at the Bureau. Its 

purpose was to consolidate Bureau activities relating to standards, extend to 

the commercial specification field the cooperative methods of simplified practice, and make more readily available to industry the results of the Federal 

Specifications Board.'15 Where specifications formulated by industry up to 

that time had principally served the needs of individual industries, the com- mercial standards published by the trade standards division were to be specifications with industrywide application."6 

To facilitate the use of Federal specifications and commercial standards by Government purchasing agencies, the Bureau compiled lists of more 

than 3,000 "willing.to-certify" manufacturers. But industry sought more 

than Government approval. What industry also wanted was certification 

ill NBS Annual Report 1927, p. 35. The next year adherences reached a high of 86.86 

percent in 31 commodities surveyed. Annual Report 1941, p. 83, reported the peak 

number of commodities affected, over 130. 114 NBS Annual Report 1928, p. 32; Annual Report 1929, p. 38; Daizeli, Gait, and 

Hudson, p. 30. LC504 (1931), "Variety reduction * * * by simplified practice," in. 

cluded 7 pages in fine print of such reductions. 

It had another purpose too. "The necessity to detach the Division of Simplified 

Practice from the Office of the Secretary [of Commerce] and. * * * align it with the 

permanent organization of the Bureau of Standards is a major reason for the Commodity Standards group." Memo, Hudson to GKB, Feb. 3, 1928 (NBS Box 231, ID—CS). 

iW NBS Annual Report 1927, p. 42; CS—O, "The commercial standards service and its 

value to business" (1930), p. 3; chapter on NBS in [Robert A. Brady], Industrial 

Standardization (New York: National Industrial Conference Board, Inc., 1929). 
THE CRUSADE FOR STANDARDIZATION 261 

of grade and quality of certain of its products, such as clinical thermometers, 

surgical gauze, fuel oils, textiles, and metal products, for greater consumer 

acceptance. Manufacturers wanted labels to identify or guarantee commodities complying with the standards they had adopted, and consumers wanted 

the information and protection thus provided. The labeling was approved 

and by the early thirties over a hundred. trade associations were utilizing 

labels to identify products that conformed to commercial standards.117 

If there was substance to the idea that standardization would contribute to a new industrial revolution, as Secretary Hoover hoped, it was attenuated by its voluntary nature. The reluctance of even a few members in a trade group was sufficient to bar any consideration of joint agreement, and 

as often as not carefully worked out programs suddenly collapsed at the 

point of Moreover, despite unsparing publicity and the exertions 

of such trade-wide organizations as the National Association for Purchasing 

Agents, gaps in agreement and compliance spread. 

The flaw in the standardization program appeared early, and of all 

places at the Bureau itself. Ray Hudson, setting up the simplified practice 

division at Commerce, requested Royal typewriters with elite type for his 

staff. Dr. Burgess demurred, pointing out that more than 20 years before 

the Bureau had settled on the L. C. Smith, for its superior construction, and 

pica as the most legible type. This machine was standard throughout the 

Bureau. Badgered for over a month by Hudson, Dr. Burgess at last gave 

in and signed Hudson's purchase order. On an attached note he wrote: 

"Your office is the only one in the Bureau of Standards that appears to insist 

M105, "Certification plan significance and scope: its application to federal specifications and commodity standards" (1930); NBS Annual Report 1931, p. 38. Commercial standards run from CS1, "Clinical thermometers" (1928) through current num- bers above CS260. 

Earlier proposals by industry to certify its products, particularly those for export, are reported in NBS Box 21 (1909) ; NBS Annual Report 1915, p. 147; and Hearings * * * 

1917 (Feb. 2, 1916), pp. 989—990. 

Daizell, Gait, and Hudson, pp. 24—27. So consuming had the Bureau's standardization work for the Government become by the 

middle of the decade that a member of the Visiting Committee queried Burgess about 

the real aims of the Bureau. Was its purpose supporting new and scientific 

work, as the PTR was doing abroad, or "standardizing old products"? The VC report 

to the Secretary of Commerce in 1926 expressed concern over the demands on the 

Bureau for this standardization testing, saying it was crowding out work on basic standards and research, "especially the determination of constants and the discovery of new 

laws and relations, which may be applied by scientific workers aüd more particularly by 

industry." Letter, W. R. Whitney to GKB, Nov. 20, 1925, and report, VC to Secretary 

of Commerce, Dec. 4, 1926 ("General Correspondence Files of the Director, 1945—1955," 

Box 6). 
262 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) on non-standard niakes and sizes of types. I am sure you are interested, 

with us, in the simplification of varieties." The flaw, of course, was in 

the consumer, at the far end of the production line, who wanted variety in 

type styles, and a choice in the design of beds. 

While the Bureau felt that through the standardization program "the 

ultimate consumer [was] getting better quality and better service, in some 

instances, at lower cost, and * * * [enjoyed] greater protection against 

unfair trade practices," high wages, the high cost of raw materials, and the 

increasing cost of doing business tended to operate against him as the decade progressed. At the same time, with increasing prosperity, consumer 

for more styles and varieties became an increasing obstacle to 

Inevitably, too, the restoration of confidence also increased 

the reluctance of business and industry to cooperate with Government, lest 

it lead to regulation or control and ultimately to Government prosecution of one kind or another.12° 

The great depression ended the crusade for standardization as appropriations plummeted and staffs shrank. But there was no thought of wholly 

abandoning the standardization work of the Bureau. Just before leaving 

office in 1932, Hoover asked Burgess to take the Commerce Department 

groups concerned with specifications and trade standards out to Connecticut 

Avenue. They were installed alongside the simplified practice unit, brought 

to the Industrial building in 1929, and there they remained until after World 

War In 1950, following the postwar reorganization of the Bureau, 

they were transferred back to the Department of Commerce. 

Memo, GKB to Hudson, Oct. 31, 1924, and attached correspondence (NBS Box 72, El). 

120 DaIzell, Gait, and Hudson, pp. 66, 70—72, 80—81. Perhaps the most notable arguments of industry against standardization were those presented on behalf of General 

Electric in John H. Van Deventer's "Extreme variety versus standardization," md. 

Management, 66, 253 (1923). 

Inevitable were the early excessive hopes for standardization, the warnings against its 

excesses, and finally the revolt of the intellectuals, as reported in F. C. Brown, "Standardization and prosperity," Am. Rev. 2, 396 (1924) ; G. K. Burgess, "What the Bureau of 

Standards is doing for American industry," md. Management, 70, 257 (1925); 

P. G. Agnew, "A step towards industrial self-government," New Republic, 46, 92 

(1926) ; N. F. Harriman, "The sane limits of industrial standardization," md. Management, 73, 363 (1927) ; Carl Van Doren, "The revolt against dullness," Survey, 57, 35 

and 152 (1926); and "Standardization," Sat. Rev. Lit. 3, 573 (1927). Popular accounts 

of the controversy appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, May 11, 1928 and Dec. 21, 1929, 

under "These standardized United States" and "Standardized and doing nicely." " Dr. Briggs summed up the status of standardization as World War II began: "It appears 

to me that the standardization which was accomplished during the last war has to a considerable extent been lost sight of and that the whole subject has again to be subjected to a searching study." Letter to Secretary, SAE, May 29, 1940 (NBS Box 445, IG). 
RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRY 263 

RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRY 

Spurred by Hoover's campaign against waste in industry, the Bureau 

seized the opportunity to extend its investigations in the utilization of raw 

materials, the quality of manufactured articles, and the quest for new uses for the by-products of industry. By 1922 work in progress included research on automobile engines to find ways to increase their operating efficiency, 

studies of electric batteries, of power losses in automobile tires, and reclamation of used lubrication oil. New public utility studies looked to improved 

efficiency of gas appliances and, for electric service, improved methods of 

measuring dielectric losses as indicators of insulation quality or deterioration. Under way in the construction field were stress studies of building 

materials, which for lack of scientific data were often used in excess amounts, 

and studies of fire resistance properties of building materials. With the 

expertise acquired in the wartime work on sound, the Bureau also began 

studies of sound transmission in structural materials—the scientific shushing 

of noise. 

Other studies sought to determine heat flow in structures and in structural materials, thermal conductivity of materials at high temperatures, spectroscopic analyses of metals, elimination of gases in metals, uses for low-grade 

cotton, utilization of American clays in the manufacture of paper, utilization 

of flax straw and tow in making paper, utilization of refuse molasses, and 

recovery of waste sugar.122 

Some account of one or two of these investigations may serve as representative of Bureau research for industry in the 1920's. The work on gas appliances, for example, had important results both for the public 

and the industry. 

Without any specific legislative directive, but using funds first 

granted by Congress in 1915 for the "investigation of public utility standards," the study of gas appliances began as a result of the sharp rise in the 

cost of household gas after the war. About half the cities and towns in the 

United States which were supplied with gas used natural gas, the ideal 

and cheapest fuel, but like petroleum, widely believed to be in limited supply. 

The Bureau investigation, therefore, centered on its conservation. It soon 

traced the greatest waste of natural gas, estimated as costing consumers a million dollars a day, to faulty or poorly installed domestic appliances. 

Hoping to ameliorate some of the worst conditions found, the Bureau preNBS Annual Report 1922, p. 8; Hearings * * * 1923 (Feb. 1, 1922), pp. 501—508. A 

summary of NBS research for industry, 1921—27, appears in letter, GKB to Exec. Council, 

Amer. Eng. Council, July 5, 1928 (NBS Box 253, PA). 
264 THE TIDE OF. COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

pared a circular for householders on "How to get better service with less 

natural gas in domestic gas appliances." 123 With the rising cost of gas, a rash of inventions appeared, so-called 

gas-saving devices, to be used on the top burners of gas ranges. Tests 

showed their claims of economy to be worthless and, where manufactured 

gas was used, proved that some of these devices created hazards even greater 

than those in the appliances themselves.124 But the real problem was the 

poor design of most of the gas appliances then on the market.123 

The appliance makers were naturally reluctant to change their products and charged that the Bureau was prejudiced and favored the electrical 

industry. Bureau suggestions of better design for greater thermal efficiency 

and safety in gas cooking stoves, water heaters, and room heaters, therefore, 

met with little acceptance by the industry. Then, in the winter of 1922—23 an unusually large number of deaths occurred in many parts of the country 

from gas poisoning. 

Upon Bureau inquiry of the health departments it was learned that 

New York had had 750 carbon monoxide deaths during the previous year, 

Chicago 500, Baltimore 42, Cincinnati 13, and Los Angeles 24. Because the 

in(lustry tended to attribute all reported fatalities by gas to suicide, the last 

two cities were• of particular interest since they were supplied with natural 

gas, which does not contain carbon monoxide, and therefore cannot be used 

successfully for suicide. 

The investigation made by Bureau engineers with the cooperation 

of Baltimore's Consolidated Gas & Electric Co. and city public health officials confirmed the previous findings of badly designed or badly adjusted 

gas appliances. When the results were published, the president of the 

American Gas Association came to the Bureau and demanded that further 

publication be withheld. More foLward-Iooking members of the industry 

realized the value of the research and persuaded the association to support a research associate group at the Bureau to assist in the work. Little more 

than a year later the association set up its own laboratories, hired away a Bureau gas engineer as supervisor, and shortly after established a seal of 

approval and inspection system that quickly brought the appliance industry 

into line. Two years later, deaths in Baltimore traceable to faulty gas 

"C116 (1921). Antiquated plant equipment and inefliciency also contributed to the 

waste, Stratton told Congress, and these were compensated for by the industry through 

periodic increases in the rates. Hearings * * * 1921 (Jan. 2, 1920), pp. 1560—1561. 

NBS Annual Report 1922, p. 71. LC397 (1933) and C404, "Cautions regarding 

gas-appliance attachments" (Eiseman, 1934), summed up more than a decade of investigation of these "gas-savers." 

See T193 (1920) and C394 (1931) on the design of gas burners for domestic use. 
RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRY 265 

appliances fell to 1 or 2 instead of 40, and the next year no such deaths 

occurred at all.126 

Considerably more complex is the history of Bureau research in the 

rare sugars, said to be the first new industry created in the United States by 

the war.127 Cut off from German sources, the sugar technologists of Bates' 

polarimetry section undertook to prepare and supply small standard samples 

of pure sucrose (ordinary sugar) and dextrose (corn sugar) for use in 

standardizing saccharimeters, testing the heat value of fuels, and for the 

differentiation of bacteria in medical laboratories. So obscure were the 

manufacturing processes as described in German patents that reconstruction 

of the sugars required almost completely original research. 

The preparation of dextrose and other rare sugars (arabinose, raffinose, xylose, rhamnose, melibiose, ribose, dulcite, mannite) in the few 

industrial laboratories willing to undertake such work was, therefore, both 

difficult and expensive, some of the sugars costing from $10 to $500 per 

pound. Even so, the products were not wholly satisfactory, for lack of even 

the most fundamental data on their properties. On behalf of the industry 

the Bureau undertook a systematic study of the whole group, looking to 

purer forms than the manufacturers could achieve. If ways to reduce the 

cost of the sugars could also be found, it might well increase their commercial importance.128 

In 1917 Dr. Richard F. Jackson, a member of Bates' group, solved 

the problem of producing hard refined dextrose. Two years later the theo. 

retical and technical work for large.scale manufacture of an almost chemically pure low-cost dextrose was completed by W. B. Newkirk, another mem- ber of the Bureau's carbohydrate group, for the Corn Products Refining Co., 

and a new industry was launched.'29 

Although the Bureau produced experimental quantities of many of 

the rare sugars, it chose to concentrate on levulose, as a sugar potentially 

acceptable for diabetics. The sweetest of all sugars, it was also the most 

NBS Annual Report 1923, p. 78; T303, "Causes of some accidents from gas appliances" (Brumbaugh, 1926) ; memo, Crittenden for A. V. Astin, Apr. 10, 1953 (NBS 

Historical File); Elmer R. Weaver, MS, "History of the Gas Chemistry Section, NBS, 

1910—1957," pp. 35—36 (NBS Historical File). 

Letter, GKB to Executive Secretary, Am. Eng. Council, July 5, 1928 (NBS Box 

253,PA). 

NBS Annual Report 1919, p. 120—121; Annual Report 1921, p. 112. 

Many of these naturally occurring rare sugars are of interest to chemists and bacteriologists for their biological function in the human body and have, as well, industrial 

applications. Some are also necessary as starting materials for the preparation of 

synthetic sugars. 

S293 (Jackson, 1917); S437 (Jackson and C. G. Silsbee, 1921); LC500 (1937); 

interview with Dr. Horace S. Isbell, Apr. 23, 1963. 
266 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

difficult to isolate and purify, and therefore, one of the most costly. Found 

in honey and fruits, levulose was equally available in the common dahlia and 

in the jerusalem artichoke, the latter a prolific weedlike plant whose bulbous 

roots contained an abundance of the raw material.130 

The year was 1920 and the wheat farms of the West, their wartime 

markets gone, were in distress. If large-scale commercial production of 

refined levulose proved economically feasible, wheatfields could be converted 

to growing artichoke tubers and so ease the Nation1s surplus wheat problem. 

Under that impetus the Bureau investigation lasted almost 20 years. 

As an ideal solution for a major surplus crop, the program had the 

full approval of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. The 

Bureau set up a special laboratory. In cooperation with the Bureau of 

Plant Industry of the Department of Agriculture, successively improved 

types of jerusalem artichokes were grown in the West under contract and 

shipped to the Bureau for processing. In 1929 a pilot plant for the production of crystalline levulose went up in the Industrial building, and there 

sirups of 99-percent purity, yielding crystallization of 75 percent of the 

sugar, were finally achieved.131 A semicommercial plant for the develop. 

ment of a continuous process approached completion when in 1933 the 

depression brought the program to an end. 

The years of reseach made the Bureau probably the greatest repository 

of sugar technology in the country but they left unsolved the problem of 

wheat surplus. Nor were levulose, ribose, mannose, raffinose, xylose or any 

other rare sugar produced at the Bureau ever to compete economically with 

dextrose, the corn derivative, which was equally satisfactory for scientific 

and medical purposes.132 The wheat surplus continued. 

The drive in the early twenties to utilize waste materials and products 

activated other investigations in the sugar laboratories, some brief, some lasting through the decade. One inquiry had its inception when the sugar 

industry called on the Bureau for help with the impurities in cane and beet 

molasses. While working on a method to minimize the deleterious effect 

of the waste molasses on sugar crystallization, the Bureau became aware of 

other uses for the waste besides fertilizer and cattle feed. German patents 

described many valuable chemical compounds produced both from waste 

"° NBS Annual Report 1920, P. 119. 

S519 (Jackson, C. G. Silsbee, and Proffitt, 1925); Hearings * * * 1926 (Jan. 5, 

1925), pp. 121—123; NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 25; Annual Report 1933, p. 53. As a sugar for diabetics, chemical saccharine eventually proved better than any of the rare sugars. 132 Continued Bureau research on ribose eventually resulted in an improved method of 

manufacture that reduced its cost from $40 to $2 per gram, but was still more expensive 

than dextrose. NBS Annual Report 1937, p. 66. 
RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRY 267 

molasses and the waste waters of sugar manufacture. Despite an intensive 

search, the Bureau to its surprise found little or nothing on the subject in the 

scientific literature, in any language. 

A closely guarded commercial secret, the processes for recovering 

amines, ammonia, cyanides, nitrogenous nonsugars, potash, alkalies, and 

miscellaneous products such as glycerine, esters and fatty acids from sugar 

wastes, were carefully buried in the patent literature. More than a thousand 

of these processes were found in German patents alone. As was true of German dye, drug, glassmaking, rare sugar and other patents confiscated at the 

outbreak of the war, it was unmistakable "that every legitimate means had 

been used by foreign patentees to create as many difficulties as possible in the 

trailing of patents." 133 After considerable research, the Bureau compiled a "Summary of the 

technical methods for the utilization of molasses" and made these findings 

available to the industry.134 Before the decade was out much simpler and 

far less expensive processes for producing industrial chemicals were to be 

developed by the petroleum industry, and waste molasses substantially re- mained an ingredient of cattle feed. 

The early promise of the levulose and waste molasses research suggested to the Bureau and the Secretary of Commerce that gums, sugars, and 

cellulose products of great economic value might well be recovered from 

such farm wastes as cornstalks and straw, and that this research warranted 

Government initiative and suppOrt.'35 Under a special congressional &nuropriation. to investigate the "utilization of waste products from the land," 

the miscellaneous materials division of the Bureau was reorganized as the 

division of organic and fibrous materials and Warren E. Emley was brought 

from the Pittsburgh laboratory as its chief. 

Before long a stream of products issued from the new division, including a stout wrapping paper made from the waste fibers in manila rope manufacture; wall, insulating, and pressed board from cornstalks; fertilizer from 

cotton burrs; and textile sizing from sweet potato starch. With the hope of 

utilizing the fifty million tons of cereal straws wasted on American farms 

annually, the Bureau developed a satisfactory kraft paper from wheat and 

rye straw pulp. Shortly before the program was transferred to the Department of Agriculture in the midthirties, the group developed a process for 

making a high-grade cellulose from cornstalks, oat hulls, and straw. Together 

iuNBS Annual Report 1920, PP. 121—122; Annual Report 1922, Pp. 109—110. "C145 (1924). " NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 44. Industry and Government were anticipated in this type of research by George Washington Carver, famed chemist at Tuskegee, who by 

1920 had evolved over 145 byproducts from the peanut, including face powder, coffee, wood stains, and relishes. 
268 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

with the gums, pentoses, and lignins separated in the process, recovery totaled 

more than 80 percent of the substance of some of these farm wastes.136 

A group brought into the fibrous materials division upon its organization in 1927 began a rival investigation to the levulose research going on in 

the optics division. Where the levulose group concerned itself with planted 

crops, Hudson, Isbell, and Acree, working with farm wastes, sought to convert cottonseed hulls, corncobs, and peanut shells into useful industrial chemicals. Attention centered for a time on the considerable quantities of the 

rare sugar xylose available in these cellulose wastes, which had important 

medical uses and also might, if economically extracted, be readily converted 

to organic acids useful to the tanning industry. 

Within 2 years a process had been developed for the production of 

100 pounds of 99.99-percent-pure xylose per day.137 But as both levulose 

and xylose approached the commercial development stage, interest in them 

waned. Their high cost repelled industry and Congress refused further 

research support as an invasion of industry's domain. Nor were efforts 

to utilize farm wastes to survive their relatively high cost of conversion 

or the avalanche of chemicals from petroleum distillation in the 1940's. 

In the depression years the Bureau turned from its technological development of specific rare sugars to the chemistry of carbohydrates and later to 

the study of labeled (radioactive tracer) carbohydrates, extensively used in 

current biological and medical research.138 

The investigation of paper made from waste materials was but one 

of more than a dozen paper studies going on in the Bureau's fibrous materials division. Some were continuations of the wartime search for new sources and substitutes, others wholly new research, looking for fundamental 

data in the properties and performance of paper. Elsewhere in the Industrial 

building similar lines of search went on in rubber, leather, and textiles. In 

the electrical division the investigation of electroplating, which began with 

studies of zinc-, lead-, and nickel-coating protection for military supplies, 

broadened to include fundamental studies for the industry, particularly the 

silverware and printing trades. And when chromium plating became com- mercially feasible in the midtwenties, some of the first scientific data on this 

process was produced at the Bureau.139 

By 1921 pyrometric control stations in heavy industry had become 

"nearly as intricate as a telephone central station," a far cry from the days 

when high temperatures were estimated by visual observation. At the re- NBS Annual Report, 1933, p. 61. 

"7NBS Annual Report, 1929, p. 41; Hearings * * * 1934 (Dec. 12, 1932), p. 179; 

NBS Annual Report, 1933, p. 61; interview with Dr. Gordon M. Kline, May 7, 1963. 188 Interview with Dr. Horace S. Isbell, Apr. 23, 1963. 

NBS Annual Report, 1925, p. 13. See ch. III, p. 128. 
RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRY 269 

quest of the industry, the Bureau made a compilation of almost 20 years 

of its research data on the industrial applications of pyrometry. The original printing of 2,000 copies of the 326-page manual, the first book on the 

subject in this country, was exhausted within 2 months.14° 

Not only pyrometers and thermocouples but hundreds of other instruments, military and nautical, optical and aeronautical, were being made in 

this country largely as a result of Bureau research and Bureau encouragement of the instrument industry. "We now manufacture over 85 percent 

of our industrial and scientific instruments and appliances," Burgess re- ported to the Secretary of Commerce in 1924, "where before the war over 

80 percent of these were imported." 141 Among the optical instruments 

alone made in this country were spectrometers; spectroscopes, refractometers, 

interference apparatus, and spectrophotometers, colorimetric and optical 

pyrometers, polarimeters and saceharimeters, microscopes and binoculars, 

astronomical telescopes and heliostats, surveying instruments, and military 

instruments. Most glass volumetric apparatus was American made, as were hydrometric and thermometric instruments and fire-resistance and automotive-test instruments.142 

Long interested in fostering new industries, the Bureau took even more satisfaction in the changing attitude of established industry. "Not long 

ago," Burgess noted in his annual report for 1923, "it was a matter of con- siderable difficulty to obtain the cooperation of industrial groups in the small 

amount, of research then carried on [for them] by the Government." Now, 

1.10 T170, "Pyrometric practice" (Foote, Fairchild, Harrison, 1921); NBS Annual 

Report 1921, p. 92. 

Another compilation for heavy industry was made when in 1920 the Smithsonian asked 

the Bureau to assist in revising its physical tables. They appeared in ClOl, "Physical 

properties of materials" (1921). Twenty years later the original 20-page circular had 

become the 4.80-page C447, "Mechanical properties of metals and alloys" (1943). 111 Letter, Sept. 13, 1924 (NBS Box 72, FPE). Similarly optimistic was Science, 57, 

649 (1923), but it pointed out that scarcity of skilled labor, high labor costs (75—80 

percent of the cost of constructing a delicate analytical balance went for labor), and 

the American penchant for mass production would act to retard the young instrument 

industry. 

Seeming confirmation appears in a recent report that in the period 1948—56 "imports of 

laboratory balances and analytical weights increased 1,096 percent, microscopes 671 

percent, and other scientific instruments basic to military victory 131 percent," all 

"strategic 'tools' of atomic research, public health, and scientific education." James R. 

Irving, The Scientific Instrument Industry. Vocational and Professional Monograph 

Series No. 98 (Cambridge, Mass.: Bellman Pubi. Co., 1958), p. 13 (L/C: T5500.17). Cf. 

Frederick A. White, Scientific Apparatus (University of Michigan dissertation, 1960), 

p. 65 if. L/C: Microfilm AC—i, No. 59—3296. " Letter, GKB to U.S. Tariff Commission, May 10, 1923 (NBS Box 52, IPO); NBS 

Annual Report 1935, p. 65. 
270 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

he said, problems were brought to the Bureau by almost every industry in 

the country.143 Large corporations, some with research organizations almost 

the size of the Bureau, were "as insistent as the small manufacturers in their 

demands on the Bureau for research and standardization." 144 The field of research at the Bureau in which undoubtedly the greatest 

variety of industries and interests had a vital concern was the standardization 

of color. As early as 1912, to settle disputes raging at the time, a cottonseed 

oil firm and representatives of the butter and oleomargarine industries called on the Bureau for help with the color grading of their products. The search 

for answers opened a whole new branch of physics for investigation. Three 

years later Irwin G. Priest, brought into the Bureau in 1907 to take charge of 

spectroscopy and applied optics, became head of a new colorimetry section 

set up in the optics division. 

By then color problems collected in Bureau correspondence ranged 

from those of glass (in signal lamps, headlights, and spectacles for eye protec. 

tion), of petroleum oil, turpentine, rosin, paper, and textiles to flour, sugar, 

eggshells, egg yolks, dyes, and water (as an index of purity). Still other 

queries asked for color measurement of chemical solutions, paints, portland 

cement, tobacco, porcelain, enamels, and even blood and human skin— 

the latter of concern to biologists and anthropologists.145 

Available to Priest and his group were the Lovibond color scale (dating 

back to 1887), used in the color grading of vegetable oils, and the recently 

published (1915) Munsell color system, both of them excellent but of narrow 

application and uncertain foundation.146 The Bureau made plans to estab- 

"'Simoly by reason of its limited staff and facilities, not every problem could be 

handled at the Bureau. Many inquiries involved testing that could be done as well 

by commercial testing laboratories. LC209, "General policy of the NBS with regards 

to testing" (Dec. 2, 1926), distinguished between permissible and nonpermissible testing. The Bureau accepted material or products for testing where it had equipment, 

technicians, or was able to provide scientific data not available elsewhere, and where, as a central and unbiased agency, it was in a position to act as arbiter or final authority 

in the settlement of technical disputes. 

In the "Standards Yearbook," 1927, pp. 284—285, the Bureau distinguished between its 

fundamental tests (of standards for industry and science), routine tests (of measures, 

devices, and materials, principally for Government agencies), referee tests, and cooperative tests (where the results might be of mutual concern to industry and the Bureau). 

The testing program alone, said the "Yearbook," consumed approximately half the 

Bureau's resources each year. 

'"NBS Annual Report 1920, p. 121; Annual Report 1923, p. 4. 

NBS Annual Report 1915, p. 75. 

The years of Bureau work on these systems culminated in two papers: Newball, Nicker. 

son, and Judd, "Final report of the OSA subcommittee on the spacing of the Munsell 

colors," J. Out. Soc. Am. 33, 385 (1943); and Judd, Chamberlin, and Haupt, "The ideal 

Lovibond color system," J. Res. NBS 66C2, 121 (1962). 

272 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

Hidnert of the Bureau expanded their initial investigation of dental inlay 

materials and dental techniques. 

Assisted by research associates from private laboratories and practicing dentists representing the American Dental Association, the Bureau 

physicists studied the physical and chemical properties of inlay materials, 

amalgams, plasters, and waxes, and began to establish specifications and 

standards for dental testing laboratories and manufacturers of dental materials.15' Prior to this research, rejection of dental materials tested at the 

Bureau for the Government had run as high as 50 percent or more. One 

Bureau report about to be made public, disclosing that 6 out of 10 dental 

amalgams available to the profession were unsatisfactory, and only 4 out 

of 10 would stay in any appreciable time if used as fillings, was suppressed 

by the Commerce Department lest it result in loss of public confidence.152 

By the early 1930's rejections amounted to less than 10 percent. Before long it became "possible for dentists to use amalgam fillings that [would] 

not shrink and drop out, cements that [would] not dissolve, bridgework 

that [was] practically permanent, and gold inlays lasting [far beyond the] 

3 to 5 years as was the case a short time ago." 

A persistent difficulty encountered with certain types of metallic alloys 

used for fillings was their tendency to become deformed in use and require 

replacement. Interferometry studies disclosed that, extending over a period 

of 1 to 4 days, the expansivity of some amalgams was about four times that 

of the teeth. For many years the trouble was attributed, in the absence of 

other discernible causes, to variations of the alloy from package to package.154 

The source of the difficulty, at least in amalgams containing zinc, was 

eventually traced to the dentist's office, in the moisture added to the filling 

by his palming or hand mulling of the amalgam. The moisture and salt 

contamination from the hand, acting on the trace of zinc in the amalgam, 

formed hydrogen gas, and in a short time out came the filling.155 

Research for the textile industry in the 1920's covered basic investigations into the physical and chemical properties of fibers, yarns, and 

fabrics, the conservation of textiles (for the peace of mind of dyers and 

cleaners), utilization of low-grade cotton and of waste silk materials, estab151 T157 (Souder and Peters, 1920); superseded by C433 (Souder and Paffenbarger, 

1942), the latter a résumé of dental research at the Bureau since 1919. 

Letter, P. J. Crogan, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce to F. C. Brown, 

Aug. 25, 1926 (NBS Box 179, PA). 

NBS Annual Report 1931, p. 43; Annual Report 1936, p. 62; Science, 92, 527 (1940). 

NBS Annual Report 1919, p. 148; Annual Report 1922, p. 174; T157, p. 9. 155 Schoonover, Souder, arid Beall, "Excessive expansion of dental amalgam," J. Am. 

Dental Assoc. 29, 1825 (1942) - 
RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRY 273 

lishment of standard tests for color fastness, of textile specifications, and 

standardization of textile products, from hosiery to cordage.'56 

In textile research, as in many other fields, it was through research 

associates, trained men from industry itself, that the Bureau rendered its most 

direct assistance to industry. Every division had its associates, the largest 

numbers in the metallurgy and building materials laboratories of the Bureau. 

They were to be found alongside Bureau staff members in almost every 

investigation into the manufacture of iron and steel, in the heat, optical, 

mechanical laboratories of the metallurgy division and in its experimental 

foundry, studying foundry sands, rail steel, high-speed tool steel, and the 

spectrographic analysis of atomic composition in metals.'57 

Investigations for the building and construction industry ranged 

all over the Bureau, from the elevator safety code work of the electrical 

division to fire-resistance studies in the heat division. Almost 100 projects 

in the chemistry, mechanics and sound, structural engineering, and ceramic 

divisions were on behalf of heavy construction or the homebuilding program 

of the twenties. One device, made in the mechanics division for an investigation of riveted joints in the construction of Navy ships, was to have wide 

application. This was Tuckerman's optical strain gage, devised in 1923, 

which gave consistent readings sensitive to two-millionths of an inch of 

deformation. It proved as reliable in measuring strains in the duralumin 

members in the framework of dirigibles, in concrete models of dams, or in 

steel and cement models of building structures, as in ship construction.158 

While industry was for the most part highly cooperative, particularly 

where the Bureau dealt with problems of research or standardization beyond 

the capabilities or resources of industry, it could be stubborn on occasion. 

A case in point was the resistance to the idea of uniform screw threads. The 

war had amply demonstrated the need for uniformity but the cost of retooling 

and fear of competition prevented any real agreement. As the Bureau re- ported in 1922: "The manufacturing world is not yet fully awake to the 

advantages of this type of standardization." 159 Throughout the twenties the National Screw Thread Commission, 

the American Engineering Standards Committee, and the Bureau continued 

to urge standardization and unification of screw threads and adoption of a consistent series of allowances and tolerances for greater efficiency in inter156 NBS Annual Report 1923, pp. 230—231. H. T. Wade, "Textile research laboratory," 

Sci. Am. Supp. 2, 153 (1920). Some 20 current problems of the cotton industry were 

sent to the Bureau in letter, president, National Association of Cotton Manufacturers to Director, NBS, Feb. 4, 1920 (NBS Box 15,1ST). 

157 NBS Annual Report 1923, p. 262; LC197, "Work shops of science" (May 2, 1926). 168 NBS Annual Report 1923, p. 210; Annual Report 1928, p. 15. 

"NBS Annual Report 1922, p. 42. 
274 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

changeable manufactures. Yet not until the very end of the decade was there sufficient general acceptance to warrant extending this line of research 

at the 

Because of the technical difficulties, relatively small market for the 

products, and ease of obtaining an adequate supply from Europe, efforts 

to turn over to industry the making of optical glass met with little response.161 

To assure sufficient glass for scientific purposes, the optical plant behind 

the Industrial building continued its operations with annual appropriations 

from Congress. Besides its research in optical and other types of glass for 

the industry, the Bureau yearly melted approximately 30,000 pounds of 

optical glass for the production of optical blanks, most of them going to the 

military services. Allowing for wastage and imperfections, the yield of 

serviceable glass from this weight of melt approximated 20 percent or 6,000 

pounds. 

The most ambitious undertaking in the history of the Bureau glass 

plant was its casting of a 69.5.inch disk for the mirror of a large reflecting 

telescope. At the time there were not more than 10 optical glass plants in 

the world, all abroad, capable of making such a disk. The two largest in this 

country, the 40-inch at the Yerkes Observatory and the 100-inch at Mount 

Wilson, had both come from Europe. Challenged by the lack of information on methods of making glass for a large telescope reflector—it was of 

course a trade secret—the Bureau borrowed on its own experience and began 

to experiment. 

The first great disk was poured in 1924. It cracked during cooling. 

So did the next three. Trying still another method, the Bureau cast a fifth one in May 1927. Cooled in the first weeks at the rate of only 10 per day 

and at no time more than 100 per day, in January 1928 the great disk, some 

10.5 inches thick and weighing 3,800 pounds, was pronounced a success. Polished and silvered elsewhere, the mirror was subsequently presented to 

the Perkins Observatory at Ohio Wesleyan University.'62 

M89, "Report of the National Screw Thread Commission" (rev. ed., 1928). The 

Commission was placed on a permanent basis by Congress in 1926, abolished as an economy measure by Executive order in 1933, and reestablished as an agency of the War, 

Navy, and Commerce Departments in 1939. 

in Of the firms that began making optical glass during World War I, all but Bausch & Lomb ceased production with the armistice. Hearings * * * 1922 (Dec. 20, 1920), 

p. 1248. 

182NBS Annual Report 1927, p. 23; Annual Report 1928, p. 21; RP97, "Making the 

glass disk for a 70-inch telescope reflector" (Finn, 1929) ; Harlan T. Stetson, "Optical 

tests of the 69-inch Perkins Observatory reflector," J. Opt. Soc. Am. 23, 293 (1933) 

conversation with Clarence H. Hahner, May 20, 1963. 

Prior to the casting of the 200-inch mirror for the Hale telescope at Palomar, the largest 

disk the Corning Glass Works had attempted was 30 inches. With the Bureau experience as guide, work on the 200-inch, 15-ton disk began in 1931. For 2 months after the 
RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRY 275 

If the most ambitious project of the optical glass section was the 

telescope disk, perhaps one of its greatest pieces of craftsmanship was the 

construction in 1926 of the Bureau's first standard of planeness. This standard of straightness, as well as planeness, in the form of highly polished disks 

of clear fused quartz, was the work of John Clacey, a remarkable self-trained 

hand craftsman of fine lenses who came to the Bureau in his 54th year back 

in 1911 and worked with Michelson during the war. The disks he shaped a decade and a half later, three in number in order to provide a self-checking 

standard, proved when tested interferometrically to have an accuracy of 

five-millionths of an inch. Aside from its application in testing the planesuccessful cast in 1934, the temperature was held at 1,2000 F. The mirror was then 

cooled at the rate of 10 a day for 8 months. It was shipped to Palomar in 1936 to be 

ground and polished, but interrupted by the war the work was not completed until 

1947. Six and a half million dollars went into the making of the mirror. The Corning 

Glass Center (Corning, N.Y., 1958), pp. 6, 8; Frederick A. White, American Industrial 

Research Laboratories (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1961), pp. 47-48. 

Prof. Clifford C. Crump, director of the Perkins Observatory and Dr. Burgess examining 

the Bureau's 69.5-inch telescope disk after an 8-inch hole had been drilled through its 

center for mounting. The disk after polishing was set up in the observatory at 

Ohio Wesleyan University. 
276 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

ness of surfaces, the straightness of edges, and the limiting surfaces of end 

gages, the Bureau's standard plane was to serve as a basis for producing 

standard angles and for calibrating instruments that measured curvature.163 

All the major industries reached new peaks of development and production in the twenties, and in the glass industry few so spectacularly as the 

manufacturers of automobile windows and windshields. But the three giants, 

and the symbols of the age, were the automobile, aviation, and radio industries. 

AUTOMOBILES AND AIRCRAFT 

Between 1920 and 1930 the number of cars registered in the United 

States leaped from 9 to 26.5 million, well over half of them Henry Ford's 

Model T. With them came the first officially numbered highway, the first 

automatic traffic light, the first concrete road with banked curves, the sixlane highway, one.way street, parking problem, tourist home, and tourist 

cabin.164 Enclosing the tonneau in glass and canvas or in steel and installing 

more efficient and more powerful engines converted the car from a family 

horseless carriage to a family locomotive. With moderate prices and installment payments, the acquisition of an automobile moved rapidly from 

luxury to convenience to necessity. But it might not have happened if the 

geologists had been right. 

Bureau research on the automobile and airplane, in adjoining laboratories in West building and in the dynamometer chambers, began on a pessimistic note: the Nation's supply of gasoline and oil must be conserved. 

Depletion of this country's known petroleum resources was said to be as little as 10 years away. The need for conservation was unquestioned.165 A 

secondary problem, partly resulting from the producers' efforts to conserve 

the supply, was the poor quality of much of the gasoline on the market. If, 

by improvement of combustion through better knowledge of fuels, ignition, 

lubrication, and carburation, the Bureau reported, it could assist "in lowering the gasoline consumption of automobiles only 10 percent for a given 

mileage, it [would] represent a saving to the country of something like 

C. A. Skinner, "Making a standard of planeness," Gen. Elec. Rev. p. 528 (1926); 

"John Clacey—Optician," Pop. Astron. 38, 1 (1930); NBS Annual Report 1937, p. 65. 

Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change, p. 110. 

Hicks, The Republican Ascendancy, pp. 27—28. As late as 1926, "the dwindling 

supply of crude oil" still marked the "urgent necessity for rigid economy in the use of 

fuel." Hearings * * * 1927 (Jan. 25, 1926), p. 107. The Bureau was to lose 8 or 10 

of its best young physicists to industry in the search for oil in the 1920's, including 

Karcher in 1923, McCollum and Eckhardt in 1926, and Foote in 1927 (interview with 

Dr. Paul D. Foote, July 23, 1963). 
AUTOMOBILES AIRCRAFT 277 

$100 million per year." 166 The phrasing was in terms of consumer savings, 

but the objective was conservation. 

Working largely with funds transferred from the Quartermaster 

Corps of the Army, with the assistance of research associates from the 

Society of Automotive Engineers, and the cooperation of the American 

Petroleum Institute, the Bureau issued a series of papers establishing the 

most efficient characteristics of motor engines, fuels, and oils. Among 

other considerations, it became evident that more knowledge of engine starting factors was necessary as use of closed cars over the new network of 

paved roads greatly increased winter operation of automobiles. (The Bu. 

reau refused to recommend any of the dozens of antifreeze solutions that 

appeared, finding none better than plain alcohol and water.) 167 Previously 

given little attention, extensive studies were made of fuel-air ratios, jet size, 

spark advance, fuel volatility, throttling and choking, and air and water 

temperatures in the engine.168 

When Bureau technicians learned that laboratory and road performances of automobiles and trucks often differed widely, they constructed an 

ingenious array of complicated apparatus that automatically recorded 18 

different measurements of the performance of the engine and the vehicle 

itself in operation. A Bureau investigation of brakes and brake linings for 

the Army Motor Transportation Corps, begun as better engines and roads 

made speeds above 25 miles an hour common, was used by the automobile 

industry to induce parts manufacturers to improve these products. Out of 

this work came the Bureau's recording and inspection decelerometer that 

measured the braking ability of cars, and the Bureau's famous study of the 

reaction time of drivers, as well as minimum stopping distances, when brakes were applied on automobiles, trucks, or busses. A chart showing these 

NBS Annual Report 1922, p. 8; Annual Report 1936, pp. 62-63. Inevitably, almost as many "gasoline-savers" as there were household "gas-savers" came on the market, 

the most spurious a device that was built into a Hudson Super Six touring car and alleged 

to give 54 miles to a quart of gasoline. It proved to be a series of concealed spare 

gas tanks. Memo, GKB for Department of Commerce, Sept. 17, 1923 (NBS Box 58, 

PA). 

NBS Annual Report 1920, p. 162; H. K. Cummings, "Anti-freeze solutions and com- pounds," J. Soc. Auto. Eng. 19, 93 (1926). 

NBS Annual Report 1925, p. 8. 

It was while making an acceleration test at low temperature and atmospheric pressure on a Ford engine using aviation gasoline—part of a Bureau investigation "to determine 

the grade of gasoline for cars that would best utilize our petroleum resources"—that on Sept. 20, 1923 a gasoline leak resulted in an explosion and fire in the altitude chamber 

that caused four deaths and injured six among the test staff. Science, 58, supp. 12 

(1923); file in NBS Box 40, AG. 
278 

Freighted with apparatus designed and constructed at the Bureau, this touring car was ready to measure and record 18 points of performance of its engine and operating 

equipment on the road. 

The instrument mounted on the running board measured wind speed and direction 

relative to the car. The apparatus on the floor o/the front seat measured and recorded 

graphically the instantaneous rates of gasoline flow to the carburetor. The equipment 

in the rear seat recorded 16 separate measurements of various factors in engine and 

car performance on a moving strip of paper. 

To measure a Bureau motorist's reaction time in applying his brakes, his car was rigged 

with two pistols. When the first pistol under the running board was fired it made a 

mark on the roadway. The sound was the signal for the driver to apply the brakes, 

the application of which automatically fired the second pistol, making another mark on the road. The reaction time was obtained by dividing the car speed by the distance 

measured. 
AUTOMOBILES AND AIRCRAFT 279 

reaction times and stopping distances at speeds up to 45 m.p.h. was widely 

publicized and found its way into many drivers' manuals. A Bureau mem- ber recalls that the chart continued to appear in at least one of these manuals as late as the early 1950's, long after high-speed cars had made the data 

dangerously 

Besides engine research, the Dynamometer Laboratory was also used 

to make studies of the durability of tires—of which there were more than a hundred makes and sizes available. Together with the tire data acquired 

during the war, these tests enabled the Bureau to prepare its first Government 

master specifications for pneumatic and solid tires and inner tubes.17° The 

specifications brought no special joy to the industry. 

The center of rubber investigations was in the Industrial building, 

where bit and Wormeley were testing rubber goods of all kinds. Until the 

rubber section was set up at the Bureau about 1911 there had been almost no rubber research in this country. Making rubber and rubber products was an 

art, with closely guarded trade secrets, and with wide ranges in quality as a consequence. The exhaustive testing of rubber products at the Bureau con- stituted some of the first real research in the field, and the successive editions 

of the Bureau circular on testing rubber products that first appeared in 1912 

became the bible of the industry.17' 

By the mid-twenties the Federal Government alone was spending 

almost a million dollars a year on tires, and much of the Bureau work in 

NBS Annual Report 1925, p. 9, cites a report in preparation on "The maximum possible deceleration of an automobile." The report seems not to have been published, 

but a chart of braking distances, showing speeds up to 20 m.p.h. and possibly prepared 

for that report, appears in Standards Yearbook, 1927, plate 36. The brake work was consolidated in M107, "Safety code for brakes and brake testing" (1930), its chart on braking distances based on a maximum speed of 45 m.p.h. 

Dr. Hobart C. Dickinson, chief of the heat and power division and automobile enthusiast, personally directed the many braking studies made by the Bureau. He was most 

proud of his paper with C. F. Marvin, Jr., on "What is safe speed?" (J. Soc. Auto. 

Eng. 17, 81, 1925) that recommended a "clear course principle" in place of fixed speed 

limits for safe driving. Several States adopted its conclusions, he reported in the 

paper, as well as its splendid formula, v=5(2as+a2t') —at, in which v represented the 

safe speed, a the rate of acceleration, s the clear course ahead, and t the time lag of 

the driver. 

'70C115 (1921; 2ded., 1925). 171 C38 (1912; 5th ed., 1927). Another aspect of rubber research occurs in a Bureau 

letter of 1944 asserting that so great was the difference between Government and industrial salaries for rubber technologists that for 25 years the Bureau had not employed a 

single chemist for that work who had had any previous rubber training or work. Letter, 

A. T. McPherson to War Manpower Commission, Aug. 3, 1944 (NBS Box 493, ISR). 
280 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

rubber was concerned with their construction, quality, care, and use.172 In 

the late twenties, as British control of natural rubber resources in the Far East 

shot prices sky high, the Bureau extended its product testing to more basic 

research, including comparative studies of natural, reclaimed, and synthetic 

rubbers. 

Attention first turned to the possibility of growing natural rubber in 

Mexico and California, and some progress was made at the Bureau in producing from the guayule bush a sheet rubber that compared favorably with 

the latex from plantation rubber.'73 A preliminary investigation was also 

made in the chemistry of synthetic rubber, a project abandoned in the depression thirties when rubber prices fell with everything else. Work on synthetic 

rubber was not resumed until the eve of World War II." 

All through the 1930's rubber manufacturers stoutly maintained the 

merits of reclaimed rubber, which was being used in larger and larger proportions in the making of tires. Bureau tests of tires and other products 

from reworked scrap and waste rubber indicated little basis for the manufacturers' claims. The reduced quality and durability of the tires, said the 

Bureau, actually made them more costly than tires from high-priced new rubber. Not until natural rubber became available again with victory in 

the Pacific did the tire industry admit that the Bureau had been right 

all along.'75 

Investigations in 1917—18 of storage batteries used in the electric 

trucks and tractors of the Army, in submarines, submarine mines, and airplanes resulted in numerous improvements in their construction, the data 

appearing in a circular issued shortly after the war."° Scarcely any of the 

improvements, however, found their way into the batteries offered to the general public. As a result, few products were more deficient electrically and 

mechanically or stood in greater need of standardization and reduction in 

sizes and kinds than the storage batteries used for starting and lighting automobiles.177 Working with the standards committees of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Society of Automotive Engineers, Dr. 

NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 31. The tire research was reported in T283 (1925), 

T318 (1926), C320 (1927), C341 (1927), all by Holt and Wormeley, and J. Walter 

Drake, "The automobile: its province and problems," Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 116, 1 (1924). 

T353 (Spence and Boon, 1927). 

lIt C427 (Wood, 1940). 

T294 (Holt and Wormeley, 1925). C393 (McPherson, 1931), p. 17, said that 

reclaimed rubber at 7 cents per pound cost the consumer more per unit of abrasion than new rubber at 20 cents or even 40 cents. 

C92 (Vinal and Pearson, 1920). 

NBS Annual Report 1920, p. 86. 
AUTOMOBILES AND AIRCRAFT 281 

George W. Vinal of the electrochemistry section sent out a stream of research 

and test results to the manufacturers. Automobile batteries slowly improved. 

Simplification, in that highly competitive field, was more difficult, but a start was made in 1922 when the Bureau, on behalf of the Army, prepared specifi. 

cations limited to 17 of the some 150 sizes of batteries available.'78 

A sequel to a battery study made for the Navy in the late spring of 

1921 was to vex the electrochemists at the Bureau off and on for the next 

30 years. The Navy came to the Bureau reporting trouble with the negative 

plates of its submarine batteries. Chemical and spectroscopic tests of the 

battery electrolyte and plates traced the repeated battery failures to impurities in the electrolyte. While studying electrolyte impurities, Vinal also 

tested a new jelly electrolyte that had come on the market, as well as several 

patent electrolytes, all being sold "with extravagant and impossible claims [of 

extending the life of storage batteries] at relatively high prices." Where 

these battery additives did not contain substances actually harmful to storage 

batteries, as most did, Dr. Vinal reported, they were useless. 

The results of the Bureau tests were used "both as a basis for specification for [battery] acid and in published warnings widely circulated to 

protect the public from fraud." The warnings went unheeded. Before 

the decade was out, dozens more of the additives appeared on the market, 

and at the request of Government transportation agencies, the Post Office, 

and the Federal Trade Commission, were tested by the Bureau. The answer 

to the claims made for them, again made public, was still a resounding no.'8° 

The continued encouragement by a credulous public of the manufacture of 

these spurious additives was some years later, as we shall see, to make headlines from coast to coast and imperil the reputation for scientific integrity - of the Bureau. 

Another long-term study in applied electrochemistry begun during 

the war centered• on the dry cell batteries used in telephones, flashlights, and 

radios. In the subsequent standardization crusade specifications for their 

construction and operating life were prepared and under simplified practice a successful effort was made to reduce the multitude of sizes and shapes that 

Letter, SWS to Secretary of Commerce, Dec. 14, 1921 (NBS Box 8, IEB); Hearings * * * 1923 (Feb. 1, 1922), P. 519. 

NBS Annual Report 1921, pp. 70—71; Annual Report 1923, pp. 83—84; Annual Report 

1925, p. 5; NBS TNB No.94 (Feb. 10, 1925), p. 1. 180 LC302, "Battery compounds and solutions" (May 15, 1931). Later Bureau letters to motorists included LC512, "Automobile costs" of owning and operating a car (1938), 

superseded by LC520 (1938), and for travelers, LC517, "Motorists' manual of weights 

and measures" (1938). 
282 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

had proliferated. The annual tests of hundreds of samples of dry cells by 

the Bureau, on which Government purchases of millions annually were based, 

served to keep manufacturers on their toes and thus led to improvement in 

the quality of the billions of dry cells sold to the public.181 

Apart from the conservation and consumer studies of the Bureau, the 

automobile industry before long took over most of its own research. But 

aviation remained a fledgling, of interest principally to the National Advisory 

Committee for Aeronautics, the Army Air Service, the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, and, after 1927, the aeronautics branch of Commerce. All of these 

agencies transferred funds to the Bureau of Standards for their research. 

Besides engine research, to improve power and fuel economy of aircraft 

engines at high altitude, investigations continued in ignition, aviation metallurgy, instrumentation (including radio), and the aerodynamics of flight. 

The military in the 1920's displayed some interest in better plane 

design but, inherently conservative and on reduced appropriations, was to 

express only passing interest in such innovations as the helicopter and jet 

propulsion. Back in 1917 the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington 

had sent the Naval Consulting Board, at its request, a two-foot model propel. 

ler for a proposed helicopter. Asked to look it over, the Sperry Gyroscope 

Co. sent it on to Dr. Edgar Buckingham at the Bureau to work out its aerodynamic equations. It seemed promising to him. Within the limits set by 

the model, Buckingham reported, a small one-man helicopter was entirely 

practicable. The only "real problem [was] motor stoppage." And, indeed, 

in view of the unreliability of aircraft engines at that time, Buckingham was probably right.t82 Twenty years passed before Heinrich Focke, in Germany, 

demonstrated the successful achievement of vertical flight. Two years later, 

in 1939, Sikorski's helicopter made its first flight in this country. 

Jet propulsion fared even less well in the twenties. In the spring 

of 1920 Dr. Robert H. Goddard, father of rocket engineering, who had pro. 

posed the use of rocket weapons during the war, published the first of his 

papers on "ejectors and new systems of propulsion" for airplanes. Both 

the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the Army Air Serv. 

ice, aware that jet propulsion was being worked on in Europe, offered the 

Bureau funds to study its principles and possibilities. As it happened, Buck. 

ingham, knowing of the work in Europe, had for some time been studying 

the aerodynamics involved. 

181 A brief history of dry cell testing, beginning with NBS C79 (1918), appears in H71, 

"Specification for dry cells and batteries" (1959). 152 Letter, SWS to Elmer A. Sperry, Aug. 18,1917 (NBS Box 12, INA). 
AUTOMOBILES AND AIRCRAFT 283 

From a theoretical point of view, he said, fuel consumption would be so much greater than that with the motor-driven screw that there was no prospect of using jet propulsion. (The petroleum industry was still experimenting with the cracking of oil, and Buckingham could not foresee better 

fuels than those available.) Moreover, said Buckingham, in what seems now masterly understatement, no further fundamental work on the subject was needed, since the principles of jet propulsion were "all well known." Only 

the engineering problems remained, and these could be better done by the Air 

Service than by the Bureau.183 

A member of the Bureau who followed Buckingham's work at the time 

has a distinct impression that "jet motors may not have got off the ground 

because the idea of airplanes spouting 2,0000 F flames on an airport was a far from welcome thought."184 Even into the next decade top-flight engineers 

considered jet propulsion impractical, in the belief that no material but fire 

brick could be used for facing the combustion chamber of a jet engine. The 

weight alone would keep it earthbound. 

The real interest of the military in the l92O's was not so much in airplanes as in lighter.than.air craft. Bemused by Count Zeppelin's invention 

and totally undismayed by their poor record of survival—of some 80 built 

by the Zeppelin Co. during and after the war, 66 were destroyed by enemy 

action, burned, broke up in flight, or smashed in landings—the Army began 

building its RS series of semirigid airships, the Navy its nonrigid dirigibles 

and ZR series of rigid airships. Considerable research for these ships, espe. 

cially in instrumentation, was supported at the Bureau with NACA and Navy 

funds. Designed originally for ship navigation but adaptable to dirigibles 

and airplanes as well was the earth inductor compass invented in 1922 by Dr. 

Paul Heyl and Dr. Lyman J. Briggs. Equipped with this compass, the navigator after presetting his compass course had only to keep the galvanometer 

needle of the earth inductor at zero to stay on course. In an airplane, the 

compass, an armature driven by a cup propeller projecting through the fuselage and responding to the magnetic field of the earth, was housed in the rear 

of the fuselage, its indicator in the cockpit. But the career of the compass 

Letter, SWS to Engineering Division, Air Service, Dec. 2, 1920, and attached report 

by E. Buckingham, June 28, 1920 (NBS Box 12, INA). Even stronger was Buckingham's conclusion in a restudy of jet propulsion made 2 years later, in which he said 

that publication of his calculations by the NACA might "prevent engineers or inventors 

from attempting impossibilities" (NBS Annual Report 1922, p. 168). Cf. George W. 

Gray, Frontiers of Flight: The Story of NACA Research (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. 

276. The fuel problem is discussed in NBS TNB 189, 10 (1933). 

Interview with Howard S. Bean, Apr. 24, 1962. 

AUTOMOBILES AND AIRCRAFT 285 

ing a protective coating of aluminum, but the last two U.S. dirigibles were 

not to survive long enough to prove the coating. Although the German-built 

Los Angeles flew for 9 years before it was decommissioned in 1932, neither 

the Navy's 785-foot Akron (ZR—4), completed in 1931, nor her sister ship 

the Macon (ZR—5), ready in 1933, lasted 2 years beyond their maiden 

flights.189 

Reacting as much to the Shenandoah disaster as to the unpopular 

(i)urt.martiahng of air-power enthusiast Brig. Gen. William Mitchell, who 

believed in planes, not dirigibles, Congress in 1927 raised the Army Air 

Service to corps level and authorized assistant secretaries for aeronautics 

in the War, Navy, and Commerce Departments. Design was standardized 

to enable industry to build up a reserve of war planes. And in support of 

civil aviation, the National Bureau of Standards, designated the research 

agency of Commerce's new Aeronautical Division, was directed to accelerate 

189 See John Toland, Ships in the Sky (New York: Holt, 1957), passim. Germany's 

Graf Zeppelin lasted almost 10 years before it was decommissioned in 1938, but the 

explosion of the Hindenburg while landing at Lakehurst that same year put an end to 

further investment in sky queens. 

Testing a duralumin girder from. the wreckage of the Shenandoah in 1925. The girder 

is shown ready for combined column and transverse tests in the 2,300,000-pound 

capacity Emery testing machine at the Bureau. The verdict was "embrittlement by 

corrosion." 
286 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (2920-30) 

its work on the radio direction beacon, ground-to-air radiotelephony, and 

develop a marker beacon system both to guide and track planes in flight.190 

If the recent war saw the development of specialization in planes, 

better planes and engines, sturdier airframes, wind tunnel research, and 

aerial photography, postwar spurs to aviation were to include the experience 

gained in flying the U.S. mails and inventions like the radio beacon, radio 

compass, gyroscopic automatic pilot, streamlining, development of the monoplane, and of retractable gear. The glamor of the dirigible was only to be 

exceeded by the headline performances of the planes that crisscrossed the 

skies in the decade that began with Lindbergh's flight to Paris. 

"POLICING THE ETHER" 

The cross-licensing agreements of General Electric, Western Electric, 

and Westinghouse in 1920—21, involving some 1,200 radio patents, ended 

the long patent war in radio. For the first time since its discovery in 1907 

the three-element vacuum tube was free from danger of infringement and 

could be manufactured and sold to the general public. It was exempt from 

Government monopoly, and there were no taxes on receiving sets, as in Europe 

The radio boom was on. In 1920 Westinghouse's experimental station KDKA at Pittsburgb 

made history by broadcasting the election returns to a radio audience estimated at less than a thousand. By the end of the first year of the patent 

peace there were 508 broadcasting stations in the United States for the hordes 

of crystal set and vacuum tube enthusiasts. The great radio craze really 

began after Armstrong's superheterodyne, with its superior reception, came 

out in 1922.191 Whereas in 1921 there were probably not more than 7,000 

privately owned sets in the Nation, by 1928 there were nearly 10 million, not 

counting home-made sets.192 

As much as anyone, the Bureau fired up a nation of do-it-yourself 

addicts by issuing a series of mimeographed letter circulars in the spring of 

1922 on how to construct a simple crystal detector set for $10; a two 

100 NBS Annual Report 1927, p. 40. See below, pp. 295, 297. 191 Armstrong's modification in the heterodyne introduced another oscillation with the 

incoming high frequency signal which produced a third "beat frequency." This lower 

intermediate frequency could be amplified much more effectively, permitting very high 

selectivity of the original signal. 

The Electric Word, pp. 212—214. 

Not to be outdone by the Bureau's radio engineers, Clarence A. Briggs of the gage 

section built a crystal set with coils on cardboard that, except for the antenna and 

telephone receiver piece, cost 60 cents, and on which, without amplification, he picked 

up Schenectady, 300 miles away. Letter, H. G. Boutell to Assistant to Sercetary of 

Commerce, May 23, 1922 (NBS Box 21, PAC). 
POLICING THE ETHER 287 

circuit crystal set capable of picking up stations beyond 50 miles, at a cost 

of $15; and an electron-tube set, reaching out a hundred miles, for between 

$23 and $37, including the tube ($5) and the storage battery ($15—$20). 

Other Bureau letter circulars that spring and summer furnished sources of 

elementary radio information to amateurs and described auxiliary con- densers, loading coils, and an audiofrequency unit for receiving sets.194 

Even before these letter circulars appeared as formal publications, they were widely printed on the new radio pages introduced by newspapers every. 

where.195 Altogether, in that first year of the radio boom the Bureau issued 

almost a hundred reports, most of them typewritten or mimeographed, to 

meet the demand for radio data and instruction of radio technicians.196 

Available too was the Bureau's compendious Circular 74, "Radio instruments 

and measurements," an encyclopedia of the theoretical and practical aspects 

of radio measurements. Less than a year after the boom started so many 

types of radio sets were on the market that the Bureau urged that a national 

movement be launched for the standardization of radio apparatus and 

service.'97 

The proliferation of radio receivers attracted thousands of hopeful 

station owners into the potentially lucrative broadcasting field, and for every 

one that succumbed, two stood ready to take his place. But there was more to 

it than building a station and selling air time even in those days. Of fewer 

than a thousand channels or noninterfering wavelengths in the then utilizable 

radio wave spectrum, only 89 were available to American broadcasting. 

Interference between stations as some 500 of them competed in these wave- lengths raised immediate difficulties, and became insufferable when, in order 

to drown out competition and reach snore people, stations that could afford 

it increased their power.'98 

Since radio had long been used almost exclusively by ships, the 

Federal Radio Law of 1912 had made the Bureau of Navigation in the 

Department of Commerce responsible for licensing stations and assigning 

wavelengths. It was a toothless law5 for Commerce could not deny or revoke a license, and bills proposed by Commerce for "policing the ether" repeatedly 

LC43 (Feb. 15, 1922) described the crystal set, LC48 (July 26, 1922) the vacuum tube set. The other letters were LC39, LC44, and LC46. 

C121, C122, and C133 were published in 1922; C137 and C141 in 1923. Two 

commercial publishers not only reprinted C120, on the crystal set, but copyrighted their 

booklet, and had to be enjoined. NBS Progress Report, May 1922 (NBS Box 24, PRM) 

NBS Annual Report 1922, p. 56. 

LC66 (June 1922) offered a partial list of almost 275 manufacturers and distributors 

of radio receiving equipment. 

late as 1928 most stations still operated on 500 watts, with some up to 1,000 watts. 

The most powerful, 50,000 watts, had a radius of less than 500 miles. Schubert, The 

Electric Word, pp. 223—224. 
288 

Above, Mrs. W. F. Harlow of the radio division, NBS, listens with 

something like incredulity to a radio broadcast picked up by a 

homemade crystal set. 

Below, the widely circulated wiring diagram 

and details of that Bu- reau crystal set that 

could be built for $10. TELLPHONL DIAGRAM AND DLTAILS OFRLCfJVING5[T 
POLICING THE ETHER 289 

died in committee.199 Without the least power to regulate a licensee, Commerce could only propose solutions and seek the compliance of the stations. 

At a conference called in March 1923, the Department and the stations agreed to abolish the term "wavelength" for that of "frequency," the 

latter representing the number of oscillations of the radio wave per second, 

expressed in kilocycles per second.20° The band of frequencies between 550 

and 1350 (later 1500) kilocycles was to be set aside for commercial broadcasting, and by dividing the country into 5 radio zones and setting station 

frequencies 5 kilocycles apart, 570 broadcasters could be accommodated in 

the 89 available channels. 

Stations continued to proliferate and the air waves grew crowded 

again. Conferences in 1924 and 1925 moved ship traffic out of the broadcasting band, and by duplication on the east and west coasts, room was found for an additional 30 stations. By 1926, another 155 new stations 

raised the total on the air to more than 730 and the chaos had become com- plete. The radio industry begged to be regulated and Congress had to 

oblige, On February 23, 1927, the Federal Radio Commission (to become 

the Federal Communications Commission in 1934), with policing power 

over its decisions, established public ownership and regulation of the air waves. The boom and battle of the stations came to an end. 

Members of the radio section of the Bureau participated as technical 

advisers at all the early radio conferences, chief among them Dr. J. Howard 

and Dr. Charles B. Johiffe, who laid the groundwork for the 

formation of the FRC. As 'brilliant and sound in radio research as he was in planning and directing its research by others, Dellinger become the first 

chief engineer of the FRC. He was to leave 'his name in radio terminology a decade later with his discovery of the simultaneous occurrence of visible 

solar eruptions and semi-worldwide sudden radio fadeouts, a phenomenon 

known as "the Dellinger effect." 201 Jolliffe, who jo:ined the Bureau' radio group on getting his doctorate 

at Cornell in 1922, succeeded to the Commission post when Dellinger re- turned to the Bureau in 1930. A researcher and organizer himself, Jolliffe 

moved on the the RCA Laboratories in 1935, later becoming executive vice 

president and technical director of the company and its laboratories.202 

in order to learn about radio transmitting at first hand, the Bureau 

itself became one of the first of the broadcasters, antedating KDKA by sev- eral months, when in 1920, at the request of the Bureau of Markets in the 

Herbert Hoover, "Policing the ether," Sci. Am. 127, 80 (1922). 

'°° NBS Annual Report 1923, P. 71. 201 See ch. VI, p. 351. on the FRC work of Dellinger and Jolliffe appears in NBS Box 234, 

IEW (1928); Box 296, AP; Box 303, IEW; and Box 321, PRM. 
290 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

Department of Agriculture, it pioneered an experimental radio market and 

crop report service. Even before that the Bureau had successfully transmitted music and speech for short distances over its station, but—such was the novelty of broadcasting—for the sake of reliability the Bureau resorted 

to Morse telegraph for the market reports. After operating the service for 

1 months, the Bureau turned it over to the Post Office, whose stations already 

served the air mail.203 

It was not transmission but reception that harbored the real gremlins 

of radio communication. The first of the technical difficulties that came to 

the Bureau as commercial broadcasting began was that of fading or variations in the intensity of received signals. A statistical study conducted by 

the Bureau traced still other forms of interference to their source in amateur 

equipment, radiating receiving sets, and powerlines, arc lights and other non- radio electrical equipment.204 Although queries about fading and noise 

began arriving at the Bureau in 1921, little was done about them at the time 

because of the even greater obstacle to reception, the interference between 

stations in the overcrowded air. 

203 NBS Annual Report 1921, p. 69; letters, SWS to Secretary of Agriculture, May 17 

and Sept. 7, 1921 (NBS Box 10, JEW). 

Dellinger and Whittemore, "Radio signal fading phenomena," J. Wash. Acad. Sci. 

11, 245 (1921) ; LC182, "Electrical interference with radio reception" (September 

1925). 

The phonograph playing into the high-power radiotelephone transmitter may be the 

experimental "broadcast station" pioneered by the Bureau. The date of the photograph is September 1920. 
POLICING THE ETHER 291 

If simple restriction on their proliferation, as the obvious solution to 

station interference, impinged on free enterprise, a degree of order seemed 

possible if the stations would operate exclusively on the frequency assigned 

to them, use as small power as was required to reach the necessary distance, 

and use waves as sharp as possible. The first two remedies were outside 

the realm of the Bureau, and it therefore concentrated on the measurement 

and control of the radio waves emanating from the stations, since the fluctuations in their width determined their capacity for interference.205 Typical was the experience of a listener in Baltimore who reported interference 

between two broadcasting stations, one in Cincinnati, the other in California. 

The interference arose, the Bureau learned, because one of the stations was off its assigned frequency by one-half percent. 

Bureau development of new and improved types of wavemeters, 

wavemeter scales, and devices for rapid radiofrequency measurements gave 

the Radio Inspection Service of Commerce better instruments for detecting 

and monitoring broadcasting frequencies.206 Then in 1923, in order to provide means of self-policing, by enabling broadcasting and other stations to 

hold exactly to their assigned frequencies, the Bureau set up a standard of 

frequency and began sending out precise signals over its laboratory transmitter, WWV, set up at Beltsville, Md. The frequency signals were transmitted in groups each day so that the range from 125 to 6000 kilocycles was covered every 2 weeks for all stations within range of the Bureau signal. 

The obvious advantage of the service soon led to more frequent transmission 

of the signals and to their broadcast over a nationwide system of standard 

frequency stations.207 

Holding to an assigned frequency was not always enough in the noisy 

crowded air at that time. In January 1924 when the dirigible Shenandoah 

tore loose from her mast at Lakehurst during a winter storm and with only a skeleton crew aboard was lost for almost 20 hours, all New York broadcasting stations went off the air to keep from interfering with her messages.208 

An enormous improvement on the original frequency standard—a 

tuning fork device—was the piezo oscillator which used a quartz plate 

vibrating at a radio frequency.200 As modified by the Bureau, it furnished an 

202 NBS Annual Report 1923, pp. 64—65. Dellinger, "The Bureau of Standards lends a hand," Radio Broadcast, 2, 40 (1922). 

207 Letter, Acting Director, NBS, to Department of Electrical Engineering, Pennsylvania 

State College, Jan. 26, 1923 (NBS Box 46, JEW); NBS Annual Report 1923, pp. 66—69; 

Southworth,. Forty Years of Radio Research, p. 40; LC171 (1925), superseded by 

LC280 (1930). 

John Toland, Ships in the Sky, p. 85. 209 The piezo or pressure electricity effect on quartz was first identified by Pierre Curie in 

1880. Its application to radio stations was described in LC223, "Use of piezo oscillators" 

(1927). 
292 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

extraordinary selective, precise, and portable frequency standard both for 

the use of radio inspectors and for the stations themselves. The remarkable 

accuracy of about 0.01 percent attained with the oscillator closely agreed with 

that of the national laboratories abroad, as comparison tests disclosed, but 

it was not enough for the Bureau. Mechanical ingenuity and capital had 

already created a far more acute situation in broadcasting in this country 

than abroad. The Bureau therefore aimed at absolute frequency values with a certainty of 0.001 percent. It achieved them before the decade was Upon formal adoption by the Federal Radio Commission in 1927 of 

frequency standards for broadcasting stations, the Bureau was made re- sponsible for their testing. New allocation of broadcasting channels and 

station restrictions imposed by the Commission, as well as the improved 

instruments, equipment, and filtering devices that had become available, 

ameliorated the problem of station interference for the time being. The 

Dellinger, "The status of frequency standardization," Proc. IRE, 16, 579 (1928). 

That certainty, to within 1 part in 100,000, was exceeded in 1930 when the Bureau devised a primary frequency standard with an error of 1 part in several million (NBS Annual 

Report 1930, p. 22; RP759, 1935). By 1960, with frequency standards based on atomic radiation beams, reliability was in the range of parts in 10 billion. (Dellinger, 

MS," Fifty years of radio in the NBS," 3 March 1961, p. 6, NBS Historical File.) 

Dr. I. Howard Dellinger examines the continuous recording of super-power tests of 

station Schenectady. In 1926 when this picture was taken, WGY had been 

granted permission to broadcast regularly twice a week on 50,000 watts. WGY assisted the Bureau for a number of years in both its studies of radio interference and 

its compiling of radio propagation data. 
POLICING THE ETHER 293 

Bureau turned again to the study of radio fading—"the vagaries of radio 

wave propagation," in the Bureau's blanket term—that by the mid-twenties 

had come to be considered "the principal obstacle to radio development." 211 A survey several years before had dispelled the belief that increasing 

transmitter power would overcome fading, or that high power itself con- tributed to the fading phenomenon. It was learned that appreciable fading 

occurred as close as 8 miles distant from a broadcasting station and that the 

irregularities in reception resulted in part at least from the multiplicity of 

paths followed by the wave from the station to the receiving set. The primary 

sources of fading seemed associated with the ionized air of the KennellyHeaviside layer, a radio-wave conducting surface identified with the ionosphere, some 60 miles up.212 

Aware that the task of measuring even some of the phenomena of 

radio fading was beyond its powers, the Bureau group under Dellinger 

secured the cooperation of 23 university, industrial, and commercial radio 

laboratories in recording fading data. General Electric's station WGY and 

the Westinghouse station KDKA provided the transmission. It took more 

than a year to sort out the collected data, but the figures seemed to establish a number of facts that had previously been only surmises. 

Fading was greatest from 60 to 125 miles from the broadcasting 

stations, and was almost certainly due to variable absorption of the transmitted waves in the upper atmosphere. The phenomenon occurred between 

the ground-transmitted wave and the wave that returned, from the ionosphere. 

While there' seemed no consistent correlation between fading and weather con- ditions, day and night variations in the degree of fading were consistent, and 

during the solar eclipse that occurred in 1925, the fading phenomenon 

mimicked the day and night fading pattern.213 

Although fading was quite pronounced on the shorter wavelengths 

of high frequency transmission, the Bureau was to learn that it presented even greater difficulties at very high frequencies. Except for Austin's work 

in the Navy radio laboratory at the Bureau,214 the possibilities of shortwave 

(very high frequency) radio communication had been neglected in the ex- citement of the work in broadcasting. The shortwave spectrum had been 

briefly explored in 1922 when the Army Air Service complained to the Bu211 NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 19. Dellinger discussed the scope of the problem in "The 

International Union of Scientific Radio Telegraphy," Science, 64, 638 (1926). 212 The first suggestion of ionized or "electrically conducting strata" in the upper region 

of the atmosphere in connection with radio wave propagation was reported simultaneously by Sir Oliver Heaviside in England and Arthur H. Kennelly in this country at 

the turn of the century. See Kennelly in Elec. World & Eng. 39, 473 (1902), and 

account in S476 (Dellinger, Whittemore, and Kruse, 1923). 213 S561 (Dellinger, Jolliffe, and Parkinson, 1927); NBS Annual Report 1928, p. 8. 214 Described in LC194 (Mar. 10, 1926). 
294 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

reau of increasing interference in its radio reception. Dellinger's group 

found at that time that in the narrower band of frequencies utilized by radio 

telephony interference was greatly reduced. Although uncertain of the practicability of using that band, the Bureau developed apparatus transmitting 

and receiving on a frequency of 3000 kc for the Air Service. The two-way 

tests between Washington and Pittsburgh proved successful, with materially 

less broadcast interference as well as less atmospheric fading.215 

By 1925 the vast and previously untrammeled range of frequencies 

between 1500 and 23,000 kc had come into extensive use by transocean com- munication companies, in ship telephony, and airplane-to-ground communications, and by the military services, amateurs, and broadcast relay stations 

using it to set up the first radio networks. Three years later, the high frequency channels, as yet unallocated and in common use by all nations, were as congested as the broadcast channels had been. Moreover, real knowledge 

of the high frequency spectrum was still meager, use of high frequencies was admittedly still in the experimental stage, and despite early optimism it was now known that they were "subject to greater vagaries than radio waves of 

lower frequency." 216 Many of the questions raised by these preliminary observations on radio wave propagation and the phenomena of fading would, as Dellinger 

reported, require years of research and development. He might better have 

said "decades," for the quest goes on to this day, increasing in scope as knowledge increases.217 In applied radio, where Federal agencies continually sought new radio equipment for their air and sea commefce, progress was more rapid. 

From its very beginning broadcast radio raised hob with the Bureau's 

radio direction finder (radio compass) on ships trying to pick up signals 

from the shore stations along the coast. No sooner had the Bureau designed 

225 NBS Annual Report 1923, p. 66, and correspondence in NBS Box 10, IEW. 

"° Dellinger, MS, "The high frequency spectrum," Jan. 17, 1928 (NBS Historical File) - Of interest is Dellinger's report in the American Year Book for 1928, p. 462, of the 

first transmission by broadcasting and high frequency stations "of pictures and of mov- ing pictures and television [via rotating discs and photoelectric cells]. * * * The re- ceived moving images were crude silhouettes or barely recognized faces." Television 

remained a laboratory novelty as late as 1940, the year radio reached the peak of its 

popularity, with 45 million sets in 33 million homes, serviced by 882 broadcasting stations. William Kenney, The Crucial Years, 1940—45 (New York: Macfadden-Bartell 

Corp., 1962), p. 116. 217 The American Telephone & Telegraph laboratories began studies of the ionosphere 

in the 1920's, in the interest of long-distance radio communication, but "later recognized 

that this type of work should be carried out by more centralized bodies [Le., the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and the National Bureau of 

Standards] for the benefit of the whole industry." Maclaurin, Invention and Innovation 

in the Radio Industry, pp. 161—162. 
POLICING THE ETHER 295 a special high-frequency radiotelephone for a new fleet of patrol boats put 

in service by the Coast Guard than the Bureau was asked to convert their 

radio compasses to similar high frequency reception. The new radio com- pass, using a frequency of 2100 kc led next to a portable unit that the 

Bureau of Navigation sought for shipping, with a useful range of 90 to 

7700 kc.218 — While the radio compass was useful for locating a radio signal source, 

acting as a radio beacon to guide ships at sea or planes in flight, Federal 

aviation, when it added passengers to its mail flights and extended its operations, required greater safeguards than the compass could provide.219 (European aviation was to rely entirely on radio direction finders for another 

two decades at least.) Shortly after the establishment of the Aeronautical 

Division in Commerce, the Bureau was asked to begin work at once on better air navigation aids. 

-The Bureau's first crude radio guidance system for aircraft was tested 

in 1921, when a pilot flew along a course designated by signals sent from 

two transmitting coils on the ground. The prototype radio beacon produced 

2 years later for the Army Air Service was put aside for further work on the 

radio compass. Without passengers, flying the mail was high adventure 

and the pilots liked it that way. Work on a beacon was not resumed until 

1926.220 

It was the inventive talents of Harry Diamond, who came to the 

Bureau in 1927, that resulted 2 years later in the first visual-type radiobeacon 

system anywhere, enabling a pilot to keep on course and know his approximate position at all times while in flight.221 Incidental to the system, the 

Bureau constructed receiving sets of special design for use in planes and 

improved shielding against interference from the engine ignition. A year 

later, in 1930, a 15-pound unit that Diamond added to the radio range beacon 

218 S428 (Koister and Dunmore, 1921); NBS Annual Report 1922, p. 57; S525 (Dunmore, 

1926); S536 (Dunmore, 1926). 219 By 1924 regular day and night mail service had been established between New York 

and San Francisco via Chicago and Cheyenne. By the end of 1928, 48 airways covering 

20,000 miles linked 355 cities in the United States. Slosson, The Great Crusade and 

After, p. 401; Aircraft Year Book, 1929 (New York: Aeronautics Chamber of Com- merce of America, Inc.), p. 103. 

"°NBS Annual Report 1921, p. 68; S480 (Engle and Dunmore, 1923). Letter, Harry 

Diamond to Leland Jamieson, Nov. 16, 1939 (NBS Box 431, IEW), credits P. D. Lowell 

of the Bureau with the suggestion for the radio range beacon about 1922, the experimental work carried out under his guidance in 1922—23 by Engel and Dunmore. 

221 RP1S9 (Dellinger, Diamond, and Dunmore, 1929). 

Born in Russia at the turn of the century, Diamond graduated from MIT and taught 

for 4 years at Lehigh University before he came to the Bureau as a radio engineer. 

His electronic genius served the Bureau and the Nation well, notably during World 

War II. His driving, tireless energy was to bring him to an untimely death in 1948. 
296 

A Curtiss Fledgling was equipped in 1931 with the first complete system for blind 

landing of an aircraft and demonstrated its practicability by an extensive series of 

hooded landings at College Park, Md., and at Newark Airport. 

The dual-pointer landing indicator on the instrument panel gave the pilot a visual 

indication of his position in space with respect to the approach glide path. Adopted 

and adapted by the Civil Aeronautics Administration, this NBS radio instrument 

landing system is basic to the present universally used ILS blind landing system. 
POLICING THE ETHER 297 

and radiotelephone in the cockpit made possible the first blind landing of 

an airplane entirely by radio guidance.222 

Blind flying and blind landing—that is, flying under conditions 

of no visibility—required the pilot to know his position in three dimensions at 

all times. This was achieved with indicators on his instrument panel which 

recorded signals from a small direction beacon, giving the pilot his lateral or 

landing field position; a marker beacon, giving the pilot his longitudinal or 

approach position; and an inclined ultrahigh frequency radio beam that con- tinuously reported his height. One important difficulty remained. The 

Commerce Department transmitted weather information to planes on the same frequency it used for ships, while the radio beacon operated on a different frequency. This meant that the pilot had to keep switching his frequencies and also contend with interference from marine radios. The difficulty was solved by adding a device allowing voice communication without 

interruption to the range service.223 

Diamond himself operated the radio in the first of the test series of 

directional and blind flights made between the Bureau experimental air station at College Park, Md., and Newark Airport, the latter chosen because of 

its heavy traffic—even then. The system proved highly satisfactory, and in 

1933 it was turned over to the Department of Commerce.224 

That same year the Bureau devised a new type of radio direction 

finder that operated on the radio waves of broadcasting stations. It was designed for the use of itinerant fliers, such as barnstormers and other non- government fliers, who did not have the special equipment necessary to use the radio range beacon. 225 The twenties witnessed extraordinary developments in radio tech. 

nology, and extraordinary radio sales. The radio and automobile industries 

were the bellwethers of that most prosperous-seeming of decades, paying the 

highest wages and leading the way in mass production and mass consumption 

techniques. and the standard of living inched up, goods and gro. 

ceries were plentiful and relatively cheap, and boom followed boom, real or 

inflated, in industry, in consumer services, in real estate, and utilities. The 

Nation speculated, buying stock on margin as it bought appliances. The 

bootblack and the grocer took fliers, and life savings went into marginal ac- A previous blind landing was achieved in July 1929 when Lt. James Doolittle brought 

down a hooded plane using a sensitive barometric altimeter, a gyro-stabilized horizon, 

together with a radio lateral course indicator and marker beacon supplied by the Bureau. 

223 RP238 (Diamond and Dunmore, 1930); RP341 (Kear and Wintermute, 1931). 

RP602 (Diamond, 1933); Frank G. Kear, "Instrument landing at the NBS," IRE 

Trans. on Aeronautical and Navigation Electronics, vol. ANE—6, No. 2, June 195Q. 

RP621 (Hinman, 19331. 
298 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30) 

counts. 226 The fever struck the Bureau too, but was to some extent con- tained. Because of the Bureau's close connection with industry and possible 

access to knowledge that niight be useful, a matter of ethics was involved and 

speculation was quietly discouraged. But no one was exempt from the conse- quences of the delirium as the Nation headed for the crash. 

Not "everyone" was in the market, but active speculators, as distinguished from those 

who took fliers, probably numbered close to a million, in a nation of 30 million families. 

John K. Gaibraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (Boston: Houghton Mifihin, 1961), pp. 82—83. 

The Winchester bushel of Henry VII, a corn bushel, with a capacity of 

2,150.5 cubic inches. This was the 

first English standard measure of 

capacity of which there is any 

cognizance. 
THE TIME 

OF THE GREAT 

DEPRESSION (1931—40) 

CHAPTER VI 

THE BUREAU IN THE PUBLIC VIEW 

The better-homes movement and the standardization crusade of the twenties, 

fed by fountains of publicity, made the Bureau known to the public as it had 

never been before. The spate of articles in the Saturday Evening Post, 

Collier's, Popular Mechanics, Literary Digest, and Everybody's describing 

how Uncle Sam was saving millions for autoists, homeowners, and the con- sumer industries acquainted the general public with a helping hand in Washington, available to all, of whose existence many had not previously been 

aware. The publicity had some remarkable consequences. 

The Bureau since its founding had been a high-level information 

center, an assaying office for inventions and ideas, and a court of appeal, to 

which Congressmen sent inquiries from their constituents, businessmen their 

production problems, and inventors their notions for appraisal. The Bureau, 

after making tests, had politely discouraged citizens of the Great Lakes 

States who saw their peat and its byproducts as unlimited substitutes for 

coal and oil, had sent investigators to examine clays, sands, and mans oft" 

hopeful economic value on behalf of owners of exhausted farmland, and 

explained repeatedly to would-be inventors the technical fallacies in their 

tide motors, and why a hole 12 miles deep, to harness the earth's heat, was impracticable.1 

Incoming mail at the Bureau surged following the appearance in the 

early twenties of magazine articles on "Uncle Sam's Questio.n.and.Answer 

Office" that pointed out that by "Federal law, every government department 

has to answer every letter which it receives, irrespective of whether the 

epistles come from lunatics or scientific ignoramuses." 2 The articles cited a dentist's request for a method of measuring wear and tear on false teeth, 

and a businessman's interest in a motor-driven letter opener to speed clearin NBS Box 12, IN; Box 13, INM. 

2 George H. Dacy, "Answering a hundred million questions," Illustrated World, 37, 823 

(1922); S. R. Winters, "Uncle Sam's question-and-answer office," Sd. Am. 129, 114 

(1923). 

299 
300 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

ance of his morning's mail. A potential voter had written to her Congressman for the recipe she was certain the Bureau of Standards had for a cosmetic 

to protect her complexion when she played tennis or went bathing. 

Some of the queries sent to the Bureau were not as farfetched as they 

seemed at first glance, as Dr. Coblentz observed in one of his monthly reports: 

That the Optical Division of this Bureau should be called upon to 

help solve [the problem of increasing the birth-rate of pigs and 

decreasing the price of bacon] seems comical on first thought. 

Nevertheless, the question presented by a large forest-products cor- poration, of the proper windows for hog houses, was a fair one 

that is worthy of consideration. Perhaps the inquiry should have 

been turned over to the Housing Commission for more mature 

consideration. However, having had some experience with problems in solar radiation as well as the farrowing of pigs, advice was given on the proper arrangement of hog-house windows in order 

to trap and conserve the maximum amount of sunlight.3 

But many of the inquiries from the public in that decade, whether 

addressed to the "Natural Bureau of Standards," "National Bureau of St. 

Andrews," "National Burrough of Standards," "National Brewer of Standards," occasionally the "Department of Science," or by its right name, defied 

the best minds of the Bureau. Would the Bureau describe "what the average American should be"? Had it a pamphlet on "what the well-dressed 

person should wear"? Would the Bureau please send its booklets dealing 

with "protection against the electric influence of radioactive Dictagraphs, 

the kind that follow people around everywhere * * * and influence * * * 

hypnotically"? 

Newspaper stories in the period announcing somewhat prematurely 

the imminence of an age of atomic energy aroused interest and apprehension.5 How, wrote a correspondent, might he "avoid being hit by the 'death 

ray'"? Another asked whether he ought not to sell his gas and electric 

stock—to which Dr. Crittenden replied that he had better keep it, since no method was yet in sight to hasten or retard the natural disintegration of 

radium or other radioactive materials. Nor, wrote the Bureau to another 

correspondent, was science in a position to release atomic energy by the 

rapid withdrawal of the magnetic field in a quantity of matter, not even that 

containing the heavy atom of uranium, thorium, or radium. And to some- one who proposed to obtain heat from the oxygen and hydrogen in water, 

NBS Box 23, PRM, December 1922. 

Correspondence in NBS Box 162, 1G. 

Contributing to the speculations were a series of speeches and articles by a member of 

the Bureau, Dr. Paul D. Foote. See his "Ancient and modern alchemy," Cml. Age, 31, 

337 and 423 (1923), and "The Alchemist," Sci. Mo. 19, 239 (1924). 
THE BUREAU IN THE PUBLIC VIEW 301 

the Bureau offered the warning that this defiance of the law of conservation 

of matter, "would upset the whole structure of physics and chemistry." 6 The Bureau received an average of a letter a month announcing the 

discovery of a perpetual motion device, and to the invariable request that it 

be tested, the Bureau answered that it would be delighted, upon submission 

of a working model. So many letters came asking for devices to locate 

buried treasure that the Bureau composed a form letter. was really 

"cheaper to dig over the suspected region than to attempt to build such 

equipment," said the Bureau.7 

Not all was chaff. Publicity given to the beneficial effects of airplane 

flights on those hard of hearing or even totally deaf led to many requests for 

treatment in the Bureau's high-altitude chamber. The Bureau always agreed 

to accept patients with types of deafness that might respond to this treatment, 

provided medical supervision was furnished.8 But the medical panacea of 

the twenties was radium (it had been electric belts and electric accumulators 

bef ore that), and the Bureau was besieged with requests from firms and factories to verify their radium appliances or certify their radium preparations. 

Sent to the Bureau for tests, in order to obtain American Medical Association 

approval, were numerous radium injection preparations, "facial radium 

applicators," and "radium salves," the latter offered as gangrene and cancer 

cures. Devices for inhaling radium emanations, a do.it-yourself "hydroradium activator" for making potable radium salts (guaranteed to induce 

mental as well as physical stimulation), and "Radithor—the perpetual 

sunshine drink" found avid markets well into the 1930's.9 

In 1924 the Bureau discontinued its certification of radioactive prep. 

arations, but continued to test them at the request of the Post Office, the 

Federal Trade Commission, and health authorities. On the basis of their 

minute or nonexistent radioactivity, the Bureau reported the patented waters, 

muds, slimes, and other concoctions "no more dangerous than a day out in 

the sun" and uniformly useless.'° Radium was known to inflict superficial 

'Correspondence in NBS Box 14, IPXA; Box 41, ICC; Box 45, lEG. See also NBS 

Box 47, AG; Box 83, IC; Box 119, IG; Box 121, IM. 

Letter, GKB to Office of Secretary of Commerce, Jan. 18, 1926 (NBS Box 166, IN); 

letter, GKB, Dec. 1, 1927 (NBS Box 201, IE). 

It may be noted here that by 1923 the Bureau was handling over 244,200 pieces of firstclass mail annually or more than 800 incoming, and outgoing pieces each working day 

(NBS Annual Report 1923, pp. 320—321). A count made in 1939, in a 3.day period 

chosen at random, showed almost 800 incoming letters requesting technical information, 

the same number of telephone calls on technical matters, 450 letters asking for publica. 

tions, and 429 visitors who called at the Bureau for scientific or technical information or help (Hearings * * * 1940, Apr. 21, 1939, p. 154). 

Letter, GKB, Feb. 11, 1926 (NBS Box 166, INA). 

o Letter, SWS to AMA, May 13, 1922 (NBS Box 14, IPXR). 

10 NBS mimographed letter, June 30, 1924 (NBS Box 103, TPX). 
302 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

burns when applied externally, but that skin lesions had insidious effects was not so well known. Despite this, and the total ignorance of the effects 

of radium when taken internally, the American Medical Association did not 

remove radium for internal administration from its list of recognized 

remedies until 1932. 

The standardization crusade that did so much to fix the public 

image of the Bureau as a "great scientific business [operated ii for the 

common benefit of all the people" acted in yet another way. Consumers 

and those interested in consumer welfare began asking what precise benefits the public derived from standardization. Critics of the Bureau appeared 

who saw only too well how its efforts at standardization and simplification 

saved money for industry but little evidence that those savings were passed 

on to the householder. 

The Bureau was at some fault itself. It extolled its consumer re- search without making clear the distinction between the "organized con- sumer," meaning Federal, State, and city agencies and hospital, hotel and 

similar trade associations which were direct beneficiaries of its research, 

and the "over-the-counter consumer" or man in the street. Yet the Bureau was sincerely concerned for the individual consumer and assured him in 

correspondence and publications that he was the' ultimate beneficiary of all 

its research, in better products and better quality.11 Even more direct aid was available to the consumer through Bureau publications on incandescent 

An indirect consumer service of the Bureau was its unpublicized investigations for 

the Federal Trade Commission, Postal Service, Justice Department, and Treasury Department, particularly in the scientific detection of misrepresentation, fraud, and high 

crime. Misleading advertising and misrepresentation of products became subjects of 

Bureau investigation almost from its inception, but interest in crime did not begin 

until 1913 when Albert S. Osborn, -author of Questioned Documents, sent some micrometers to the Bureau for calibration. By chance, the instruments were tested 

by Dr. Wilmer Souder of the weights and measures division, who became interested in 

the scientific detection of crime. His laboratory, with Dr. Stratton's encouragement, 

was for almost two decades the principal crime research center in the Federal Government, long antedating the organization of a crime laboratory in the Federal Bureau of 

Investigation. The FBI Laboratory acquired its first scientist in 1932. 

Assistance from all the Bureau laboratories was available to Dr. Souder, especially the 

photographic technology laboratory, where Raymond Davis developed a method for 

photographing and deciphering almost completely charred records when the ordinary 

camera, the microscope, and chemical reagents failed (S454, 1922). Specializing in the 

identification of questoned documents, of typewriting, handwriting, bullets, cartridge 

cases, and firearms, Dr. Souder by the early 1930's was participating in some 50 to 75 

Federal investigations a year involving extortion, kidnapping, theft of money orders, 

raised checks, forgeries, stolen securities, and threatening letters. Bureau testimony in a contract case in 1935 was reported to have saved the Government almost $300,000, 

and in another instance settled the payment of income taxes on $1 million (NBS 

Annual Report 1935, p. 66; correspondence in NBS Box 386, IWI). 
THE BUREAU IN THE PUBLIC VIEW 303 

lamps, on "gas-savers," "fuel-savers," reclaimed rubber, the care of automobile tires, on battery additives, antifreeze solutions, and the characteristics of "good gasoline." Directed wholly to the consuming public too 

were the Bureau circulars on household measurements, materials, and safety, 

and on care and repair of the home. 

If industry resented this kind of Government research, the consumer 

protested it was not enough. The criticism came to a focus with the depression. In the considerable reorientation of Bureau research impelled by the 

economies of the depression, neither side was pleased. 

The criticism that began shortly after the war swelled to a storm in 

1923 and lasted for a decade. The Bureau was accused of meddling with the 

rights of private industry. It was said to be producing materials that should 

be made by industry. It served industry at the expense of the small consumer. 

It had become an adj unct of the Better Business Bureau. It was an engineering rather than a scientific research agency. It entertained too many interests 

outside the scope of its organic act. Many of the charges were exaggerated 

and, taken together, highly contradictory, but they possessed a common element of truth. The empire building of Stratton and Rosa, bequeathed intact 

to Burgess and maintained by him, made the Bureau vulnerable to the inference of expansionism.12 

The censure of the Bureau began and, for all practical purposes, ended 

with the American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC), over whose 

reorganization in 1919, in order to commit industry to standardization, the 

Bureau had presided. Much concerned to define the role of the Bureau in 

the standardization program, an AESC affiliate had pointedly observed that 

the Bureau "originally dealt largely, if not exclusively, with scientific problems." Was it authorized "to include also engineering standards, that is, 

problems of applied science"? Stratton's reply, that he "most emphatically 

had no intention of limiting the activities of the Bureau of Standards exclusively to what you call 'problems of pure science'," was not reassuring.13 

Nor was the published remark of Russell McBride, Bureau gas engineer, calculated to calm representatives of industry, that the Bureau had become 

"now * * * what is in effect a 'Bureau of Technology,' closely interwoven 

with, and in some measure superseding parts of, the original 'Bureau of 

Physics'." 14 

12 Dr. Burgess acknowledged the criticism in a speech on "Policies, problems, and practices of the NBS," dated Nov. 4, 1923 (MS in NBS Box 42, ID). 

18 Letter, SWS to president, Am. Soc. Mech. Eng., Sept. 12, 1919, and attached corre- spondence (NBS Box 2, AG). 

"McBride, "The National Bureau of Standards," Chem. & Met. Eng. 27, 1162 (1922). 

Cf. letter, H. D. Hubbard for Acting Secretary of Commerce to Secretary of State, 

Sept. 3, 1924: "The Bureau of Standards is primarily a laboratory for industrial research 

and standardization" (NBS Box 71, AG). 
304 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

The first serious disagreement with the AESC arose over the degree 

of Bureau involvement in the simplified practices program, which, the com- mittee asserted, increased the reluctance of some industries to accept the 

principles of simplification and standardization for which the AESC worked.15 

The establishment in 1927 of the trade standards division at the Bureau, 

for the purpose of bringing together the standardization, simplification, and 

specification activities of the AESC and the Bureau, at once met resistance. 

In 1928, at the direction of Dr. Agnew, its executive secretary (and 

former member of the Bureau), the AESC was reconstituted as the American 

Standards Association (ASA), with authority, through acceptance by con- census of its members, to make standards and validate them as well, and 

thereby "draw to itself * * * the bulk of standardization and simplification" in industry.16 Preliminary to the reorganization, the AESC formally 

requested Bureau withdrawal from all commercial standardization activities. 

A period of estrangement ensued during which Burgess and other Bureau 

members ceased to attend ASA meetings.17 

The resolution was rescinded, but the estrangement continued as the 

Bureau reported that whole series of projects begun by its trade standards 

group were being held up or deliberately duplicated by ASA and that the 

attitude of the association had become antagonistic. Claiming interference 

and lack of cooperation, ASA retorted that the Bureau was usurping ASA 

functions and was promoting Federal specifications as commodity standards. 

As a result, ASA claimed, both producing and consuming industries, fearful 

of Government interference, resisted the validation by ASA of standards 

largely determined by Federal agencies.18 The conflict of interests was not 

to be entirely resolved for another two decades. 

The ASA estrangement was but one manifestation of increasing cen- sure of Bureau research. in 1924 a Baltimore newspaper article, "What becomes of the money you pay in taxes," singled out the Bureau as representative of bureaucratic extravagance, claiming it wasted public funds on testing 

gas meters, recording the flight of golf balls, investigating fire hazards of 

motion picture film on ocean liners, testing watches, and making liquid air, 

all to no purpose.19 An editorial in the "Washington Post" on "Futile putter- 

"Letter, GKB to chairman, AESC, May 14, 1923 (NBS Box 43, IDP); memo, GKB for 

Durgin, Simplified Practices Division, Jan. 10, 1924 (Box 71, AG); memo, Crittenden 

for GKB, Sept. 30, 1925 (Box 141, PM, SSMC). 

"Eng. News-Record, 99,291 (1927); ibid., 101,712 (1928). 

Minutes, AESC Executive Committee, Jan. 19, 1928, par. 1923; rescinded in letter, 

chairman, AESC to GKB, June 15, 1928 (NBS Box 231, IDS—AESC). 18 Memo, Fairchild for GKB, Sept. 10, 1928 (NBS Box 231, ID—CS); letter, chairman, 

ASA to R. Hudson, Nov. 15, 1928 (Box 231, ID—SP). 

"Attached to memo, GKB for Assistant to Secretary of Commerce, Feb. 15, 1924, 

and Bureau articles, in manuscript, in reply (NBS Box 71, AG). 
THE BUREAU IN THE PUBLiC VIEW 305 

ers in Washington," which was widely reprinted, rounded on "the paladins.of 

precision" at the Bureau to which Congress had given "a blanket charter to go as far as it likes * * * [investigating] everything under the round and shining sun." Other research agencies of the Government, particularly in the 

Department of Agriculture, shared in the editorial complaints, but the Bureau was the focus of the storm. The rumbling had been of some duration and 

apparently had reached Congress. The "Post" editorialist, summing up the 

questionable research, recommended that in the promised general shakeup 

of Federal bureaus "this small dust in the balances of government may as 

well be swept out. It will never be missed." 20 In this, as in each instance of attack, the answered with a statement of the need and authority for its research. It was to little purpose. 

Acting on complaints of industry, the Comptroller General in 1925 informed 

the Bureau that it had no right to manufacture optical glass for the Navy 

or to make special castings for the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Transferred 

funds for those purposes would be withheld. The Bureau replied that it alone 

manufactured a suitable optical glass in sufficient quantity for Navy requirements, and that its castings, made "in connection with the Bureau of Standard's investigation of such material," were experimental and noncompetitive. 

Satisfied, the Comptroller General released the funds.21 

Industry was not alone in its criticism of the Bureau, nor was Dr. 

Agnew, executive secretary of the ASA, the only Bureau-trained censor. On a 

wholly different tack was the private war of Frederick J. Schlink, former 

technical assistant to Dr. Stratton and from 1922 to 1931 the assistant secre- tary of the ASA. He was to carry his feud with the Bureau into the thirties 

from the offices of Consumers' Research, Inc., which he founded with Stuart 

Chase in 1929. 

In 1925—27, while an officer of the AESC, Schlink, with Stuart Chase, 

wrote a series of eminently readable articles for the New Republic (subsequently published as Getting Your Money's Worth) that had as a principal 

target the Bureau of Standards.22 The authors estimated that the Bureau, 

operating on a budget of $2 million, saved the Government better than a hundred million dollars a year through its testing of products. That same 

20 The editorial also appeared July 2, 1925 in the "Philadelphia Public Ledger" and "New 

York Evening Post" (NBS Box 108, AG, and Box 139, PA). 

Letter, GKB to Secretary of Commerce, July 21, 1925 (NBS Box 112, FPG); letter, 

Acting Secretary of Commerce to Comptroller General of the United States, August 3, 

1925 (NBS Box 111, FL); letter, GKB to Chairman, Navy BuOrd, June 14, 1926 (NBS 

Box 170, IRG). 

22While probably not endorsed by the AESC, the articles and book may have had some support in the AESC's pique with the Bureau at the time. See Getting Your Money's 

Worth: a Study in the Waste of the Consumer's Dollar (New York: Macmillan, 1927, re- printed 1931), pp. 82, 98. 
306 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

research and testing, said Schlink and Chase, would save the public at 

least a billion dollars annually if Bureau test results were made available 

in a form that the consumer could use. They declared invalid in an agency 

operated on taxpayers' money the Bureau argument that release of its test 

results on competitive products, and identifying them by name, would "promote commercial injustice." They proposed a consumers' rebellion, and 

urged the public to act through Congress to secure release of all Government 

information of consumer interest, particularly that concealed in the publications and files of the Bureau of Standards and the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry.23 

In a book he wrote in 1929, Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, former chief of 

the Bureau of Chemistry, father of the Food and Drug Act, inveterate 

polemicist, and at that time director of research on Good Housekeeping 

magazine, made one of the most virulent and comprehensive of the attacks on the character of research at the Bureau up to that time.24 Besides his 

condemnation of Bureau investigations that encroached on provinces of 

other research agencies in the Government, he assailed at length, as did 

Schlink and other critics, the research associate plan at 

the Bureau which performed research directly for the benefit of industry 

at the taxpayer's expense. And he struck at "the expansive activities of thç 

Bureau of Standards," citing its use of transferred funds— 

to investigate oil pollution, radio direction for the Coast Guard, 

helium recorders, chromium plating, corrosion, fatigue and em- brittlement of duralumin, electrically charged dust, optical glass, 

substitutes for parachute silk, goldbeaters skin, storage batteries, 

internal combustion engines, fuels, lubricants, photographic emul. 

sions, stresses in riveted joints, machine guns, bomb ballistics, rope 

and cordage, chemical and metallurgical tests, wind tunnel tests 

of models, aircraft engines, velocity of flame in explosives * * 

caroa fibers * * * and farm wastes 

23 The same criticism of the Bureau appeared in Dr. Robert A. Brady's article, "How 

Government standards affect the ultimate consumer," Ann. Amer. Acad. Soc. Pol. Sci. 

137, 245 (1928), and in Schlink's article, "Standards and specifications from the standpoint of the ultimate consumer," ibid. issue. 

The Bureau position has been repeatedly pointed out. The creation of a Government 

laboratory to test consumer goods sounds eminently reasonable. But the Bureau has 

long been aware how impossibly large and controversial such a project would be. Health 

hazards may justify the Food and Drug Administration, but to cover all consumer 

products in order to mitigate merely economic hazards would be a herculean task. 

Interview with Dr. F. B. Silsbee, Mar. 10, 1964. 

The recitation of grievances appeared in a remarkable digression in his History of a Crime against the Food Law (Privately printed, Washington, D.C., 1929), wherein a whole chapter (pp. 281—345) was devoted to the Bureau. 
THE BUREAU IN THE PUBLIC VIEW 307 as evidence that the Bureau was in direct competition with private research 

laboratories such as the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research and Arthur 

D. Little, Inc. There was no more warrant in the organic act of the Bureau 

for this commercial research, Wiley declared, than there was for its "architectural excursions" in building pilot plants to manufacture dextrose and 

levulose. The Bureau, he concluded, was badly in need of policing.25 

The recurring charge that the Bureau interpreted its authority over 

weights and measures as a license to investigate literally everything that 

could be weighed or measured, appeared also in a pamphlet entitled "Why 

not reorganize the Bureau of Standards?" published in 1929 by William E. 

Bullock, secretary of the antimetric society, the American Institute of Weights 

and Measures.26 If this was simply a random gadfly attack, a letter that 

same year from Arthur D. Little, president of Arthur D Little, Inc., was not. It was an ultimatum from industry. Many prominent chemists and 

chemical engineers, he wrote, were convinced that "the Bureau has extended 

its efforts far outside its legitimate field," and "threatened to take the whole 

question before the House Committee on Appropriations." 27 Provoked by "the four-year furor" over its research in industry, Dr. 

Burgess submitted the controversy and a statement of the Bureau position 

and its program of research to the Department of Justice for a legal opinion. 

Justice ruled that the extension of Bureau activities beyond the organic act, as authorized by a succession of congressional acts, was completely valid.25 

In the last months of the Hoover Administration, Congress finally held 

its long-promised investigation of Government interference in industry. (It 

paid no attention to the equally valid criticism of Federal apathy where the 

taxpaying consumer was concerned.) Acting on complaints of the U.S. 

Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the 

Federation of American Business, Congress appointed a committee on May 

31, 1932, to survey "the extensive commercial and manufacturing interests 

of Government bureaus seriously competing with private industry." Despite 

all the furor, the Bureau turned out to be the least of offenders. 

Congress found that during World War I, owing to the reluctance of 

private industry to risk short-term, unprofitable ventures, Government agencies had organized a great number of manufacturing plants, factories, 

foundries, and services, and with the "overreaching zeal of governmental 

bureaus to retain authority and prestige," had continued to operate them 

after the war. Heading a list of 17 specific areas of serious competition were 

Many of Wiley's charges were longstanding. See 12-page letter, GKB to C, Bureau 

of Efficiency, Aug. 31, 1923 (NBS Box 40, AG). 

Pamphlet in Bureau of Budget records, NARG 51, file 86 (Bureau of Standards). 

Letter to GKB, Dec. 30, 1929, and attached correspondence (NBS Box 263, AG). 

Letter, Dr. Julius Klein, Assistant Secretary of Commerce. to R. 0. Bailey, Dec. 30, 

1931 (NBS Box 339, AG-Conf. for Dir. only). 
308 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

Navy Department factories and foundries, Government Printing Office supply 

plants, Army and Navy clothing and leather factories, the Post Exchange 

organization, a wide range of Farm Board enterprises, and many of the Federal prison industries. 

Nowhere in the 253-page report of the committee was the Bureau of 

Standards mentioned by name, though it might have answered to the indictment of "overdevelopment of industrial research in Government laboratories," buried in the last pages of the report. Much of that research had 

been initiated by industry itself, the committee found, but had "grown beyond the original intent or desired objective in many instances." 29 The 

Bureau might also have answered to the charges that technical specialists in 

the Government, acting as industrial consultants, thereby competed with 

professional consultants, and that Government patents taken out by Federal 

scientists on behalf of the public "prevented exclusive development by industry." Since the congressional committee felt that neither the intention 

nor extension of Government research for industry could be accurately defined, it recommended only "curtailment by limitation of funds appropriated 

for such investigations," as a brake on Federal competition.3° 

The report of the committee appeared at the depth of the depression, 

just as the incoming administration launched its massive drive against Federal expenditures. Curtailment of Bureau funds, and the investigations of 

Bureau activities that followed, were to end more of its research for industry 

than industry bargained for. 

LYMAN JAMES BRIGGS 

It has been said that any Republican could have been elected President 

in 1928. That the Republican was the incumbent Secretary of Commerce 

made Hoover the unluckiest President in American history. With the stock 

market crash, the national income between 1929 and 1932 fell with the 

value of the dollar from $87.4 billion to $41.7 billion. Unemployment, from an irreducible peacetime low of 1.8 million in 1925 (representing 4 percent 

of the civilian labor force), reached 4.3 million (8.7 percent) in 1930. In 

Report of Special Committee appointed to investigate Government competition with 

Private Industry (72d Cong., 2d sess., H.R. 1985), Feb. 8, 1933, p. 236 (L/C: 

HD3616.U45A3). 

Ibid., p. 237. The House questionnaire on Government competition, with Bureau 

answers, appears in letter, LJB to Hon. Joseph B. Shannon, Aug. 24, 1932 (NBS Box 339, 

AG). For the Chamber of Commerce attack on the Bureau's "overdevelopment of industrial research," see memo, Office of Secretary of Commerce for LJB, Oct. 4, 1932 

(ibid.). 
LYMAN JAMES BRIGGS 309 

the wake of the financial collapse of Europe in early 1931, this country began 

the steep slide into the great depression. 

By late 1932, 85,000 business firms and 5,000 banks had failed and 

unemployment reached 12.8 million (24.9 percent of the labor force), representing 1 out of every 4 workers in the Nation.31 With varying intensity, 

the depression lasted for 10 years, until the vast pooi of manpower and industrial capacity was absorbed by war. 

Constitutionally opposed to emergency Government measures, President Hoover at first sought, as he had in his recovery program of the early 

twenties, to prod private enterprise into action by stepping up Federal con- struction, urging local governments to accelerate their spending, and businessmen to maintain wage rates.32 By 1931, as State and city treasuries 

emptied and business and industry acknowledged their helplessness, the administration was forced to act. Much against his will, Hoover brought large 

areas of the economy—the banks, railroads, insurance companies, farmers, 

and finally the unemployed—into the Federal orbit. A Reconstruction 

Finance Corporation was set up to lend money to States and municipalities 

for self-liquidating public works and a Federal Home Loan Bank Act was passed to prevent home foreclosures. A "public works administration" was proposed to promote expansion of Government construction. In the presidential campaign of 1932 these and other measures intended to shore up the 

financial and industrial structure, relieve unemployment, and restore balance 

were rejected by the Democratic opposition as rampant socialism, encroachment of the Federal Government on States' rights, and radical spending of 

public funds.33 By the summer of 1932 Hoover's influence was gone and a vast apathy, born of confusion and despair, settled over the Nation. 

The Bureau gave no sign that it was in any way aware of the stock 

market crash of 1929. Its first recognition of "reduced industrial activities" 

occurred in mid-1931, following the collapse of Europe, with the note that 

"every effort [is beingj made to operate economically." Still, the Bureau 

exhibited no alarm. That year in his annual report Dr. Burgess counted 

525 projects under 22 research appropriations made to the Bureau, the 

largest number of projects ever. Both public and Government demands for 

tests continued to increase each year, and it was expected they would ac- "Historical Statistics, p. 73. By comparison, at the height of the 1920—21 depression, 

unemployment did not rise above 5.01 million or 11.9 percent of the labor force. a Leutenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914—1c32, p. 251; Dixon Wecter, The Age 

of the Great Depression, 1929—1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 17. 

"Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: Crisis of the Old Order, 1919—1933 

(Boston: Houghton Muffin, 1957), pp. 416—417, 423, 433. 
310 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

celerate "with returning prosperity." Actually, from the viewpoint of 

appropriations, as Dr. Burgess wrote with great satisfaction to Gano Dunn 

of the Visiting Committee, 1931 had been "the banner year for the Bureau." 

Transferred funds and direct appropriations totaled'more than $4 million, 

the largest sum in its history, exceeding even the appropriations of the war 

years. Besides increases in salaries, special appropriations, and transferred 

funds, almost a million dollars had been allocated for a new hydraulic laboratory, two radio stations, and some 15 acres of additional land to the 

north and west of the Bureau quadrangle.35 

NBS Annual Report 1931, PP. 1, 46. This report is the only one ever to state the 

number of projects carried on under each Bureau appropriation. 

No special alarm, either, seems to have been felt at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR), the Bureau's counterpart in Berlin. More interestingly, that year 

produced the only comparison between the Bureau and the PTR that has been found. 

Five years earlier, in 1926, Paul D. Foote while in Europe had written Dr. that 

from his observations the Bureau, with better equipment, now excelled the PTR in 

practically every line of work (letters in NBS Box 157, ID and IDP). A German 

article on the state of the PTR in 1931 confirmed Foote's reports. 

By comparison with the NBS and Britain's National Physical Laboratory, the writer 

said, the PTR "in these past years, has considerably receded into the background." It 

had become preoccupied with testing to the exclusion of basic physical-technical re- search, it suffered from lack of team work, and the technically important work it should 

be d&ng for industry was instead being done by industry itself. 

Where the NBS budget for 1929 amounted roughly to $2.75 million or 11.5 million RM, 

with a "material" (nonsalary) budget of 8.8 million RM, the PTR budget for 1931 of 

1.5 million RM allowed but 400,000 RM for all material expenditures, of which only 

170,000 RM were earmarked for research. As for productivity, "The staff of the Reichsanstalt would really have to consist of half-gods * * * to achieve the same results as the Bureau of Standards." J. Zenneck, "Werner von Siemens und die grundung der 

Physikalisch Technische Reichsanstalt," Munich Deutsches Museum Abh. u. Ber. 3, 

13 (1931) L/C: AM1O1.M974.3. 

Letter, Mar. 4, 1931 (NBS Box 330, ID). The National Hydraulic Laboratory established at the Bureau was described in Science, 72, 7 (1930), and Civil Eng., 1, 

911 (1931). 

Surveying the 9 major and 12 minor buildings spread over the Bureau heights, Burgess 

beheld "a varitable city of science." Outside Washington, the new radio research station on 17 acres at Beltsville, Md., was to be used to send continuous standard frequency signals to broadcasting stations, the station on 200 acres at Meadows, Md., to study upper atmosphere radio phenomena. Aviation eigine testing, too rackety for 

the householders dGwn on Connecticut Avenue, had been moved to a new station at 

Arlington, Va. Other field stations included that for radio aids to aviation at College, 

Park, Md., electric lamp inspection laboratories in the New York and Boston districts; 

farm waste stations at Ames, Iowa, and at Auburn and Tuscaloosa, Ala.; cement and 

concrete test stations at Northampton, Pa., and Denver, Cob.; cement, concrete, and 

miscellaneous materials test units at San Francisco, and ceramics research at Columbus, 

Ohio. Burgess, "The National Bureau of Standards," posthumously published in Sci. Mo. 

36, 201 (1933). For an earlier report by Burgess on the Bureau plant, see Hearings * * * 1928 (Dec. 5, 1927), p. 43. 
LYMAN JAMES BRIGGS 311 

The Bureau was also fully staffed. Not long before, Dr. Burgess 

observed that "for the first time in many years the Bureau now has a com- plete administrative and scientific roster.36 The addition of more than 

300 new members in 1931 brought the total Bureau staff to 1,066, despite 

the recent loss of some of its best people who had left for better pay elsewhere.37 In order to maintain this staff, Burgess proposed not only to operate as economically as possible but to give special attention to those activities 

"tending to relieve the business depression and unemployment," that is, 

industrial research, stimulation of new industries, standardization, and building and housing.38 

The sense of well-being was brief. In the spring of 1932 Dr. Burgess 

learned that Bureau funds for the coming year were to be reduced by one- fifth, affecting every item in his budget.39 But he did not live to see this 

disaster or the subsequent effects of the depression on the Bureau. 

Six months previously, in October 1931, while presiding at a Wednesday meeting of his division chiefs, Dr. Burgess suffered a slight stroke resulting in a partial paralysis from which he recovered after 3 months of care.4° A 

second and fatal stroke occurred on July 2, 1932, while he was working at 

his desk in South building. He had been with the Bureau for almost 30 

of his 58 years. 

Dr. Briggs, assistant director for research and testing, became acting 

director upon the death of Dr. Burgess. A week later Secretary of Commerce 

Robert P. Lamont wrote to the Visiting Committee asking its assistance in 

recommending a successor to Dr. Burgess. He was, Lamont said, a strong 

believer in filling vacancies from within the service and for that reason 

suggested Dr. Briggs's name. Charles F. Kettering, a senior member of the 

committee, replied that he himself did not know Briggs very well, but it had 

been his experience that it was often better to bring in someone from outside. 

The point was discussed in committee correspondence for several• months. 

It was December before the Visiting Committee met and formally recommended Dr. Briggs.4' 

'° NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 1. Letter, GKB to Office of Department of Commerce, June 11, 1930 (NBS Box 296, AP), 

named 28 in the professional group at the Bureau who had resigned since mid-1928. 

Memo, GKB for Secretary of Commerce Lamont, Apr. 16, 1932 (NBS Box 339, AG), told 

of 8 members of the automotive section, including its chief, who left in 1927 to set up a re- search department at the Studebaker Corp., at almost three times their Bureau salaries. 38 Memo, GKB for Administrative Assistant to Secretary of Commerce, May 14, 1931 

(NBS Box 331, IG). 

Science, 75, supp. 11 (April 1932). 40 Letter, Lamont to Kettering, Oct. 30, 1931 (Department of Commerce, Visiting Committee file, NARG 40, 67009/5) ; Briggs at Hearings * * * 1933 (Jan. 8, 1932), p. 212. 41 Letter, Lamont to K. T. Compton, July 13, 1932; letter, Kettering to Lamont, July 20, 

1932; letter, Compton to Chapin, Dec. 1, 1932 (NARG 40, file 67009/5, Pt. 2). 
312 

Dr. Lyman I. Briggs, third Director of NBS, in his 6th year as chief and 5th year of 

the New Deal. Under the glass top of his desk is an organization chart of the Bureau. 

The advice of Satchel Paige may also be under that glass, but this cannot be verified. 
LYMAN JAMES BRIGGS 313 

Receiving the recommendation from interim Secretary of Commerce 

Roy D. Chapin, Hoover offered Dr. Briggs's name to the Senate. In view 

of the imminent change of administrations, the Senate did not act on the 

appointment. In the patronage scramble of 1933, Roosevelt was pressed to 

name "a good Democrat" to the office. He is said to have replied: "I haven't 

the slightest idea whether Dr. Briggs is a Republican or a 'Democrat; all 

I know is that he is the best qualified man for the job." On March 27, 1933, 

Roosevelt renominated Dr. Briggs and on June 13 the Senate confirmed the 

appointment.42 

Dr. Lyman J. Briggs (1874—1963), born the' same year as Dr. Bur. 

gess, grew up on a farm north of Battle Creek, Mich. He acquired his copy 

of Ganot's Physics at 18, in his third year at Michigan State College. 

Transferring to the University of Michigan for graduate work, Briggs studied 

under Dr. Karl E. Guthe, who was to be chief of an electrical section at the 

Bureau of Standards in its early years. in 1895 Briggs graduated with a 

master of science in physics.43 That same fall he entered the Johns Hopkins 

University, where he worked under Prof. Henry A. Rowland, investigating 

with him the recently discovered Roentgen rays.44 But his principal interest 'had been fixed earlier at Michigan State, in what was then a new science 

called "soil physics." To learn more of the subject, and to support his approaching marriage, Briggs in June 1896 obtained a position .as physicist in 

the Bureau of Soils of the Department of Agriculture.45 His Hopkins thesis, 

42 Wallace R. Brode, "Lyman J. Briggs s," Sci. Mo. 78, 269 (1954). 

The delay in acting on the nomination of Dr. Briggs was occasioned by efforts of certain 

members of the Senate to name a director of their own choice. Their candidate was Winder Elwell Goldsborough of Maryland, electrical engineer, teacher, inventor, business. 

man, and from 1923 to 1932 director of the Henry L. Doherty Research Laboratories. 

The impasse that ensued was apparently broken when Secretary Roper informed Golds. 

borough's sponsors that contrary to their belief "that he is a Democrat and entitled, 

because of this as well as because of his qualifications, to this position," he was in fact 

"a consistent Republican" (letter, Secretary Roper to Senators Harrison, Lonergan, and 

Sheppard, June 10, 1933 [NARG 40, Correspondence of Secretary of Commerce Roper, 

Box 24.—SI). Additional correspondence on Goldsborough's candidacy, dating from 

September 1932, appears in NARG 40, file 93067). 

His thesis was published as Guthe and Briggs, "On the electrolytic conductivity of 

concentrated sulfuric acid," Phys. Rev. 3, np (1895). 

Rowland, Carmichael, and Briggs, "Notes of observations on the roentgen rays," 

Am. J. Sci. 1, 247 (1896); Rowland, Carmichael, and Briggs, "Notes on roentgen rays," 

Elec. World, 27, 452 (1896). 

At that time, according to Dr. Briggs, there were only three soil physicists in this coun- try, Eugene W. Hilgard at California, Franklin H. King at Wisconsin, and Milton Whitney in the Department of Agriculture. Interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1962. 
314 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

for which he received his doctoral degree in 1901, was on an aspect of the 

physical action of moisture in soil.46 

Dr. Briggs headed the biophysical laboratory of the Bureau of Plant 

Industry, which he had organized in 1906, when he was detailed by Executive order to the Bureau of Standards upon America's entry into the war and 

set to work constructing a wind tunnel for aviation research.47 Two years 

later he brought into his aviation physics section Hugh L. Dryden, a graduate 

student from Johns Hopkins, recommended by Professor Ames as "the bright. 

est young man he had ever had, without exception." By then Briggs was wholly won to the study of aerodynamics and formally severed his connection 

with the Department of Agriculture. Briggs and Dryden were to remain 

closely associated throughout their careers at the Bureau.48 

Chief of the mechanics and sound division when Stratton left the 

Bureau, Briggs had declined the proposal of the Visiting Committee that his 

name be submitted with that of Burgess for the directorship, saying that he 

considered Burgess jhe better fitted at the Bureau for the position. Soon after 

he became Director, Burgess asked Congress that a position of Assistant 

Director be established at the Bureau, to take over some of the burden of 

supervising research and testing. Dr. Briggs was offered the position and 

declined, but when in 1926 Secretary of Commerce Hoover proposed that Dr. 

Ray M. Hudson of his office be made Assistant Director at the Bureau, 

Burgess asked Briggs to reconsider. On September 29, 1927, two Assistant 

Directors were appointed, Briggs for research and testing and Hudson for 

commercial standardization.49 

Dr. Brigg's assumption of the Director's chair after 6 years of supervising research and testing and a year as Acting Director was therefore 

without incident, except that it occurred at the nadir of the depression. He was already confronted with the task of preserving a working organization in 

the face of repeated reduction in salaries, staff, and programs, and was about to participate in a series of congressional and special committee invesBriggs, "On the adsorption of water vapor and of certain salts in aqueous solution 

by quartz," J. Phys. Chem. 9, 617 (1905). 

The request for the transfer of Dr. Briggs to the Bureau said he was needed "in 

connection with the organization of a division for the purpose of certifying all gages 

in the manufacture of munitions." Letter, Secretary of Commerce to Secretary of 

Agriculture, May 22, 1917 (Department of Commerce records, NARG 40, file 67009/43). 

The gage work, however, remained a section in the division of weights and measures, 

and Dr. Briggs went into aeronautics. 

48 Interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1962. Dr. Dryden succeeded Briggs at the Bureau as section chief in 1922, as division chief in 1934, and as associate director in 1946, 

leaving in 1947, 2 years after Brigg's retirement, to become research director of the 

National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. 

Interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 2, 1962. The positions are described in NBS Annual 

Report 1928, p. 1. 
Dr. Hugh L. Dryden 

made some of this 

country's earliest 

studies of airfoil characteristics 

near the speed of 

sound. He was associate director 

of the Bureau 

until 1947, when 

he became re- search director of 

NACA, forerunner 

of NASA, and first 

deputy administrator of NASA 

when that agency was created in 

1958. 

Dr. Eugene C. Crittenden, who came in 1904 to develop 

standards in photometry and re- mained 50 years, was to become the 

most knowledgeable man about 

NBS operations 

and activities and 

the Bureau's chief 

diplomat in negotiating national 

and international 

agreement on the 

establishment of new standards. 

315 
316 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

tigations of Bureau operations, ordeals that deeply pained Dr. Briggs's gentle 

spirit. The time called for a ruggedness and ruthlessness he did not have, 

and in his later years he preferred not to think of the problems of that troubled 

era, turning questions about them to peripheral subjects more agreeable. 

Unlike Stratton and Burgess, Dr. Briggs was of slight,, slender build 

and of warm, affectionate, and unfailingly kind demeanor and manner. 

Dr. Stratton, when harassed by demands upon his time and attention or in a stormy mood, often sought out Briggs' company in his laboratory in West 

building, for as he once said: "You always have something nice to report 

to me and I appreciate it.. These other fellows give me a lot of trouble." 50 The "something nice" was usually a new and ingenious piece of apparatus 

or testing device, for, like Stratton, Dr. Briggs was strongly mechanical and an inveterate tinkerer. When he came from the Department of Agriculture 

he brought with him his mechanic, Mr. Cottrell, and for years the two 

designed and constructed many of the special devices that Briggs used in 

his measurement studies.'1 His laboratory was a wonderful clutter of apparatus in various stages of assembly, a tangle of piping and tubing and ticking 

instruments, but it was comfortable and a tranquil spirit filled it. 

His serenity of temper was Dr. Briggs's outstanding characteristic, and 

he was to have need of it under the frustrations of the depression years and 

the pressures and harassments of security in World War II. Asked after he 

resigned the direction of the Bureau and returned to his laboratory for the 

secret of his unfailing patience, he liked to say that the "precepts of that great 

philosopher and baseball player, Satchel Paige," best summed up his own: 

Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood. 

If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool 

thoughts. 

Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. 

Go very lightly on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The 

social ramble ain't restful. 

Avoid running at all times. 

Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you. 

The last was the precept he set greatest store by and delighted to quote at 

interviews.'2 

Dr. Briggs had two outside enthusiasms during his years at the 

Bureau, scientific exploration and baseball. Succeeding Dr. Burgess on the 

board of trustees of the National Geographic Society, Dr. Briggs took a highly 

'° Interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 3, 1962. 

Interview with Dr. Dryden, Aug. 26, 1963. 

The NBS Standard, April 1963; interview, Nov. 2, 1962. 
LYMAN JAMES BRJGGS 317 

active interest in its expeditions, and in his laboratory supervised the design 

and construction of many of the scientific instruments required by the Society. 

In the 17 years he held the chairmanship of the research committee of the 

Society, he personally directed or was closely involved in its many 

expeditions.53 

Well past retirement age when he left the Director's office, Dr. Briggs 

spent the last years of his long life in his old laboratory in West building. 

A baseball player while at Michigan State and avid fan in the stands at Griffith Stadium in Washington, he was in his 85th year when he determined to 

settle a long disputed phenomenon: scientific proof of the degree a baseball 

can be made to curve in the 60-foot throw from the pitcher's box to the 

plate. With the aid of the wind tunnel he designed in 1918 and the pitching 

staff of the Washington Senators, he made a series of quantitative measurements of the relation of spin to deflection of a pitched baseball at various 

speeds. 

In laboratory tests to measure spin, Dr. Briggs repeatedly projected 

baseballs, rotated on a rubber tee to provide spin, out of a mounted air gun 

at a paper target 60 feet away. Air flow phenomena were measured in the 

wind tunnel, and still other studies with a suspended camera measured the 

curvature of the ball in flight. Finally, at Griffith Stadium, members of the 

pitching staff hurled endless balls to which light, flat tapes were fastened, 

and the number of completed turns in the twisted tape were counted at 

home plate. 

With baseballs thrown at a speed of 100. feet per second, roughly 

68 miles per hour, and well within a professional pitcher's capability, Briggs 

recorded lateral deflections in the 60-foot flight from the pitcher's box of 

11.7 inches at 1,200 revolutions per minute and 17.5 inches at 1,800 revolutions per minute as the maximums attainable. The spin rather than the 

speed of the ball, he found, determined its "break." The feat, reported in 

every newspaper in the country, was a logical development in the field of 

mechanics, Dr. Briggs said, closely related to the low-speed ballistics and 

projectile work of the Bureau. And it had been 

As the new Director, Dr. Briggs presided over a temporary eclipse of 

the Bureau. For several years his paramount concern was to hold on to his 

scientific staff by all means available and to justify research that was not 

immediately productive of depression-thwarting results.55 Throughout the 

decade he was aware of something less than enthusiasm on the part of the 

See below, pp. 355—357. 

Briggs, "Effect of spin and speed on the lateral deflection (curve) of a baseball; and 

the Magnus effect for smooth spheres," Am. J. Phys. 27, 589 (1959) ; interview, Nov. 2, 

1962. 

Letter, LJB to Secretary of Commerce, Oct. 10, 1932 (NBS Box 339, AG). 
318 

The baseball impact machine 

constructed at the Bureau for 

measuring the coefficient of 

restitution (evidences of liveliness) of baseballs. 

Dr. Briggs, Director Emeritus, and Mr. Ossie Bluege, comptroller of the Washington 

Baseball Club and formerly third baseman and manager, at Griffith Stadium in 1959, 

measuring the spin of a pitched ball with the aid of a flat measuring tape fastened to the ball. 
LYMAN JAMES BRJGGS 319 

new administration toward his organization. The stature of the Bureau in 

the Department of Commerce and its close identity with industry and com- merce linked it with the policies of the Hoover administration and therefore 

the depression. 

Daniel C. Roper, Roosevelt's appointee as Secretary of Commerce, 

said that his Department, "important under normal conditions, was at this 

time from the fact that business was in the doghouse." 56 On the 

other hand, as a living memorial to Herbert Hoover, it was "looked upon by 

Congress as the 'last stronghold of sanity in the New Deal.' " To the New 

Dealers the Department, whose body of civil servants continued in office during the greater part of the Roosevelt administration, was anathema. At the 

very outset of the new administration, Sam G. Bratton, Senator from New 

Mexico, went so far as to propose a joint House and Senate committee "to 

consider the advisability of abolishing the Department of Commerce and the 

transfer of its indispensable services to other agencies." 58 The threat of dispersal persisted, and some it imminent when 

at the start of his second term Roosevelt proposed to reorganize 

the departments of the Government. Ignored at meetings and unable 

to gain the President's ear, Roper wrote to his bureau chiefs asking them 

whether they had "knowledge of any proposed action by other Government 

agencies or by Congress looking to transfer of your Bureau or any part of 

it from the Department." The bureau chiefs knew no more than the Secretary. Badgered by rumors at fourth and fifth hand "that there would not 

be much left of the Department of Commerce after this reorganiration," Secretary Roper resigned in December 1939 to make way for Harry Hopkins.60 

The talk of reorganization ended. 

Apart from the drastic cuts made in its funds, the Bureau was in no 

way further endangered by the political trafficking downtown. Yet through- 

'° Roper, Fifty Years of Public Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1941), 

p. 288. 

"Grace Tully, F.D.R.—My Boss (New York: Scribner, 1949), p. 196. 

Congressional Record, vol. 76, pt. 2, 72d Cong., 2d sess., 1933, pp. 1720—1721. The 

National Association of Manufacturers maintained that "throughout both the New Deal 

and the war production programs, Commerce was all but ignored. Special agencies and 

executive offices were created by the dozen to perform functions that should naturally 

have fallen to this department." Hearings * * * on First Deficiency Appropriation Bill 

for 1946 (Oct. 25, 1945), p. 320. 

"Letter, Administrative Assistant to Secretary of Commerce to Heads of Bureaus, 

June 29, 1938, and attached correspondence (NBS Box 414, AG). 

"Roper, Fifty Years of Public Life, pp. 347—348. 
320 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

out the period the recurring tremors had their effect in the office of the 

Director out on Connecticut Avenue. 

TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 

Out of the welter of emergency measures, experiments, and planned 

programs of the new administration, three impinged importantly on the 

Bureau: the initial drive for economy in Federal spending, the effort to 

define the relations between Government and non-Government research, and 

the exertions on behalf of the common man in his role as ultimate consumer. 

Campaigning on a platform of Federal frugality, Roosevelt on taking 

office ordered a slash of 25 percent in the funds of every Government department and agency, making it retroactive by impounding current as well as 

projected appropriations. The 10-percent cut in Government salaries voted 

by the previous administration in the Economy Act of June 30, 1932, had 

necessitated an 8-day furlough without pay for all at the Bureau but had not 

cut the staff.6' As a result of the new 25-percent slash, almost one-third of 

the Bureau force was dismissed, and to stretch remaining funds, a second 

payless 8-day furlough was decreed for those not separated.62 

In mobilizing the resources of the Nation for recovery, Roosevelt ex- ercised his penchant for creating new agencies, particularly in order to bypass 

such of his executive departments as seemed to him ingrown and incapable 

of adapting to the New Deal emergency.63 His precedents were the allpowerful agencies of World War I, his guide Bernard Baruch's report on the 

War Industries Board of 1918, which Baruch in 1931 had supplemented with a detailed program for the creation of a central agency to control industrial 

61 Letter, Secretary of Commerce Chapin to Visiting Committee, Nov. 10, 1932 (NARG 

40, file 67009/5). 

Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt: Crisis of the Old Order, p. 256; NBS Annual 

Report 1933, p. 45; Annual Report 1934, Pp. 51, 75. Hearings * * * 1935 (Jan. 4, 

1934), p. 131. 

A startling economy proposed by Roosevelt in late 1932 involved transfer of the National 

Advisory Committee on Aeronautics to the Bureau of Standards. NACA's Langley 

Field Laboratory was to be maintained as an independent agency, but considerable 

savings in the NACA budget of $900,000 were anticipated in consolidating its Washington staff with that of the Bureau. Questioned at a House committee hearing about 

the transfer, Dr. Briggs admitted he had not been consulted, but he "liked" it, and 

pointed out that in Britain, aeronautical research had always been under the National 

Physical Laboratory (Hearings * * * 1934, Dec. 12, 1932, pp. 175—77). NACA, now 

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which had strong roots 

in Bureau aeronautics research, was not of course turned over to the Bureau. 

Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal, 1933—1934 (Boston: 

Houghton Muffin, 1958), pp. 534—535. 
TOWARD A REDEFINiTION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 321 

mobilization in the event of war.64 That war had come, a war of relief, re- covery, and reform. 

As the maj or experiments of the New Deal's planned economy, industry was mobilized through the National Recovery Administration (NRA), 

agriculture through the Agricultural Adj ustment Administration (AAA). 

Science was not included in the planning. As the adjunct of industry, identified with laissez faire and classical economics and divorced from modern 

economic theory, science was suspect. To find a possible future place for it 

in the social experiments of the New Deal, however, called for a reassessment 

of the scientific agencies in the Government and the role of Government in 

both the physical and social sciences.65 

To that end, on July 31, 1933, an Executive order created a Science 

Advisory Board under the jurisdiction of the National Research Council 

and National Academy of Sciences to study the functions and programs of 

the principal scientific agencies of the Government and propose a more 

effective relationship between governmental and nongovernmental research 

organizations. It was to examine the place of science in the Government 

structure with a view to establishing a policy both for economic recovery 

and for future national welfare.66 As it turned out, the Board at once became more concerned with the current plight of Federal research agencies than with the goal that was sought by the New Deal, namely, to 

effect a conjunction between the natural and social sciences that would pro. 

vide solutions pointing the way out of the depression. 

The Bureau of Standards came under special scrutiny during the 

study, since four of the nine members of the Science Advisory Board—its 

chairman, Karl T. Compton, and Gano Dunn, F. Kettering, and 

The two Baruch. reports were reprinted in a special edition as American Industry in 

the War: a Report of the War Industries Board, with an introduction by Hugh S. 

Johnson (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1941). For Roosevelt's great interest in Wilson's 

wartime administration, see Roper, Fifty Years of Public Life, pp. 320 if. 65 Dupree, pp. 347—350. 

An extremist point of view then current saw science as a cause of the depression. Notice 

of the charge that the physicist and chemist made discoveries too rapidly for the good 

of the world, and did not heed or care what misapplications were made of their discoveries, appeared in Science, 80, 535 (1934) and Science, 81, 4.6 (1935). For the 

opposite viewpoint, that this country had succumbed to the depression because it had 

lived on its resources and had not put science to work for the national welfare or to combat its present difficulties, see Science Advisory Board correspondence in NBS Box 

382, ID-Misc. 

Science Advisory Board, Report, 1933—34 (Washington, D.C., 1934), pp. 9, 11, 13, 15, 40—42. The Board reported scientific services functioning in 41 Federal bureaus, of 

which 18, on which the Board focussed its attention, could be called primarily scientific 

and essential to the national welfare, in agriculture, manufacturing, commerce, health 

and safety (p. 12). 
322 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

Frank B. Jewett—were on the Visiting Committee to the Bureau. As it 

happened, the Visiting Committee was already engaged in a study of Bu. 

reau problems. The same four men were also members of the Business 

Advisory and Planning Council, which had recently been appointed by 

Secretary of Commerce Roper to survey the program of research of the 

Bureau and other Commerce agencies in the light of the economies forced on them. Thus, the Bureau entertained simultaneously three investigative 

groups in 1933—34. Except for details in the reports of the two Commerce 

committees, the essential findings of all three groups were by agreement 

embodied in the comprehensive report of the President's Science Advisory 

Board. 

Perceptibly waiving the purpose for which it had been created, 

at least so far as the Bureau of Standards was concerned, the Board declared 

that the drastic reductions in its funds "prompted a critical examination pf 

the Bureau's situation and program." The slashes in Bureau appropria. 

tions for 1933 and 1934, together with the impounding of funds, amounted 

to a reduction of 50 percent since 1932. But Bureau testing of materials for 

Government departments and State institutions, an essential service not 

specified in the organic act or explicitly provided for in appropriations, 

represented a fixed charge of 45 percent against Bureau funds. The actual 

reduction in Bureau funds since 1932 therefore amounted not to 50 percent 

hut to about 70 percent [italicized in the Report] 68 In the same period the 

Bureau staff had been reduced by 200 to 300 members through separation 

or indefinite furlough.eo This much the three investigating groups agreed 

upon, and noted with concern the necessary but serious drain on Bureau 

time and energies involved in its representation on 825 committees in scientific, engineering, testing, standardizing, interdepartmental, and international organizations.7° 

In its separate study, the Business Advisory group acknowledged 

the validity of much of the late criticism of the Bureau 'by industry and 

urged that the greatest economies be made in some of the more recently 

acquired functions giving offense. Somewhat more specifically, the Joint 

Committee recommended curtailment of those projects which were in a 

67 Science Advisory Board, Report, 1933—34, P. 23. 

"Dr. Briggs described the actual working funds even of the full 1932 appropriation as "only the equivalent of one 3-cent postage stamp during the year for each inhabitant 

of this country" (Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Sci. 173, 153, 1934). 

"The total was 348, out of a staff of 979, according to memo, C. J. Humphreys for 

LJB, July 31, 1933 (NBS Box 358, ID). 

Science Advisory Board, Report, 1933—34, pp. 23, 62—63, 65. By February 1934, 

with 613 members, the Bureau had the smallest staff since 1917 (letter, LJB to F. J. 

Schlink, Feb. 3, 1934, NBS Historical File) - 
TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 

measure completed or could be continued by non-Government agencies, 

and elimination of all others, insofar as they left the basic functions of the 

Bureau unimpaired. Those functions, vital to the industries of the Nation, 

must be maintained on an effective basis at all costs.7' 

The Business Advisory group particularly argued against the com- mercial standards activities of the Bureau as not matters of scientifIc fact 

and accuracy but matters of convenience. Every one of these activities had 

created problems of one kind or another, now made acute by the enforced 

economy.72 Similar conflicts 'had arisen in the Bureau's industrial research, 

and the Business Advisory group therefore recommended that Bureau re- search should be strictly limited to the development of fundamental standards for science, medicine, and industry.73 

The Science Advisory Board, equally concerned about the reduced 

funds of the Bureau and the necessity for some adjustment in its activities, 

was both less drastic and more concrete in its recommendations. It urged 

that official approval be given to a redefinition of Bureau functions it proposed that would formalize current Bureau activities and,, of more import, 

that direct appropriations be made to cover the testing work of the Bureau 

for Federal agencies.74 

71 Minutes of the joint meeting of the Visiting Committee of the Bureau of Standards 

and the Committee on the Bureau of Standards of the Business Advisory and Planning 

Council, Dec. 5, 1933 (NARG 40, Box 114, file 67009/5). 

The report traced the progress of Bureau acquisition of these activities, from the work on safety codes in the early century through building and housing codes, standards and 

specifications for Federal and State purchasing agencies, and testing of materials purchased by the Government. Closely allied were the trade standards and simplified 

practices programs for industry. 

Report of the Committee on the Bureau of Standards of the Business Advisory and 

Planning Council, Dec. 9, 1933, pp. 15—16 (NARG 40, file 67009/5). 

Science Advisory Board, Report, 1933—34, pp. 67—68. The proposed Bureau functions 

(ibid., pp. 64—65), harmonizing those of the organic act with those subsequently 

sanctioned by acts of Congress, were: 1. To maintain the national standards of measurement and conduct research necessary 

for the development of such standards. 

2. To calibrate and certify measuring instruments in terms of the national standards, 

for the Federal Government and the various States (without charge), and for 

scientific, engineering and industrial groups and individuals (at cost), in order 

that accurate and uniform standards of measurement may be used throughout the 

Nation. 

3. To develop improved methods of measurement for use in industry, engineering, and 

scientific research. 

4. To determine physical constants and the properties of materials and physical systems "when such data are of great importance to scientific or manufacturing 
324 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION. (1931-40) 

Nothing like formal approval of the new functions was considered, 

although the Board later reported that the restatement was "to a large 

degree * * * officially approved" by the appropriations act of 1935. That 

act replaced the 29 specific appropriation items in the budget of the previous 

year by grouping the work of the Bureau into 4 general funds: (1) for 

operation and administration, (2) testing, inspection, and information serv- ice, (3) research and development, and (4) standards for commerce, the 

latter to provide for Bureau cooperation in the work of the American Standards Association.75 

Turning from its extended study of the Bureau and other scientific 

agencies in the Federal establishment, the Science Advisory Board briefly 

interests and are not to be obtained of sufficient accuracy elsewhere" [quoted from 

the organic act]. 

5. To serve, insofar as is practicable, as a centralized laboratory for physical, chemical 

and engineering investigations for governmental agencies, thus utilizing effectively 

the special facilities of the Bureau, avoiding unnecessary duplication among Government agencies and preventing unnecessary development of new laboratories 

the future. 

6. To conduct investigations looking to broader and more effective utilization of ma- terials and the development of better processes and methods of fabrication, in 

cooperation and with the financial assistance of engineering societies, trade associations, industrial and consumer groups, provided such investigations are of public 

and governmental interest. 

7. To cooperate with the Federal Specifications Board and national standardizing 

agencies in the development of (a) specifications for equipment and supplies, and 

(b) safety and engineering codes; and to conduct research when necessary to pro. 

vide a satisfactory technical basis for such specifications and codes. 

8. To serve as a testing agency for governmental purchases to determine whether 

purchases of equipment, materials, and supplies meet the purchase specifications. 

9. In connection with national standardizing organizations to develop simplified practice recommendations and commercial standards in cooperation with manufacturers, 

distributors, and consumers, provided such activities are of public and governmental 

interest; and to encourage the use of nationally recognized specifications by purchasing agencies expending funds derived from taxes. 

10. To serve Federal, State and municipal agencies in an advisory capacity on technical 

matters in the fields of physics, chemistry, and engineering; and to indicate to citizens of the United States, upon request, available technical information relating 

to these subjects. 

Science Advisory Board, Report, 1934—35 (Washington, D.C., 1935), pp. 52—53; letter, 

LJB to Secretary, SAB, Aug. 6, 1935 (NBS Box 383, IDS—SAB). 

The House Appropriations Committee had suggested consolidation of Bureau funds to Dr. Stratton in 1922. But special appropriations had served him well and he hesitated. 

"On the whole," he had replied, "it is not a bad plan. * * The best thing from many 

points of view is to have a lump sum for all purposes to carry on * * * research work, 

but on the other hand it is good business to have a specific appropriation for a specific 

thing" (Hearings * * * 1924, Nov. 16, 1922, p. 207). In his annual reports of 1927 and 

1928, Dr. Burgess strongly recommended to Commerce consolidation of funds into three 

or four classes, to simplify office procedure. 
TOWARD A REDEFINiTION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 325 

considered the relation between governmental and nongovernmental research. 

The Board saw "no need for the GOvernment to embark upon comprehensive 

programs on pure science, invention or industrial development." That was 

the province of industry, the universities, and private institutions.76 The 

proper scientific activities of the Government, which alone justified its scientific bureaus, were "scientific services of such wide scope and universal 

utility that no agency except the Government is competent adequately to 

handle them" (e.g., the development of scientific and technical standards); 

those "essentially supplementary to nonscientific governmental activities" 

(e.g., standards for Government purchases); and those "which hold evident 

promise of benefiting the public but which are not proper or practical fields 

for private initiative" (e.g., NACA) 

The "social objectives of science," whose consideration had been a prime purpose in the creation of the Board, appeared in a section awkwardly entitled, "Recovery Program of Science Progress." In effect, the 

Board recommended a new deal for science based on enlistment of "the 

science and engineering groups in the country in a cooperative effort for 

the quick success of the National Industrial Recovery Program." But the 

proposal that a fund of $16 million (subsequently raised to $75 be 

spent over a period of 5 years on research for public works programs, for 

76 The discussion of the "place of science in the Government" in the reports of the Science 

Advisory Board (1933—34, pp. 15—17; 1934.—35, pp. 40, 269) reflected the concern 

of the National Research Council since the end of World War I for fundamental research 

in this country. 

A recurring anxiety voiced in the 1920's was that the war years had used up the basic 

research of the previous century and it was not being adequately replaced. Industrial 

research laboratories annually spent almost $200 million on applied science, Secretary 

of Commerce Hoover wrote in 1925, while funds for all pure research did not exceed 

$10 million. Yet the applied science laboratories were wholly "dependent upon the raw material which flows from the laboratories and men engaged in pure science. And 

the industrial investigators are the first to demand more support to pure science." 

It is unfortunately true [Hoover declared] that we can claim no such rank 

in pure science research as that which we enjoy in the field of industrial 

research. Instead of leading all other countries in the advancement of fundamental scientific knowledge, the United States occupies a position far in the rear of the majority of European nations. A list of the awards of the Nobel 

prizes to men of various nationalities reveals the small proportion of first rank 

minds that we support. Other tests lead to the same conclusion, namely, that 

the number of first rank investigators developed in the United States is far 

below what our population, education, and wealth would lead one to expect. 

("The vital need for greater financial support of pure science research," an address before 

Am. Soc. Mech. Eng., Dec. 1, 1925, reprinted by National Research Council EL/C: 

Q11.N293]). See also Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, pp. 340—343. 

Science Advisory Board, Report, 1934—35, p. 15 and n. 
326 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

conservation, and for the creation of new industries was not apparently what 

the administration had in mind. The Science Advisory Board was dissolved.78 

The year 1935 came and the depression persisted. The WPA and 

other relief agencies were at their peak, giving work to 20 million persons, 

and Federal employees, numbering 588,000 when the depression began, 

headed toward the total of 1,370,000 reached in 1941. But across the Nation 

over 11 million remained unemployed and close to that same number would 

still be unemployed on the eve of war.79 

Industry was moving again but cautiously, and consumers, growing 

wary of the rising public debt, tended to hoard the little they had. To the 

economists and social scientists of the administration more planning was the 

answer. To scientists, including Dr. Briggs, who wrote and spoke repeatedly on the subject, new inventions, and enterprises were needed to 

prime the economy, stimulate the consumer, and start up industry again.80 

Federal agencies, notably the Public Works Administration (PWA), 

successfully employed tens of thousands in reclaiming and developing the 

natural resources of the country, completing Boulder [Hoover] Dam in 

Nevada and the Triboro Bridge in New York, harnessing the Mississippi, 

78 Science Advisory Board, Report, 1933—34, PP. 267 if.; Dupree, Science in the Federal 

Government, pp. 353—358. 

Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, p. 294; Wecter, The Age of the Great 

Depression, p. 82. 

Dr. Briggs's promise of "rich returns in employment in new industries" was made 

repeatedly, in a speech of Mar. 25, 1936 (NBS Box 400, PAC), memoranda for the Secretary of Commerce between July 26 and Nov. 4, 1936 (NBS Box 394, AG; Box 400, PA; 

Box 401, PRA); letter to the Civil Service commission, Dec. 22, 1936 (NBS Box 394, AP). 

Before the House Appropriations Subcommittee in 1938, Briggs said: "We need more industries in this country; but new industries must have something to work with— new facts, new discoveries which they can develop. To get new discoveries and new facts we must support research" (Hearings * * * 1939, Jan. 31, 1938, P. 139). 

Stimulated as much by the need to replenish the stock of pure science as to create 

out of it new industries that would absorb some of the unemployed, Roosevelt from 

1936 to 1941 gave his approval to a number of bills proposed in both the House and 

Senate designed to support programs of basic research in physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and engineering. in several of the bills the research was to be carried out by 

the National Bureau of Standards and other nonprofit research institutions, through 

grants administered by the Bureau and the National Research Council. Other bills 

proposed basic research stations affiliated with State universities, in cooperation with 

the Department of Commerce, or engineering experimental stations at the land.grant 

colleges, on the model of the Department of Agriculture experimental stations. To Dr. 

Briggs, the most promising was the Lea (H.R. 3652), proposed in 1939, which called 

for almost $60 million to be expended over a period of years, 75 percent of that 

sum going to research in the natural sciences and engineering. Half of the funds were to be appropriated to the Bureau, the other half to universities for specific research 

projects. By June 1941, as war approached and debate continued, all chances of 

enactment ended. See correspondence in NBS Blue Folder Boxes 30, 31, 58. 
TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 327 

setting up the Tennessee Valley Authority, and planning hydroelectric power 

dams such as that at Passamaquoddy Bay.81 But science proved unamenable 

to planning. In the latter half of the decade, the National Planning Board 

and its successors, the National Resources Board and National Resources 

Committeç, all sought, unsuccessfully, to establish a sound Federal relation 

with scientific research that would harness the scientific resources of the 

Nation.82 

As stirring in its implications for the Bureau as the search for the 

role of Government in scientific research was the revival in the thirties of 

concern for the consumer. In the national emergency of 1918, Bernard 

Baruch had shown the possibilities of an economy oriented to "engineered 

consumption" instead of uncontrolled production for individual profit. A 

controlling idea in the early years of the New Deal was the plan to shift from 

a producer economy to a consumer economy. Thus arose "consumerism" 

as a major remedy for the depression, its mystique in the recent books of 

Stuart Chase, Schlink, Kallet, and others.83 

Hope for Government support and direction of consumer interests 

centered in the National Recovery Administration, Roosevelt's chief prescription for recovery, set up on June 16, 1933, as a cooperative system of 

industrial self-government under Federal supervision. Under an NRA code 

system, industry, in exchange for Federal aid in regulating prices, would 

increase minimum wages and shorten work hours, thereby accelerating con- sumption. To maintain a balance between the interests of management, 

labor, and the consumer, NRA was to have the advice of three official boards, 

an Industrial Board, to secure the cooperation of the trade associations in 

support of NRA codes; a Labor Advisory Board, to work with the labor 

Among civic structures whose completion provided much needed employment was the new monumental Commerce Building at 14th and E Streets in Washington, its corner- stone laid on Apr. 5, 1929. Its acres of office space, reported the "New York Sun," were to house all the scattered activities of Commerce "except * * * the experimental gentle. men of the Bureau of Standards—perhaps the most interesing single agency of the 

Government of these United States" (file in NBS Box 263, AG). 

The remarkable "study of Federal Aids to Research and the place of research (includ. 

ing natural and social sciences) in the Federal Government," prepared by the science 

subcommittee of the National Resources Committee, under Dr. Charles H. Judd, University of Chicago psychologist, made two notable recommendations, destined to be 

implemented in the vast Federal research of World War II and after: That 

research agencies of the Government be authorized and encouraged to enter into con- tracts for the prosecution of research projects with * * * recognized research agencies, 

and that research agencies of the Government extend the practice of encouraging decentralized research in institutions not directly related to the Government and by individuals 

not in its employ. National Resources Committee, Research—A National Resource. I. 

Relation of the Federal Government to Research (Washington, D.C., November 1938), 

p.2. 

Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, pp. 128—130. 
328 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

unions; and a Consumers' Advisory Board, to represent consumer interests.84 

A brief account of the latter agency as it impinged on the Bureau of Standards is of interest. 

The Consumers' Advisory Board was charged with promoting greater 

use of specifications and labeling in consumer products by recommending 

such provisions in NRA codes. It was assumed that the necessary consumer 

standards could be promulgated in existing Government and Governmentconnected agencies. A committee of the Board, headed by Dr. Robert S. 

Lynd, professor of sociology at Columbia University, disagreed. In a report 

made public on December 1, 1933, the committee declared that the American 

Standards Association, the Bureau of Standards and other available agencies were so strongly oriented to the point of view of industry that they could 

not be entrusted with the task.85 

The Lynd report aroused wide interest, but its proposal for an mdc. 

pendent consumers' research laboratory wholly within the Government was turned down.86 During its brief career, the Consumers' Advisory Board, 

without facilities of its own, had to rely on the Bureau and the ASA for its 

research and testing. The Bureau reviewed almost 500 of some 830 NRA 

codes of fair competition involving consumer standards that the Board 

submitted.87 ASA, asked to aid in quality labeling of consumer goods, set 

up its Committee. on Ultimate Consumer Goods, on which the Bureau was also represented. But neither agency, nor NRA itself, satisfied the requisites 

of the Board, and with the death of the NRA in 1935 went its hopes for some kind of Federal department of the consumer.88 

84 More than 2.5 million firms enrolled under the Blue Eagle and nearly 800 trade 

associations came to Washington for their codes before enthusiasm for the NRA waned 

and cynical violations began to vitiate its promise. On May 27, 1935, the Supreme 

Court declared invalid the NRA as an attempt to control the national economy through 

regulation of intrastate commerce. See Paul C. Agnew, "The movement for standards for consumer goods," Ann. Am. 

Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 173, 60 (1934). 

80 Persia Campbell, Consumer Representation in the New Deal (New York: Columbia 

University Press, 1940), p.49. 

Bolder than Lynd's laboratory was •Schlink's proposal for a Federal Department of the 

Consumer, to be comprised of the oil, gas, coke, and fuel laboratories of the Bureau of 

Mines, all of the Bureau of Standards, the Office of Education, and the Bureaus of 

Home Economics, Chemistry, and Entomology in the Department of Agriculture. Schlink, 

"What the Government does and might do for the consumer," Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. 

Soc. Sci. 173, 125 (1934). 

NBS Annual Report 1934, p. 74; correspondence in NBS Blue Folder Box 19, 

669c-CAB. 

Helen Sorenson, The Consumer Movement (New York: Harper, 1941), pp. 183—184. 

Campbell, pp. 54, 172, reported that the influence of CAB recommendations on NRA 

codes was negligible. 
TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 329 

The consumer movement responded to a real public need and 

persisted as a militant force throughout the decade, but it was unable to 

present the united front, as did industry, labor, and agriculture, necessary 

to make a place for itself in the alphabetical agencies of the New Deal.89 

Sparking that movement, Schlink and Chase in 1927 had brought out their 

Consumers' Research Bulletin, as a mimeographed letter of the Consumers' 

League of New York. Two years later, upon the acquisition of laboratory 

facilities, the Bulletin appeared under the irnprimatur of Consumers' Research, Inc. In 1933 the Consumers' Council of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) inaugurated a biweekly Consumers' Guide, 

and in 1936 Arthur Kallet's organization, Consumers Union, began publication of Consumer Reports. A number of city and State agencies established 

consumer laboratories, as did the "New York Herald-Tribune" and the magazines Delineator, Modern Priscilla, and Good Housekeeping. By the end 

of the decade, as textbooks became available, some 25,000 secondary schools were giving consumer education courses, and in 1937 Stephens College, in 

Missouri, set up one of the first of the college and university consumer 

laboratories.90 

The Bureau, as its extensive correspondence files witness, was never 

entirely happy in its relations with these consumer groups. It was, by law 

and organization, oriented to industry, as the Consumers' Advisory Board 

said. Schlink's avowed objective in setting up his Consumers' Research was "to translate everything that the National Bureau of Standards and the National Physical Laboratory [in England] had done into consumer terms." 

But except in the most general terms, this was not possible with the technical 

reports of the Bureau, since its tests centered on the determination of those 

physical properties and characteristics of commodities or materials which 

made them most suitable for Government use. Efforts of Schlink and others 

to obtain useful and authoritative test results from the Bureau by sending 

consumer products to its laboratories had to be rebuffed. They were referred 

to commercial testing laboratories.92 

80 Sorenson, pp. 19, 20. 

Wecter, p. 279. Among widely used textbooks were Charles S. Wyand's The Economics of Consumption (New York: Macmillan, 1937), Alfred H. Hausrath and John 

H. Harms's Consumer Science (New York: Macmillan, 1939), and Leland J. Gordon's 

Economics for Consumers (New York: American Book Co.. 1939). 

°' Interview with F. J. Schlink, June 7, 1962. 

See Consumers' Research General Bulletin, II, 309 (January 1933); public and con. gressional correspondence with the Bureau, largely incited by Schlink's publication, 

in NBS Box 356, AG; Schlink's own correspondence with the Bureau, in NBS Box 4.00, 

AG; and D. W. McConnell, "The Bureau of Standards and the ultimate 

Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 173, 146 (1934). 
330 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

The Bureau acknowledged that consumer testing might well be a function of the Federal Government and that it ought to be concentrated in a single institution. Indeed, the Bureau frequently expressed itself as willing to become that agency. It doubted, however, whether Congress was ever 

likely to appropriate the estimated hundred million dollars annually that a really comprehensive program of consumer testing would cost.93 

Although oriented to research for industry by the nature of its or- ganic act, the Bureau insisted that its ultimate beneficiary was the consumer, 

whether represented by a public purchasing agency or private citizen. It was therefore in sympathy with the consumer movement and did what it 

could. Besides its assistance to the Consumers' Advisory Board it advised 

consumer laboratories on test instruments and equipment and developed new equipment, such as the standard abrasion machine for the American Home 

Economics Association, to measure the durability of textiles. It revised its 

directory of commercial laboratories that tested consumer products, issued a letter circular on "the availability to the public of research and testing 

facilities of the National Bureau of Standards," and issued periodically its 

list of "publications of interest to household purchasers." Perhaps most 

widely circulated was the illustrated brochure, "Services of the National 

Bureau of Standards to the consumer," which went through five printings 

totaling 15,000 copies between 1937 and 1940. Besides explaining the relation of Bureau testing to over-the-counter buying, the brochure informed 

readers of the Bureau's useful mimeographed letter, "Aid for over the coun- ter buyers," and of the range of letter circulars and published reports of 

Letter, Crittenden for LJB to Prof. Robert S. Lynd, Nov. 15, 1933, and letter, Crittenden to Executive Secretary, Peoples Lobby, Inc., June 16, 1949 (NBS Historical 

File); Hearings * * * 1939 (Jan. 31, 1938), p. 138. 

In a resurgence of interest in the consumer in 1938—39, several bills were proposed in 

Congress to extend the services of the Bureau to consumer testing, one of them authorizing an initial sum of $250,000 to "provide performance standards in the public interest," 

and permit the Bureau to grant firms and factories the right to label tested goods as "U.S. Consumer Standard," such standards to be policed by the Federal Trade Commission. Letter, LJB to Secretary of Commerce, June 14, 1939 (NBS Blue Folder Box 

19, 669c); letter, Assistant Secretary of Commerce to Gano Dunn, Visiting Committee, 

Sept. 15, 1939 ("General Correspondence Files of the Director, 1945—1955"); LJB 

correspondence in NBS Box 430, ID-Misc; letter, LJB to Wm. E. Ames, Jan. 3, 1940, 

aid attached correspondence (NBS Box 445, IG). 

M125 (1927), revised 1936; LC490 (February 1937); LC322 (1932), superseded by 

LC416 (1934), LC586 (1940), LC696 (1942), LC849 (1946). See letter LJB to Department of Agriculture, Aug. 6, 1927 (NBS Box 428, SPD), for a complete listing of 

Bureau publications of consumer interest. 
TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 331 

interest and use in the purchase of hundreds of products from automobiles 

to window glass.95 

The failure of national consumer interests to mobilize Government 

action on their behalf recoiled on the Bureau. Its products testing and its 

continued association in the specifications, simplified practices, and com- modity standards work even after that work was transferred to ASA in 1933 

sustained the hopes of consumer.groups and kept the Bureau in something of a bind for the next two decades. As late as 1952 the Bureau still found it 

necessary to maintain a form letter explaining the limitations inherent in its 

testing of products for Government and industry and why it could not issue 

comparative ratings of brand-name commodities. 

Despite the alarms, apprehensions, and hardships of the period, many 

of the seniors at the Bureau later remembered the time of the depression as 

not unrelievedly bleak. The respite in committee assignments, curtailment 

of travel, and decline in supervisory duties left welcome time for research. 

The paper load was further lightened as testing, which had long accounted for 

almost half of all annual funds and occupied more than half the time of the 

staff, fell off. 

It was a time of moratoriums and petty economies. The annual con- ference on weights and measures, first postponed in 1932, was not resumed 

until 3 years later. The Director's annual report was reduced by half and 

printed with that of the Secretary of Commerce. The master scale depot at 

Chicago, the farm-waste laboratory at Tuscaloosa, Ala., and the ceramic 

station at Columbus, Ohio, were closed, and the Bureau's cotton mill in the 

Industrial building was shut down.. Reduction of the building and housing 

division from 36 to 2 members and the automotive research section from 

40 to 13 members had counterparts in almost every building at the Bureau.96 

Although hiring of technicians and scientists, no matter how available 

or desirable, was out of the question, large numbers of "clerks," "draftsmen," 

and "technicians" were offered the Bureau through the Federal Emergency 

Relief Administration (FERA) A Works Projects Administration 

The material of the brochure first appeared as an article by Dr. Briggs in Ann. Am. 

Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 173, 153 (1934). In the same brochure series were "Services of the 

National Bureau of Standards to the home building industry and to the household" 

(1936) and "Services * * to governmental purchasing agencies" (1937). °° NBS Annual Report 1932, p. 2; Annual Report 1934, p. 73; correspondence in NBS 

Box 356, AB and AG, and Box 399, 1ST. 

Early in 1935 the President allotted $75,000 of FERA funds to the Bureau, "to assist 

educational, professional, and clerical persons in a study of materials for low-cost housing." Few of the 189 persons assigned to the Bureau possessed the specified training 

and were given cleaning and repairing chores. By autumn only half were still at the 

Bureau, on a part-time basis. The other half had been transferred to other Federal 

agencies. Report, A. S. McAllister, Oct. 4, 1935 (NBS Box 388, PRM). 
332 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

(WPA) allotment of $100,000 in 1934, distributed over some 20 projects, 

made possible long-deferred repairs to walks, walls, storm sewers, wiring, 

and general enhancement of the buildings and grounds.98 Several of the 

abler mechanics and technicians of the Bureau, let go earlier, found their 

way into these projects and tarried there until they could be restored to the 

Bureau payroll. 

It was a time of petty economies. The most elementary tools and 

supplies could not be obtained through customary supply channels, and Bureau members vividly recall raiding junk heaps for usable parts, and sending assistants with a dollar to Woolworth's downtown to buy pliers, friction 

tape, wire, and the like. A small compensation in that period was Dr. Brigg's 

successful effort to restore the word "National" in the original name of the 

Bureau. For over 30 years, through an administrative whim, the agency 

had been simply the "Bureau of Standards." It was "nationalized" again in 

With salaries down and insecurity rife, it was a time of tight money. 

Across the Nation car sales slumped and nightclubs closed. Theaters gave 

away dishes and held bank nights. Hobbies of all sorts boomed. A craze 

for crossword puzzles swept the country and contract bridge became a na- tional pastime. The spirit of speculation found new outlets in card games 

and the game of monopoly. And satisfying both the speculative and acquisi. 

tive impulses at small cost, stamp collecting in the mid-thirties zoomed from a hobby to big business, dignified by a President who was an ardent collector 

himself, and made profitable by an enterprising Postmaster General, James 

A. Farley. 

The first slight upturn in the depression came in 1935 when the 

Bureau reported "a distinct increase in * * * requests * * * from indus. 

tries * * for scientific and technical data." At the same time, as building 

activity by Federal and State agencies accelerated, tests and calibration for 

Government agencies increased fully 15 percent over the highest previous 

year in Bureau history. That year also brought a small increase in Bureau 

appropriations, sufficient to rehire some 20 former staff members separated 

2 years previously.'00 And the next year, 1936, the consolidation of funds 

went into effect, greatly simplifying the Director's bookkeeping and his 

sessions before Congress.101 

Hearings * * 1936 (Dec. 27, 1934), p. 109; letter, LJB to Secretary of Commerce, 

Feb. 20, 1936, sub: Emergency funds administered by the Bureau (NBS Box 394, FA). 

The first group of laborers came under the Civilian Works Administration ($50,000) and 

NRA ($20,500) in late 1933. Hearings * * * 1935 (Jan. 4, 1934), pp. 134, 137—39. 

See ch. I, p. 47. 

'°° NBS Annual Report 1935, p. 61. In 1936 half the 10 percent salary cut of 1932 was restored, the remainder in 1937. 

Hearings * * * 1937 (Feb. 18, 1936), p. 127. 
TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 333 

The first approval of new construction since the turn of the decade 

occurred in 1938 when Congress agreed to the erection of a high voltage 

laboratory to replace the obsolete structure built alongside East building 

in 1913.102 Up to that time the electrical industry had been content with 

laboratory measurements in line-to-line voltages in the range of 100,000 volts. 

By the late thirties the industry, transmitting power at 285,000 volts, was 

in need of new measurements. At a cost of $315,000, the new laboratory, 

with a 2 million-volt generator for high voltage work and a 1,400,000-volt 

generator for X-ray studies, was completed late in 1940.103 

Reflecting less the upturn than the relentless outpouring of Federal 

funds into construction projects was the expansion of Bureau branch laboratories in the latter half of the decade. A new laboratory was established 

in Seattle to test cement for the Grand Coulee Dam. The staff at Denver was augmented for the building of the Austin and Hamilton Dams in Texas and 

the Conchas Dam in New Mexico, as were the test groups at Riverside, Calif., 

and Allentown, Pa., for local construction projects.'°4 

Despite the relief programs and the massive construction projects, 

the Nation still failed to recover its normal momentum, a fact the President 

bitterly attributed to the deliberate machinations of the economic royalists 

in industry.105 The answer was more pump-priming, and the administration 

turned to new efforts on behalf of housing, the railroads, and utilities. 

The better homes movement of the 1920's became the low-cost housing 

program of the 1930's, administered on a series of fronts by the housing 

division of the Public Works Administration, the Federal Emergency Relief 

Administration, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, and the Tennessee 

Valley Authority. For some time a consultant to these agencies on building 

materials, the Bureau was now brought directly into the program and provided with special funds for research in low-cost housing. Its studies in the 

structural and fire-resistant properties of materials for these houses were 

102 The original laboratory was not planned but acquired as an alternative to invoking a penalty clause in the construction contract for East building. The structure, Building 

No. 26, was later converted into a telephone exchange for the Bureau. Interview with 

Dr. Silsbee, May 21, 1962. 

102NBS Annual Report 1937, p. 59; Hearings * * * 1939 (Jan. 31, 1938), pp. 146—152; 

Annual Report 1940, pp. 63—64, 70. 204 NBS Annual Report 1936, pp. 75—76. 105 James A. Farley, Jim Farley's Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948), pp. 101, 104. 

For Morgenthau's diary entry on the "conspiracy" of business, see The Memoirs of 

Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929—1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 

p. 482. 
334 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

published in a new series, 'Building Materials and Structures Reports' 

(BMS) 

With the approach of war, New Deal sponsorship of the program 

ended and the special funds for the Bureau ceased. At the urging of the 

building trades, of engineers, and architects, the work continued under both 

research and transferred funds and was broadened to include all building 

construction. Halted during the war, building technology achieved divisional status in 1950 as a necessary and permanent Bureau function. 

One other line of research extending earlier work, reactivated in the 

year of the Great Crash, was that on the permanence of paper and paper 

records. With funds provided by the Carnegie Foundation, studies were made of the permanence of Government writing papers, the preservation of 

records, and of library storage conditions. Light, heat, humidity and many 

other deterioratives of papers and books were assessed, but the principal, 

ioe NBS Annual Report 1935, P. 84; Annual Report 1938, PP. 90—92. The program, under 

the direction of Dr. Hugh L. Dryden, was formally launched in 1937. See Arch. Rec. 

82,34(1937); NBSLC5O2 (1937). 

The Bureau preserves the Declaration of Independence by air-sealing it in a frame 

against air pollutants. 
SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 335 

enemy of records proved to be the common air pollutant, sulphur dioxide. 

The investigation, extended to newspaper records, motion picture film, records on photographic film, microfilm, and lamination, culminated in the 

Bureau's work on the preservation at the National Archives of the originals of 

the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.107 

After the unsettling events of the early decade, the Bureau made its 

adjustment to the new limitations on research and working force. Few of 

the professional staff had taken their imposed furloughs, preferring to work 

without pay, unhampered by administrative duties. Others, under indefinite furlough, sought on their own initiative, with some success, funds from 

other Federal agencies, in order to return to their laboratories. Looking 

back on years, many at the Bureau were to have the impression that with 

industrial research at low ebb the period was particularly fruitful in 

fundamental research. 

SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 

The Seventh General Conference on Weights and Measures held in 

Paris in the fall of 1927, with Dr. Stratton, on leave from MIT, and Dr. Burgess as the American delegates, was later pronounced the most important 

since that of 1875, when the international prototype meter and kilogram were 

adopted. The 31 nations attending the Conference established an international temperature scale, accepted the principle of defining the international 

meter in terms of light waves, instead of the prototype meter bar maintained 

in Paris, and urged the national laboratories to reach agreement on a new basis for the international electrical Uflits.108 

Establishment of the international temperature scale was discussed 

in the previous chapter. Equally gratifying to the Bureau delegates was the 

adoption by the Conference of the American proposal to define the international meter in terms of the wavelength of the red radiation from the cadmium lamp. Not only were many precision measurements in science and 

industry then being made in tenns of light waves, but acceptance of this definition would greatly increase accuracy in the intercomparison of gage blocks 

and in determining the subdivisions of the meter and yard. Moreover, it 

101 NBS Annual Report 1930, p. 28; Annual Report 1931, p. 26; NBS M128 (1931) and 

intermittently through M168 (1940), and NBS C505 (1951). no danger of being supplanted, as was the international meter, this country's na- tional prototype kilogram was taken to the International Bureau at Sèvres in 1937 and 

recompared for the first time in 50 years with the international standard Its mass had 

changed by only 1 part in 50 million, a reassuring high degree of constancy (NBS Annual 

Report 1937, pp. 60—61). 
336 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) was hoped that with acceptance many of the difficulties in the way of international interchangeability of parts in industry might be satisfactorily solved. 

No serious competitor of the cadmium red line had been found since 

Michelson's comparison of that wavelength with the international meter in 

1893. Now, in the light of advances in spectroscopy, the search for possibly 

superior lines was renewed. The arc and spark spectra of the elements krypton and xenon disclosed very narrow lines when subjected to low temperatures 

obtained with liquid air, though none compared favorably with the cadmium 

lamp line.109 For its own purposes, however, the Bureau developed a method 

for the use of cadmium and krypton wavelengths in the measurement of 

master precision gage blocks that permitted their certification to an accuracy 

of 0.000001 inch per inch or three times closer than Not until 

after World War II were krypton and mercury lamps devised that made 

possible a redefinition of the light wave to give more precise values for the 

inch and yard. 

Earlier, in 1932; as a matter of industrial convenience, the Bureau 

and the American Standards Association agreed on a new ratio between the 

American inch and the millimeter. Arbitrary reduction by 0.00005 millimeter in the American inch made its equivalent to the 25.4-mm inch that was standard in England, and the new agreement put precision measuring in the 

two countries on the same basis, with consequent advantage to American 

export industries.11' 

Because the national laboratories both here and abroad had fewer 

calls on them from industry, the depression years were remembered as a time of international conferences, of many interlaboratory comparisons and 

exchanges of data and equipment looking to new or improved international 

standards. Besides the work in thermometry and standards of length, much was done in the standards upon which electrical, heat, photometric, X-ray, 

and radio measurements depend."2 

100 NBS Annual Report 1928, pp. 2—3; Annual Report 1929, p-8. 

For the earlier research see S441, "Notes on standard wave-lengths, spectrographs, and 

spectrum tubes" (Meggers and Burns, 1922); Meggers, "Measuring with light waves," 

Sci. Am. 129, 258 (1923) and Sci. Am. 134, 258 (1926); S535, "A fundamental basis for 

measurements of lengths" (Bearce, 1926). 110 NBS Annual Report 1935, pp. 66—67. The early work on standardization of precision 

gages was done on the Hoke blocks of World War I (ch. IV, p. 200) and reported by 

Peters and Boyd in S436 (1922) - " Science, 76, supp. 8 (1932). See app. B. " NBS Annual Report 1929, pp. 2—3, marks the first appearance of a series of yearly 

notes on interlaboratory cooperation and on international visitors to the Bureau. 

An excellent review of the fundamental research in the decade appears in Briggs, "The 

national standards of measurements," Annual Report, Smithsonian Institute, 1940, 

pp. 161—176. 
SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 337 

Meeting in Paris the year after the Conference of 1927, an international advisory committee on electricity proposed the establishment of electrical units based on the fundamental units of mechanical energy, the 

centigrade-gram-second system, rather than the practical but arbitrary units 

then in use. To this end the Bureau in 1934 published Dr. Curtis's absolute 

determination of the ampere and its relation to the accepted international 

unit, and in 1936 his absolute determination of the ohm.113 Moreover, the new apparatus constructed for these determinations made it possible to maintain and transfer working standards of the units to other laboratories for 

purposes of intercomparison. 

Anticipating a rapid conclusion to the work, the international advisory committee predicted general agreement on the new electrical values 

within 2 years and their formal adoption by January 1940. But by 1939, as the laboratories in Europe continued to delay reporting their work, the 

Bureau had constructed still better apparatus than that used in its original 

determinations and was working toward even greater precision in its meas- urements. The adjustment of discrepancies and final agreement with the 

laboratories abroad were suspended until after the war.114 

Also deferred by the war was final adoption of new and practical 

photometric units, based on a scale of color temperatures developed during 

the 1930's.1'5 While the photometric measurements involved psychological 

factors and could not be put on an absolute basis, the national laboratories 

subsequently reached agreement on a single, practical, worldwide system of 

units, in place of the diverse units and standards then prevailing. 

The new photometric units were made possible by the adoption of a standard visibility curve, based mainly on earlier work of Coblentz, Emerson, 

Gibson, and Tyndall,"6 and by the realization of the Waidner.Burgess absolute standard of light, first proposed in 1908 and achieved experimentally for 

the first time in 193L"7 Together with absolute units of electricity, international adoption of the photometric units was accomplished at last in 1948. 

113 RP685 (H. L. Curtis and R. W. Curtis, 1934); RP857 (Curtis, Moon, and Sparks, 

1936). 

114 NBS Annual Report 1936, pp. 58—60; Annual Report 1939, pp. 49—50. In RP1606 

(1944), Curtis reviewed the experimental work on the absolute units and in C459 (1947) 

announced their international adoption, along with the photometric units, effective Jan. 1, 

1948. The former electrical units, last adjusted in 1912, were then 50 years old. 

The reproducible color temperature scale, consistent with the International Temperature Scale, was reported by Wensel, Judd, and Roeser in RP677 (1934). 

and S305 (Coblentz and Emerson, 1918); S475 (Gibson and Tyndall, 1923). 117 See ch. III, pp. 111—112; NBS Annual Report 1930, p. 10; "A primary standard of 

light," Science, 72, 109 (1930) ; RP325 (Wensel, Roeser, Barbrow, and Caldwell, 1931); 

RP699, "Determination of photometric standards * * * (ibid., 1934); NBS Annual 

Report 1937, p. 64; Annual Report 1938, pp. 69—70. 
338 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

Much of the success in securing cooperation and final agreement on these 

standards was owing to the skill and diplomacy of the Bureau's chief 

over those years, Dr. Eugene C. Crittenden.118 

In the lull of the depression, Dr. Coblentz found time to reassess his 

standards of thermal radiation, kept at the Bureau for precise calibration of 

thermopiles and other radiometers used by industry, and to work on his 

standards of ultraviolet radiation.119 Hospitals, as well as many industries, 

had long been concerned with control of both the beneficial and harmful 

effects of ultraviolet radiation, and sought means for precise calibration of 

the photoelectric dosage intensity meters used for measuring radiation. 

Under study since 1931, about the time ultraviolet lamps first appeared on the market as household health aids, the Bureau standard, consisting of a quartz.mercury arc lamp whose ultraviolet rays were calibrated in absolute 

units, was ready in 1936.120 

An even more critical aid to the medical profession than the standard 

of ultraviolet radiation was flue Bureau's standardization of X.ray dosages. 

The need arose when World War I saw new X.ray apparatus that increased 

the voltage from 50,000 to 200,000 volts, and soon after the war these new voltages began to be widely used in cancer therapy. 

Even after a quarter century of experience hospital technicians and 

private practitioners still operated their X.ray equipment empirically. Al. 

though the early postwar apparatus, unlike previous equipment, had some 

lead shielding, in cancer therapy the voltage, more or less arbitrarily established at 140,000 volts, presented a tremendous haz'ard. Patients were rela. 

tively safe since exposure times fairly well known, but cumulative 

injuries to the operators working constantly with the apparatus were frequent 

and often severe. The question of-these radiation hazards was first raised 

at the International Congress of Radiology, held at London in 1925. ConCrittenden, who came to the photometry section of the Bureau from Cornell in 1909, 

succeeded Rosa as chief of the electrical division in 1921, became Assistant Director of 

the Bureau in 1933, Associate Director in 1945, and consultant to the Director from his 

retirement in 1950 until his death 4 years later. As chairman of the personnel and 

editorial committees of the Bureau for many years, he set the standards for personnel 

policies and for the high quality of the scientific output of the Bureau. Serving under 

all five Directors, he came to possess the most complete knowledge of the Bureau at every 

level of its operation and administration. 

RP578 (Coblentz and Stair, 1933). 

RP858 (Coblentz and Stair, 1936); NBS Annual Report 1940, p. 71. Two projects 

dear to Coblentz still unsolved at the time of his retirement were establishment of a unit of dosage of biologically effective ultraviolet radiation and a primary standard meter 

for measuring ultraviolet solar and sun radiation, for use in heliotherapy. Coblentz, 

"Reminiscences of the radiometry section," Dec. 9, 1944 (NBS Historical File). Without Coblentz, his group turned to more pressing work in the field of X rays. Interview 

with Harry J. Keegan, Feb. 12, 1964. 
SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 339 

cerned at the time principally with the certification of radium and not with 

radiation measurement, the Bureau had sent no one to the Congress. 

In the spring of 1926 the president of the Radiological Society of North 

America came to the Bureau and in some desperation asked it to undertake 

the determination of proper X-ray and radium dosages. At the urging of 

the society, Congress provided funds for the radiation research, and Lauri. 

ston S. Taylor, a young physicist working in X rays and electronics on a Heckscher Foundation grant at Cornell, was brought to the Bureau for 

the work.12' 

Taylor found the war surplus equipment that had been acquired by 

the Bureau wholly inadequate for the research to be done and successfully 

constructed from odd parts new apparatus of 200,000-volt capacity, setting 

it up in East building. A year later, in 1928, Taylor attended the Second 

International Congress, which proposed the "roentgen" as the unit of quantity 

for expressing X-ray and gamma-ray protection. The American counterpart of the councils working on standards in Europe was established with 

the founding of the National Committee on Radiation Protection and 

Measurements (NCRP) in 1928, its chairman, Dr. Taylor.122 

Taylor's work on the absolute measurement of X rays, published in 

1929, showed that the roentgen could be precisely measured, and resulted in 

the first real quantitative data on X-ray dosage standards in this country. 

Working through NCRP, his X-ray safety code in 1931 established guides 

for the shielding of operating rooms and of high voltage equipment and for 

protective devices for patients and operators. The first NCRP handbook on radium protection, prepared by Taylor's colleague, Dr. Leon F. Curtiss, for 

the use of industry and the medical profession, followed in 1934.123 

The initial, measurements of X rays had been made with heavy and 

bulky equipment. Construction in 1930 of a portable, guarded-field ionization chamber provided means for a much needed, accurate primary standard 

in convenient form. With the chamber, intercomparisons were made in 

1931 with measurements obtained in the laboratories abroad. The excellence 

of results led in 1934 to international agreement between the laboratories of. 

England, France, Germany, and the United States on procedures in X-ray 

ill Interview with Dr. Taylor, Sept. 24, 1963. 122 NBS Annual Report 1928, pp. 35—36. The work of the Second Congress was reported 

in NBS C374 (1929). 

Represented on the NCRP was the American Roentgen Ray Society, the Radiological 

Society of North America, the American Medical Association, X-ray equipment manu- facturers, and the Bureau. See Taylor, "Brief history of the NCRP * * *," Health 

Physics, 1, 3 (1958). 

123 RP56 "The precise measurement of X-ray dosage" (Taylor, 1929); HiS, "X-ray protection" (1931), superseded by H20 (1936); H18, "Radium protection" (1934), superseded byH23 (1938). 

SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 341 

though measurable, was and, with some qualifications, still is considered 

harmless. Ingestion of the radium paint was something else again, yet no 

one gave any thought to the hundreds of girls who during the war painted 

the dials, putting the radium.tipped brushes in their mouths to point them. 

In the early twenties a number of the girls fell mysteriously ill and died. It 

was 1927 before their illness was identified as radium sickness.129 

Staff artists on the tabloids drew lurid front.page pictures of young 

girls in nightgowns glowing in the dark of their bedrooms before full.length 

mirrors, while captions beneath described this terrifying experience in the 

night as the initial clue to the sickness. If the drawings were medically 

unsound, the poisoning was real, and in 1932, after extensive studies of the 

radium nostrums on the market, the American Medical Association removed 

radium for internal administration, in any form, from its list of remedies. 

Bureau research on radioactive luminous compounds, particularly their safe 

handling in industry, found it way into the handbook on radium protection in 

1934 and by 1941 merited a handbook (H27) of its own.13° 

Among other fundamental studies accelerated in the thirties was Dr. 

Meggers' work in spectroanalysis, leading to the compilation of new and ac- curate measurements of the atomic emission spectra of chemical elements, 

rare gases, rare metals, and to analyses of their structures. In a specially 

equipped laboratory, Meggers began an investigation to standardize the 

emission spectra of elements, with the intention of developing methods for 

quantitative chemical analysis by means of partial spectra. The systematic 

observation of the relation of various spectral lines to atomic structure pointed 

the way to fundamental factors that were to provide a valuable guide later 

in the chemical purification of metals, in testing materials of specific purity, 

sorting scrap metal, and controlling the composition of alloys.'31 

The progress in spectrochemical analysis, increasingly used in both 

research and industrial laboratories, was mirrored in an index, published by 

the American Society for Testing Materials, that listed almost a thousand 

papers on the subject spanning the period 1920_37.132 Even as the stacks of 

graph paper with their six- and eight-digit columns of figures mounted in the 

spectrographic laboratories in Washington, another tabular project of the 

Bureau, equally ambitious, got under way in New York City. 

Lang, "A most valuable accident," The New Yorker, May 2, 1959, pp. 49—92. For Surgeon General—NBS conferences on radium sickness, see memo, L. F. Curtiss for 

GKB, Dec. 21, 1948 (NBS Box 230, ID—Div IV). 

In the 1960's the watch industry began using tritium, a radioisotope of hydrogen, as a substitute for radium in dial paints, its radiation so slight it cannot be detected outside 

the watch. " NBS Annual Report 1933, p. 53; Annual Report 1937, pp. 64—65. "NBS Annual Report 1939, p. 55. 
342 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

An indispensable tool of physicists are the mathematical tables of 

functions, such as exponentials, logarithms, and probability functions, neces- sary in determining mathematical problems as varied as the diffraction of 

sound and electromagnetic waves, the potential of radiofrequency transmission lines, and electrical and thermal diffusion. The tables are fundamental 

in the solution of problems ranging from heat conduction and wave motion, 

the diffusion of a searchlight beam by fog, and the production of knock in 

gasoline engine cylinders, to the oscillations of an ultrahigh frequency radio 

tube. 

Scientists in this country as a rule relied on partial tables made up as needed. In the universities sporadic attempts had been made to formulate 

more comprehensive tables, but there was nothing comparable to the mathematical services available to scientists abroad, such as that established in the 

early thirties by the British Association for the Advancement of Science.133 

Then in January 1938 at a conference called by the Works Projects Administration to aid unemployed scientists (it was assumed there must be some, 

though they had not been heard from), Dr. Briggs proposed that the Bureau 

sponsor establishment of a central agency for computing fundamental tables 

of importance in various fields of applied mathematics. Dr. Arnold N. 

Lowan, Hungarian-born professor of physics in residence at the new Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and part-time teacher at Brooklyn 

College, was offered the directorship of the project. That summer the program was set up in a vacant loft building off Columbus Circle in New York. 

As it was WPA policy to provide work in its projects for as many 

unemployed as possible, and as almost no equipment of any kind could be 

provided, the planning staff assemiled by Dr. Lowan devised a self-checking, 

hand-computing procedure of preparing tables that could be performed in a series of simple, single stages. Over 400 individuals from the relief rolls, 

with a variety of talents but none of them trained scientists, and in most 

instances with no mathematical background whatever, were set to work with 

paper and pencils on the initial basic projects. These were to prepare the 

16-place values of natural logarithms, the 15-place values of probability functions, and the 10-place values of Bessel functions of complex arguments. A 

few desk calculators and adding machines were acquired by the directing 

staff to check the tabulations and were also used by a select group whose more 

complex task it was to determine values of polynomials for integral arguments. 

Electronic equipment that became available less than a decade later 

performed in minutes what 400 pencil-computers took months to do, but the 

Some German tables were available to their scientists but were not in print. The 

British work was still in progress, and most of the Bureau tables came out before theirs 

did. Conversation with Miss Irene A. Stegun, Feb. 18, 1964. 
SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 343 

procedure devised by the Mathematical Tables Project insured nearly flawless 

tables that received wide and grateful recognition. Before long universities, industry (General Electric), the Bureau itself, and other Federal agencies 

(the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation, the Corps of Engineers, 

the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance) began suggesting or requesting much needed 

tables for their research. By 1943, 27 book-length tables had been published in the Bureau's Mathematical Tables (MT) series, and as many 

more short tables had appeared in specialized periodicals. That spring the 

project staff, reduced to 60 by induction into the Armed Forces or empioyment in industry, was transferred from WPA administration to that of the 

Bureau, to continue its work on behalf of the National Defense Research 

Committee. Four years later the project moved from New York to the 

National Applied Mathematics Laboratories established at the Bureau.134 

Another fundamental study begun in the thirties was concerned with 

the physical constants of pure substances. The Bureau had long been aware 

of the need for accurately determined constants as offering the best criteria 

of the identity and purity of many industrially important organic com- pounds. A new technique in this field had been devised abroad, that of 

ebulliometry, providing a comparative method for determining the vapor 

pressure, boiling point, and purity of organic substances by comparison with 

water as a primary reference standard. In 1935 the Bureau invited Dr. 

Mieczyslaw Wojciechowski of the Polytechnic Institute of Warsaw, the student of Wojciech Swietoslawski, originator of the technique, to Washington. 

Under his direction, Bureau chemists began preparation of a number of high 

purity organic reagents and organic substances, including benzene, dioxane, 

isoprene, as well as of the aliphatic. hydrocarbons and alcohols. The work 

continued up to the eve of war.135 

The considerable fundamental research of the depression years, useful 

alike to science and industry, won wide acknowledgment. Unlike some of 

the research earlier in the decade, which had found little welcome though it was equally fundamental, none of these new lines of work impinged on or 

Lowan, "The computer laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards," Scripta 

Math. 15, 33 (1949); interview with Mrs. Ida Rhodes, Sept. 10, 1963. For the status of 

staff and equipment just prior to the transfer of the project from WPA to NDRC auspices, 

see memo, Warren Weaver, Applied Math Panel, NDRC, Nov. 13, 1942 (OSRD records, 

NARG 227, file MTP General Correspondence). 

131 NBS Annual Report 1936, p. 67; Annual Report 1941, p. 73; interview with Dr. E. R. 

Smith, Jan. 14, 1964. Swietoslawski visited the Bureau 3 years later and with Smith 

published RP1088, "Water as a reference standard for ebulliometry" (1938). See 

memo, Crittenden for LJB, Aug. 15, 1940 (NBS Box 490, 1DM), for a program of 

standard substances at the Bureau. 
344 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

threatened to disclose industrial processes. Almost all of them found 

important uses and applications when war came. 

"CURTAILMENT BY LIMITATION OF FUNDS" 

In September 1934 Science magazine reprinted an excerpt from the 

bulletin of the Société Française de Photographie et de Cinematographic 

concerning an event that had occurred almost a year earlier: 

The budget: retrenchments which the Government of the United 

States have made has forced the Bureau of Standards to close its 

laboratory devoted to the study of photographic emulsions, a laboratory in which Messrs. Burt H. Carroll and Donald Hubbard have 

carried on researches the publication of which has for the first time 

given quantitative information on the preparation of modern photo. 

sensitive emulsions. * * * Our society will be honored in awarding to Messrs. Carroll and Hubbard two of its medals, thus 

expressing its appreciation of their important contributions in a field heretofore mysterious.136 

Research in photographic emulsions, initiated at the Bureau in 1921, grew 

out of the need in the spectroscopy laboratory for emulsions sensitive to 

infrared spectra. Commercial film was not very satisfactory, particularly 

for spectrographic purposes. Its sensitivity was of a low order, its base of 

cellulose nitrate was flammable, and it shrank badly. The search for a better 

infrared emulsion led the Bureau to the study of emulsions in general.137 

With funds transferred from the Army Signal Corps, which was 

equally concerned with better film, Dr. Meggers went to Germany and obtained pilot plant machinery for making emulsions. To operate the plant 

installed in the basement of the Chemistry building, he brought to the Bureau 

two skilled technicians, Carroll, a chemist from the Chemical Warfare Service, 

and Hubbard, a recent University of Florida graduate in chemistry. 

For 7 years results were largely negative. The fIrst notice, of their 

efforts, now with funds provided by Congress for "industrial research," 

appeared in the Director's annual report of 1926 and spoke only of the difficulties under which they labored: 

The science of lens design has received a great amount of attention 

which is almost classical in character. The preparation of photo. 

"6Science, 80, 263 (1934). 

S422, "Studies in color sensitive photographic plates * * *" (Walters and Davis, 

1922); S439, "Sensitometry of photographic emulsions * * P" (Davis and Walters, 

1922); interview with Dr. Meggers, Mar. 13, 1962. 
CURTAILMENT BY LIMITATION OF FUNDS 345 

graphic emulsions, on the other hand, is largely a secret and empirical art known to relatively few. There is probably room for ten 

times more improvement in making emulsions than in making 

lenses. 

That year Carroll and Hubbard had made over 400 batches of emulsion. 

Under more exact controls, they were turning out emulsions with superior 

keeping qualities, but the secret of emulsion sensitivity still eluded them.138 

The breakthrough came 2 years later, and their first paper, on 

the sensitization of photographic emulsions by colloidal materials.139 

In 1933 Carroll and Hubbard published their seventeenth report on the mechanism of photographic hypersensitivity, and their preparation of new "grainless" emulsions.14° Not only were these emulsions superior to the 

best commercially available, but disclosure by the Bureau of the method of 

their preparation threatened to make public vital trade secrets. It was the 

time of the great depression, and the advisory committees surveying Bureau 

research and mindful of recent complaints of Government interference with 

private industry had to recommend retrenchments. The emulsion project was among the first to be terminated in the interest of economy.141 

The emulsion work was one of seven investigations which the Visiting Committee specifically "questioned whether the Bureau ought to con- tinue": (1) its research in heavy hydrogen, (2) its work on dental cements 

and alloys, (3) distinctly industrial problems like temperature measurements 

in the pouring of cast iron, (4) ignition phenomena and flame propagation in 

internal combustion engines, (5) development of large-scale production 

methods for levulose, (6) design of a telephoto astronomical objective, and 

(7) development of special photographic developers.142 

The precise areas of industrial research terminated or curtailed under 

the pressure of economy are difficult to identify or document, since they 

NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 34. 

119RP20 (1928). 

"°NBS Annual Report 1933, p. 52. The key paper in the group was RP447, "The photographic emulsion: analysis for nonhalide silver and soluble bromide" (1932). 

Dr. Briggs' outline of the project and unavailing efforts to interest the Carnegie Institution of Washington in its support appear in letter, Sept. 7, 1933 (NBS Box 361, IPS). 

Subsequent photographic research at the Bureau was limited to work on the international 

standardization of photosensitometric methods and, in cooperation with the ASA, preparation of specifications for films and plates. See NBS Annual Report 1940, p. 71. 

N0TE.—-In 1934 Burt Carroll and his assistant, Charles M. Kretchman, went to Eastman 

Kodak. Hubbard remained at the Bureau. " Minutes of meeting of the Visiting Committee, Aug. 23, 1934 (NARG 40,67009/5). 
346 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

were determined by verbal agreement between Dr. Briggs and the committees 

to the Bureau. Acting on an earlier House recommendation for "curtailment by limitation of funds," Congress in 1933 made the deepest of its cuts, 54 

percent, in its appropriation to the Bureau for "industrial research." It alone 

affected more than 100 projects.143 

Notable was the cut in the special fund for the "investigation of automotive engines." Supporting some 40 projects in 1932, funds for that work a year later were down by 30 percent. Among the investigations abandoned was one on the measurement of the road performance of automobile engines, 

undertaken at the request of interested Government agencies. The comparative tests made by the Bureau, indicating marked superiority of one make the new Ford V—B engine) over all others on the market, understandably displeased the rest of the industry, and termination of the study precluded 

publication of the test results.144 

Appropriation cuts, together with impounding of funds, came close 

to putting an end to all Bureau participation in both the building and 

housing and the standardization programs. With the initial reduction of 40 

percent in standardization funds, Secretary of Commerce Roper, with Dr. 

Briggs' concurrence, proposed to the American Standards Association that 

it take over the major role in that program.145 The work on specifications, 

simplified practices, trade standards, and building and safety codes was, 

however, to the advantage to many industries, and at once, through their 

Congressmen and trade groups, they protested the transfer to ASA, arguing 

for the Bureau's impartiality and superior facilities. 

As a compromise, Commerce agreed that the Bureau would cooperate 

in ASA standardization "under the procedure of the association," continue 

143 NBS Annual Report 1931, p. 37, reported 103 projects under this fund. Dr. Briggs 

later said that funds for industrial research were finally cut by 88 percent. Hearings * * $ 1935 (Jan.4, 1934),p. 132. 

Obviously incomplete was the list in memo, C. J. Humphreys (of the radiometry laboratory) for LJB, July 31, 1933 (NBS Box 358, ID), which noted that besides discontinuance 

of the specifications, simplified practices, building and housing, and trade standards 

divisions, and the safety standards work, other projects dropped included soil corrosion, 

telephone standards, preparation of levulose, testing of commercial aircraft engines, and 

radio aids to air navigation. 144 See NBS Annual Report 1931, p. 43; Annual Report 1932, p. 34; interview with Dr. 

Meggers, Mar. 13, 1962. 

Letter, Secretary Roper to Senator A. Lonergan, July 7, 1933; letter, president, ASA to H. S. Dennison, Nov. 2, 1933, and related correspondence in NBS Blue Folder Box 

19, 669c, and NBS Box 356, AG. The proposal for complete transfer of the standardization work was reported in Science, 78, 95 (1933). 
CURTAILMENT BY LIMITATION OF FUNDS 347 

its representation on almost a hundred sectional committees of ASA dealing 

with technical subjects, and sponsor certain projects assigned to it by ASA. 

When the formal transfer was made, some of the staff members separated 

earlier by the Bureau were taken on by ASA, to continue their work at the Bureau as ASA employees.146 

To what extent Bureau research was terminated in areas susceptible 

of patentable ideas that industry might otherwise discover for itself cannot 

be determined. Suggestive, however, is the example in radio research, where 

fundamental investigations in radio transmission phenomena were continued, 

while the entire group in applied radio research at College Park, Md., involving 20 members, was dismissed in June 1934 and the station closed.147 

All three committees advising the Bureau on retrenchment and re- organization of its research expressed concern over the current patent policy 

of the Bureau. Their investigations came at a time when Dr. Briggs was in 

NBS Annual Report 1934, pp. 52—53; Annual Report 1937, p. 59. Upon consolidation 

of Bureau funds in 1936, the standardization work remaining at the Bureau was performed under the appropriation for "commercial standards." 

147 Interview with W. S. Hinman, Jr., Dec. 28, 1963. Three of the group, unman, 

Diamond, and Dunmore, were brought back to Washington not long after. 

Percival D. Lowell with his invention in 1922 that made it possible to use ordinary house 

current instead of storage batteries to operate a home radio. For the first time, the 

60-cycle alternating current that operated the lights in the house could, with Lowell's 

rectifier, equally well supply power to the filament and plates of the radio. 
348 THE TiME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

the midst of serious litigation over patents taken out by members of the staff, 

in defiance of long-standing practice.148 No solution was offered at that 

148 Traditionally, the Government retained rights to the use of inventions of Federal 

employees but otherwise left title to them with their inventors. The Bureau of Standards did not follow this policy. For 20 years under Dr. Stratton it was understood that 

any innovation or invention of a Bureau staff member was to be patented in the name 

of the Government for the use of the public. 

The understanding was not seriously challenged until the summer of 1921 when two 

members of the radio section, Percival D. Lowell and Francis W. Dunmore, while working on a radio relay project for the Air Corps, conceived the idea of substituting house power 

for the storage batteries then used with radio apparatus. The method they devised for 

operating radio on ordinary house current also eliminated the principal obstacle to its use, 

the hum of alternating current in the radiofl Their inventions were only remotely related 

to the Air Corps project. 

In March 1922 Lowell and Dunmore filed the first of three related patents in their own names and in October 1924 granted manufacturing rights to the Dubilier Condenser 

Corp. of Delaware. The devices were described in NBS S450, June 17, 1922, and in a paper in the AIEE Journal, 41, 488 (1922). 

Shortly after filing their first patent, the Government, at the prompting of the Bureau, 

submitted the case for judgment to the U.S. District Court for Delaware. And on Nov. 

2, 1922, in a memorandum to all Bureau employees, Dr. Stratton for the first time formally 

established as policy the assignment of all patent rights in inventions and discoveries of 

the staff to the Government (memo in NBS Box 40, AGP). 

Almost a decade later, on Apr. 27, 1931, the District Court handed down its decision, 

deciding against the Government. Although the court declared that the devices of 

Lowell and Dunmore had been developed on Government time, with Government funds, 

and with the assistance of other Government employees, the devices had not been a part of 

their assigned work and therefore the inventions and patents were their property (The 

United States Daily, May 2, 1931, p. 52). The decision was appealed by the Justice 

When on May 24, 1932 the U.S. Circuit Court upheld the decision of the district court, 

the Government filed a petition in the Supreme Court. No similar case of patent rights 

had come up at the Bureau in the intervening years, but after the district court decision 

of 1932 some members of the Bureau continued to assign their rights to the Government, 

while others were advised that the Bureau would raise no objection tO a private patent, 

pending a final court decision (letter, Acting Director LJB to Secretary of Commerce, 

Dec. 17, 1932, NARG 40, 67009/5). On Apr. 10, 1933, the Supreme Court, one member 

dissenting, decreed that in the absence of a specific contractual agreement, all com- mercial rights to patents belonged to the inventor, whether or not the work was performed on Government time. 

Aware of the lack of uniformity in patent policy in Government agencies and the impasse 

at the Bureau, the Visiting Committee to the Bureau and the Business Advisory Council 

of the Department of Commerce in their joint report issued on Dec. 5, 1933, suggested 

that a Government ownership of patents clause be written into the standard employment 

contract of the Bureau. For unknown reasons, the Business Advisory Council reversed 

its stand and in a separate report of Dec. 9, 1933, formally recommended that Bureau 

employees be permitted to patent devices developed at the Bureau, with the warning 

that exercise of their right must not "interfere with free communication and cooperation 
CURTAILMENT BY LIMITATION OF FUNDS 349 

time, and Bureau policy, as elsewhere in the Federal establishment, continued 

vague and uncertain for almost another two decades. 

Bureau appropriations between 1932 and 1933, as the Science Advisory 

Board reported, fell by half, and further diminished by the sums diverted to 

the testing work of the Bureau, left its research funds reduced by almost 70 

percent. Equally imperiled was the fundamental research carried out under 

statutory salaries and investigations under special appropriations. Among 

projects in the latter category, two were scheduled for early termination, the 

whole of the levulose program and all research on utilization of waste prod. 

ucts of the land, the second by transfer to the Department of Agriculture.149 

Except in the Bureau's huge industrial research and standardization programs, however, most of the other cuts in special appropriations did not ex- ceed 15 percent. And in the research funds transferred to the Bureau from 

other Government agencies, slashes ranged between 10 and 50 percent. The 

necessity for economy was the sole justification offered. 

A member of the metallurgy division who had left the Bureau several 

years before to become director of the Battelle Memorial Foundation wrote 

between Bureau members or between the Bureau of Standards and industries and 

other organizations." 

Lowell and Dunmore gained little from their revolutionary invention. Granted a license 

by the inventors to manufacture the device in 1922, Dubilier in turn licensed it to Philco and several other interested makers of radios. Then in 1924 the Radio Corp. of 

America (RCA), largest of the radio manufacturers, developed a heater type of vacuum tube that performed as well with alternating house current as the Lowell-Dunmore unit. 

Within a year or two most radios sold to the public were operating on house current 

with the RCA tube (see "The electric light socket and our vacuum, tubes," Sci. 

Am. 132, 240, 1925.) 

Dubilier at once sued RCA for infringement of the patents and won the first round 

in the Delaware courts. When RCA offered to settle out of court and Dubilier refused, 

RCA appealed. The case was finally adjudicated in 1937 in favor of RCA when it was 

decided that the Lowell and Dunmore patents were not valid by reason of priority and 

the only new element in the invention, the suppression of a.c. hum, was inherent in the 

RCA tube and constituted no infringement (interview with P. D. Lowell, Nov. 12, 

1963). 

Stratton's patent policy announced in 1922 continued in force until modified in 1940, 

when patents were procured by the Justice Department and assigned to the Secretary of 

Commerce for licensing under terms he prescribed (Hearings * * * 1942, Feb. 11, 1941, 

p. 219, and policy letter, LJB, Feb. 16, 1944, NBS Box 489, AGP). 

The long-accepted Federal policy of permitting employees to retain title to their inventions ended on Jan. 23, 1950, when by Executive Order 10096 it was announced that 

all rights to any invention developed by a Government employee in the course of his 

assigned work belonged to the Government (see app. C). 

140 Some cherished research died hard. As late as 1939, Dr. Briggs requested experiments on the possible use of levulose or xylose in the quick-freezing process for preserving fruits and strawberries. Nothing apparently came of the study (memo for F. J. Bates, 

Dec. 7, 1939, NBS Box 490, 1DM). 
350 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

frankly to Dr. Briggs that he believed the enforced curtailment of Bureau 

activities a good thing: 

* * * In the course of time there are likely to creep into a long 

term program, and to stay there because there is always one more 

thing to try, projects that are not of very great import, or in which 

the economic condition has passed that once made them important. 

* * * In the long run the necessity for * * * a clean-cut decision 

as to the relative importance of the work in hand * * * will 

improve the patient. 

Dr. Briggs, who saw science the handmaid to new industries, with reservations reluctantly agreed.'5° 

One area of investigation which felt the knife of economy directed 

wholly at its applied research was radio. By 1935 staff and funds for radio 

research were approximately half what they had been in 1932. As a conse- quence, research was narrowed to the most pressing concerns: The improve. 

ment of primary and secondary frequency standards and of Bureau broadcasting of standard radio and audio frequencies for the control of station 

transmitters; research in the character and cause of variations in radio wave intensity and direction (i.e., radio wave propagation phenomena); and ac- curate determination of the height and characteristics of the ionosphere 

layers, the primary factor in long-distance radio transmission. 

Outgrowing its radio laboratory and its reliance on commercial and 

Government broadcasting stations for additional operating facilities, the 

Bureau in 1932 received funds to establish two experimental stations just 

outside Washington. One was a transmitting station, in several frame buildings erected on the site of the Department of Agriculture experimental farm 

near Beltsville, Md.; the other a receiving station for radio wave research, in 

similar structures on 200 acres purchased near Meadows, Md.151 

With new and improved equipment at Beltsville, the Bureau continued 

its transmission of standard radio frequencies to permit stations to calibrate 

standard oscillators and check their broadcast frequencies, and in 1935 began 

transmitting standard time intervals in the form of spaced pulses, as well as a standard musical pitch.152 

Long-distance radio transmission continued to present the greatest 

difficulties, owing to the character of the ionosphere layers, some 60 miles 

up. In cooperation with standards laboratories and radio agencies abroad, 

the Bureau set up automatic equipment at Meadows and began making con- Letter, H. W. Gillett, July 13, 1933, and attached correspondence (NBS Box 356, AG). 

NBS Annual Report 1932, pp. 16—1'Z. The services were described in LC453, "Standard frequencies and other services * * (1935), superseded by LC498 (1937), LC565, (1939), and LC591 (1940). 
CURTAILMENT BY LIMITATION OF FUNDS 351 

tinuous recordings at varying heights of the critical frequencies of the ionized 

layers responsible for reflecting radio waves back to earth. 

Not a single surface, as originally believed, the ionosphere phenomenon apparently consisted of a series of layers, each affecting differently 

the distance obtained in radio transmission at various frequencies, at different times of day, different seasons, and even in different years. From "the 

most complete body of data in existence on this subject," the Bureau reported 

in 1934, the radio section began the first of its deductions about the roles 

played in long-distance transmission by reflection and refraction and the relative effects of ultraviolet light, electrons, and heavy ions. The amassed data on sudden fadeouts in long-distance transmission, obtained through cooperative research, led in 1935 to Dellinger's confirmation of their source in sudden 

eruptions on the sun, a phenomenon subsequently known as "the Dellinger 

effect." 153 By 1937 the data at the Bureau made it possible to inaugurate a serv- ice of monthly predictions of ionospheric and radio conditions. For the 

first time Government long-distance stations and commercial air services were 

provided with information on the selection of radio frequencies for transmission over specified distances at various times of day and year, alternative 

means of radio communication when sun disturbances interfered with normal 

communications, and other vital transmission information.154 

One investigation in the field of applied radio in the 1930's—long 

before the advent of CONELRAD or EBS (Emergency Broadcast System)— 

struck a faintly ominous note, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation 

requested the Bureau to make experiments to see whether voice broadcasting 

NBS Annual Report 1934, p. 54; Dellinger notes in Science, 82, 351 and 548 (1935); 

NBS Annual Report 1936, p. 61; RP1001, "Characteristics of the ionosphere * * 

(Gilliland, Smith, and Reymer, 1937); RP1O61, "Sudden disturbances of the ionosphere" 

(Dellinger, 1937). 154 The service was announced in LC499, "The weekly radio broadcast of the NBS on the ionosphere and radio transmission conditions" (1937). LC565, "Standard frequencies and other services broadcast by NBS" (1939), said the Bureau's ionospheric 

reports would offer information on vertical-incidence critical frequencies, heights of the 

ionospheric layers, maximum usable frequencies for radio transmission, and information on ionospheric disturbances, thereby permitting a choice to be made in selecting optimum 

frequencies for long-distance transmission. 

LC614, "Radio transmission and the ionosphere" (1940), was a 22-page description of 

the new ionosphere observation, reporting, and predicting service of the Bureau, analogous to the Federal weather reporting service. 

LC615, "Radio distance ranges" (1940), provided the first detailed data for long-distance 

radio stations on ionospheric heights and ionization density of ionosphere layers, and 

determination and control of optimum conditions for long-distance radio for the coming 

year. This circular was superseded by LC658 (1941), with ranges for the summer of 

1941 and winter of 1941—42. It was withdrawn on Jan. 2, 1942, as classified information. 

The series was resumed after the war. 
Recording radio-weather forecasting data as a preliminary to preparing monthly predictions of ionospheric and radio conditions. Systematic measurement of the height 

and density of the ionospheric layers, the highly electrified region of the upper atmosphere produced by solar radiation and greatly influenced, by high-speed particles 

discharged from the sun, is basic in the predicting of radio weather. 

to cover the entire United States was possible from a single station. The 

Bureau engineers came up with a system that seemed feasible, but whether 

any part of it was ever tested, and what the FBI proposed to do with it is 

unfortunately nowhere recorded at the Bureau.155 

A happier career was promised in two kindred projects first reported 

in 1935. They grew out of the experimental work in telemeteorography then 

going on in Germany, France, and Finland, where compact packages of radio 

equipment were being sent aloft via unmanned balloons to gather upper air 

weather data and record their transmission on a ground receiver.156 

NBS Annual Report 1936, p. 61. 

The principle of telemetry or remote measurement was not new to the Bureau. In 

1924 McCollum and Peters devised an electric telemeter for remote reading and recording of strain and force measurements, especially in inaccessible places, for use in testing 

bridge members and airship girders already in place in units under'construction (T247, 

1924). 

352 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

I II 
CURTAILMENT BY LIMITATION OF FUNDS 353 

At the request pf the U.S. Weather Bureau, Leon Curtiss and Allen V. 

Astin of the electrical division undertook similar research at the Bureau, to 

devise a practical system of radiometeorography for the weather service.'57 

When the aerological division of the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics requested 

a high-altitude weather recording system of its own, a second project was 

initiated in the radio laboratory under Diamond, Hinman, and Dunmore. 

As the Diamond apparatus seemed better suited to both Weather 

Bureau and Navy needs, Curtiss and Astin, more interested in radiation 

phenomena than in weather, equipped the radio telemeter they devised with 

special Geiger counters and began lofting them 20 miles and more into the 

stratosphere to gather cosmic-ray data.'58 Cosmic rays, the source of high 

energy particles that impinge on the earth from space, are of interest not 

only as radiation phenomena but for their effect on radio communication 

and also as possible keys to the study of atomic structure. The 18 ascensions 

made with the Curtiss-Astin telemeter confirmed earlier views reported from 

abroad, that the greater part of cosmic-ray phenomena was apparently caused 

by secondary effects generated not in outer space but within our owii 

atmosphere.159 

A year after beginning construction of their unit, Diamond and 

his group sent up their first model and demonstrated its effectiveness in 

cransmitting continuous data on cloud height and thickness, temperature, 

pressure, humidity, and light intensity in the upper atmosphere. Effective 

from ground level to heights of 15 or more miles and at distances up to 200 

miles, the radiosonde, as it was called, enormously increased the range and 

quantity of weather data, previously gathered by observing devices strapped 

to kites, zeppelins, or the wings of airplanes. By 1940 the radiosonde had 

become an integral part of U.S. weather and meteorological services and some 35,000 units were being built and sent up each year in this country and its 

territories.'60 

" Curtiss and Astin, J. Aeron. Sci. 3, 35 (1935). 

'581n 1928, with the recent incorporation of the vacuum tube in the Geiger-Muller ion 

counter (the principle had been established by Rutherford and Geiger in 1908), Dr. Curtiss began a long series of studies on routine quantitative measurements with the counter 

which led to the later cosmic-ray studies and development of new types of counters. See 

RP165 (1930), RP191 (1930), RP509 (1932), RP526 (1933), RP1154 (1938), RP1525 

(1943). 

"° RP1169, "An improved radio meteorograph on the Olland principle" (Curtiss, Astin, 

et aL, 1938); Curtiss and Astin, "Cosmic ray observations in the stratosphere," Phys. 

Rev. 53, 23 (1938); RP1254, "Cosmic-ray observations * * (Curtiss, Astin, et al., 

1939). 100 NBS Annual Report 1936, p. 65; Annual Report 1937, p. 60; RP1082 "A method for 

investigation of upper air phenomena * * (Diamond, Hinman, and Dunmore, 1937) 
354 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

The radiosonde, developed 

for the Navy by the Bu- reau in 1936, telemeters 

information on upper air 

pressure, temperature, and 

humidity from unmanned 

balloons. It employs an 

ultra-high-frequency oscil. 

lator and a modulator. 

The frequency of the latter is controlled by special resistors whose electrical resistance varies with 

the atmospheric phenomena. At the receiving 

station on the ground or on shipboard, a graphic 

frequency recorder, con- nected in the receiving set 

output, provides an automatic chart of the variations of the phenomena 

with altitude. 

Subsequent refinements in the radiosonde included improved instruments such as the electric hygrometer,161 superior electronic components, 

and more recently, miniaturization. These were also used in the special radiosonde designed for the Navy to operate as an automatic weather station. 

Instatied on isolated islands or in mountainous regions, the radiosonde 

transmitted data on temperature, pressure, humidity, wind velocity and direction, and rainfall via keyed frequencies picked up and recorded at the nearest 

Navy base.162 

The international interest in telemeteorography that led to the radiosonde coincided with a new age of exploration—ionospheric, stratospheric, 

and terrestrial—marked early in the decade by the Second International 

Polar Year of 1932—34. Available to that Year were the airplane, radio, and a range of scientific instruments and equipment denied the First Polar Year, 

held 50 years earlier, in 1882—83. In that initial cooperative assault of 

science on the icy unknown, meteorologists and astronomers of 11 nations 

had acted in concert to explore the polar regions and, from 12 bases around 

the Arctic and in the southern ocean, make observations of polar weather, 

RP1329, 'An improved radio sonde and its performance" (Diamond, Hinman, et al., 

1940); Science, 90, 246 (1939). 

Mass production of the radiosonde was turned over to several companies in 1937, including Bendix-Friez of Towson, Md. In the next 26 years, Bendix alone manufactured more than 2 million units. "Baltimore Evening Sun," Sept. 6, 1963, p. B6. 

RP11O2, "An electric hygrometer * * a" (Dunmore, 1938), and its improvement, 

RP1265 (1939). RP1318, "An automatic weather station" (Diamond and unman, 1940). 
CURTAILMENT BY LIMITATION OF FUNDS 355 

the aurora borealis, and of sun-spot activity and its attendant magnetic 

storms.163 

The Second Polar Year, with more countries and more branches of 

science involved, again centered its studies on meteorology, magnetism, and 

aurora in the the Arctic, where their effects are strongest and most free from 

the contamination of civilization. Among prominent new objectives of the 

Year was the work planned in space phenomena, primarily the study of their 

effects on radio transmission. Representing the United States were the 

National Bureau of Standards, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution, and the Naval 

Research Laboratory. 

The Year unfortunately fell during the worst phase of the worldwide 

depression. The Bureau had planned to carry out extensive new measurements of the heights and degree of ionization of the ionosphere layers at the 

station set up at Fairbanks, Alaska. Instead, its participation was limited 

to the preparation of certain computations for the expedition and construction of some of the automatic recording instruments used by members of the 

Department of Terrestrial Magnetism.164 More active participation and 

extensive research awaited the International Geophysical Year of 1957—59. 

The strides of radio and aeronautics in the 1920's made possible the 

far-ranging exploration that created headlines all through the thirties. 

Byrd's flight to the North Pole in 1926 was followed by his Antarctic expeditions, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, in 1933 and 1934. 

Through Dr. Briggs's chairmanship of the special advisory committee and 

later the research committee of the society, the Bureau took part in the Antarctic studies, as it did in almost every expedition of the society during that 

decade, actively assisting in the preparation, providing special instrumentation, and in many instances sending staff members along on. the expeditions. 

With Dr. Briggs, Dr. Tuckerman, and other Bureau members as- sisting in instrumentation and computations, the National Geographic Society 

in 1934 and 1935 sponsored two flights into the stratosphere in the largest 

free balloons constructed up to that time. In the first ascension, the balloon 

carried more than a ton of scientific instruments arranged by Dr. Briggs, 

including special meteorographs, electric thermometers, and spectrographs 

designed or constructed at the Bureau. Manned by two Army Air Corps 

officers, the huge balloon reached the unprecedented height of 72,395 feet or 

almost 14 miles. Instruments aboard the gondola recorded data on cosmic 

radiation, sun and sky spectra, and the ozone layer, collected air samples and 

information on the functioning of radio equipment at extreme altitudes, and 

163 The two Polar Years are compared in J. Tuzo Wilson, I.G.Y.: The Year of the New 

Moons (New York: Knopf, 1961), pp. 6—8. Science, 76, 187 (1932); NBS Annual Report 1933, p. 48. 
356 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

made comparisons of photographic and instrument measurements at high 

altitudes.'65 

The next year, in 1936, the National Geographic and the Bureau 

jointly sponsored an expedition to the Kazak region of Asiatic U.S.S.R., 

to observe the June solar eclipse. New data on the suns corona, its prominences, and solar spectra were recorded by the Soviet and Harvard Uni. 

versitv groups with the expedition. Dr. Irvine C. Gardner of the Bureau 

brought back the first natural-color photographs ever made of a total eclipse, 

with a 14-foot eclipse camera and 9-inch astrographic lens wholly designed 

and constructed at the Bureau.166 The giant camera went again on the 

National Geographic-U.S. Navy Eclipse Expedition to Canton Island in the 

South Pacific the following year.167 

Another joint National Geographic.Bureau eclipse expedition was made to South America in 1940, and a year later the Bureau itself sponsored 

the Louise A. Boyd Arctic Expedition, to make new radio, geomagnetic, and 

auroral measurements for a special study of ionospheric characteristics.168 

Briggs, "Laboratories in the stratosphere," Sci. Mo. 40, 295 (1935), et seq.; Capt. 

A. W. Stevens, "Man's farthest aloft," Nat. Geo. 69,59 (1936). 

166 Gardner, "Observing an eclipse in Asiatic Russia," Nat. Geo. 71, 179 (1937). 

167 NBS Annual Report 1937, p. 65. 

'66Sci. Mo., 51, 305 (1940); Science, 93, 420 (1941); Science, 94, 324 (1941). 

Dr. Gardner's specially designed camera for photographing the solar corona. It was used at Ak Bulak in Asiatic Russia in 1936 and at Canton Island in the South Pacific 

in 1937. The lens was made at NBS from optical glass poured in the Bureau glass plant. 
HEAVY WATER 357 

Dr. Briggs himself led and directed the scientific work of "one of the most 

extensive efforts ever organized" for spatial and radio research, the 76.man 

team of scientists, Air Force, Army, and National Geographic members that 

went to Brazil for the eclipse of 1947.169 

In light of present knowledge, the First Polar Year of 1882 sought no more than superficial clues to the makeup of the solar system and to spatial 

influences on weather. The Second Polar Year and the decade of exploration that followed it were not much broader in horizon or more sophisticated 

in their inquiry, in spite of the progress of radio, aviation, and the new physics. The advances in these three fields of science were not to yield their 

fruit—foreshadowing command of the atom, human flight in space, and near 

approach to the planets—for another half a dozen years. 

HEAVY WATER 

The Bureau studies of cosmic radiations, weather and radio phenomena, of X rays, radium, and their emanations bore only distant relation 

to far more sophisticated investigations going on elsewhere in the thirties in 

this country and abroad into the nature of matter and its atomic structure. 

Following Roentgen's discovery of X rays in 1895 and Becquerel's 

demonstration of radioactivity, the new century witnessed a train of discoveries extending illimitably the boundaries of physical knowledge: "the 

quantum character of light energy (Max Planck and Albert Einstein), the 

theory of relativity (Einstein), the nuclear structure of the atom (Lord 

Rutherford and Niels Bohr) ; interpretation of the light-emitting properties 

of matter (Prince Louis de Brogue, Erwin Schrödinger, and Max Born), of 

heavy hydrogen (Harold Urey), of the neutron (Sir James Chadwick), and 

of means of producing artificial transmutations of the elements (Sir John 

Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, Frédéric Curie.Joliot, Enrico Fermi, and 

others) " 170 The initial concern of the Bureau in the atomic adventure may be 

said to stem from Becquerel's finding of radioactivity in uranium salts, and was in the chemistry rather than the physics of the atom. 

Mapping the group of radioactive elements that had been identified 

since Becquerel's discovery, the English chemist Frederick Soddy in 1913 

found a number of them, because they had identical chemical characteristics, 

169 Gilbert Grosvenor, "Earth, sea and sky; twenty years of exploration by the National 

Geographic Society," Sci. Mo. 78, 296 (1954). 

E. U. Condon, "Physics," What Is Science? ed. James R. Newman (New York: 

Washington Square Press, 1961), p. 110. 
358 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

occupying the same space in the Periodic Table of Elements even though they 

possessed different atomic weights. He coined the word "isotope" to describe chemically identical substances with different atomic weights. 

The 1920's saw the development of the mass spectroscope, an electromagnetic device that sorted out atoms, both normal and isotopic, according to 

their masses, and projected them as sharp clear lines in a spectrum. Analysis 

of the true weights of the atoms of various elements thus became possible, 

and with this instrument, F. W. Aston of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge showed that not only radioactive elements, but almost all elements, 

have isotopes.171 

One element, hydrogen, gave particular trouble. Precise measurement of its atomic weight indicated that it had a heavy isotope, but apparently 

in so small concentration that Aston could find no trace of it on the spectroscope. At this point the Bureau of Standards became actively associated with 

this field of atomic research. 

In the summer of 1931, Harold C. Urey, associate professor of chemistry at Columbia, then lecturing at the Johns Hopkins University, became 

convinced .that an isotope of hydrogen of mass 2, though unknown, could 

be found.172 In conversation with Fred L. Mohier of the atomic physics sec- tion of the Bureau, Urey told him that in his studies of the hydrogen spectrum 

he had found a satellite line next to the hydrogen alpha line that he thought 

might be heavy hydrogen. Urey sought a way to enrich the suspected isotope, 

and wondered whether liquid hydrogen might not make better definition 

possible. Mohler suggested the Bureau's cryogenic laboratory, where Brickwedde was studying ortho- and para-hydrogen. There, successive lowtemperature distillations of liquid hydrogen resulted in a concentration whose 

spectrum left no doubt of the existence of the isotope.'73 

Urey had earlier suggested the possibility of separation of the isotope 

by electrolysis, but the procedure had been tried and given up as unpromising. 

Acting on a suggestion of Dr. Washburn, chief of the Bureau chemistry divi. 

sion, Edgar R. Smith on December 9, 1931, began an experiment in the isotopic fractionation of water by repeated hydrolysis of solutions of caustic 

potash. When 98 percent of the water had been decomposed in this manner, 

the density of the hydrogen in the residual water proved measurably higher 

"In the early nineteen-thirties, many atomic masses were very accurately measured and 

the energy of products of many nuclear reactions became known * * * [making) possible the full quantitative verification of Einstein's 1905 prediction that mass and energy 

are equivalent." E. U. Condon, "Physics," pp. 145—146. 

See Urey, "The natural system of atomic nuclei," J. Am. Cml. Soc. 53, 2872 (1931). 

NBS TNB No. 179 (March 1932), p. 23; Urey, Brickwedde, and Murphy, "A hydrogen 

isotope of mass 2 and its concentration," Phys. Rev. 40, 1 (April 1932) ; interview 

with Dr. Mohler, Oct. 1, 1963. 
HEAVY WATER 359 

than in normal water, by 164 parts in a million, that is, possessing a specific 

gravity of 1.000164.174 

Urey's discovery of the isotope of hydrogen and Washburn's actual 

separation were revolutionary.175 The new isotope, winning Urey the Nobel 

Prize in chemistry in 1934, was given the name "deuterium," with the symbol 

D (in the form of deuterium oxide or heavy water it is D20). Within 2 

years it had been prepared in a pure state, its specific gravity 1.015.176 

Another event in 1932, James Chadwick's discovery of the neutron, was to prove even more important in subsequent events than that of heavy 

water. In the atom compounded of protons and electrons (its positiveand negative-charged particles), Chadwick in England identified yet another 

fundamental particle, not electrically charged, which he called the neutron. 

Its neutral characteristics made it highly penetrating and therefore very effective as an agent in nuclear transmutation. That same year, Cockcroft and 

Walton, working in Rutherford's laboratory at Cambridge, bombarded a lithium target with protons. In the experiment, a hydrogen 

atom reacted with a lithium atom to produce two helium atoms. The first 

artificial nuclear reaction and true transmutation of elements had occurred.177 

For a time physicists showed great interest in the deuteron, the nucleus 

of deuterium or heavy water that Urey had found, because of its "remarkable 

properties as a projectile for producing transmutation of elements and par. 

ticularly for the production of neutrons." 178 But while deuterium had a NBS Annual Report 1932, p. 8; Washburn and Urey, "Concentration of the H' 

isotope of hydrogen * * 'I'," Proc. Nati. Acad. Sci. 18, 496 (1932); Washburn, Smith, 

and Frandsen, "The isotopic fractionation of water," J. Chem. Phys. 1, 288 (1933); 

RP6OJ, "The isotopic fractionation of water" (Washburn, Smith, and Frandsen, 

1933). Urey and Teal summarized deuterium research in Revs. Mod. Phys. 7, 34 (1935). 

Dr. Edward W. Washburn came to the Bureau as its chief chemist in 1926, when he was 45. He had recently completed a 4-year project as editor in chief of the monu- mental International Critical Tables of Numerical Data of Physics, Chemistry, and 

Technology. He was one of the best scientists ever to work at the Bureau, his research on the fractionation of petroleum, the crystallization of rubber, and on heavy water 

among his most important achievements in the 8 years there before his untimely death. 

See Nati. Acad. Sci., Biographical Memoirs, XVII (1935). 

Annual Report 1933, p. 54. In Science, 78, 555, (1933), Dr. Washburn urged 

construction of a plant for quantity production of "deuterium water." The 6 to 10 

gallons produced annually would be enough, he believed, for all current needs of physics, 

chemistry, and biological and medical research. Urey was no more prescient. Many 

years later he recalled that when he discovered heavy water he never dreamed that it 

would become a vital ingredient in the making of the atomic bomb. "I thought it 

might have some practical use in something like neon signs." Time, Feb. 19, 1965, p. 42. 

E. U. Condon, "Physics," p. 143. 

'78Sci. Mo., 38, 390 (1934). 
360 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

part in the final process of nuclear disintegration, the deuteron was not to be 

the trigger of atomic power as the chemists hoped. This role was reserved 

for the neutron. 

Enrico Fermi, then in England, reasoned that neutrons, lacking 

charge, should be highly effective in penetrating nuclei, especially those of 

high atomic number, with consequent release of energy. He selected 

uranium, at No. 92 the last of the naturally occurring elements, with atomic 

weight 238. But his bombardment in 1934 of uranium by neutrons slowed 

down by the use of deuterium proved inconclusive. He obtained only a "confusion" of radioactive substances, two of which, however, proved to 

have atomic numbers larger than 92. In Germany in late 1938, Otto Hahn 

and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry performed the same experiment and obtained a large variety of radioactive 

isotopes of chemical elements having half the atomic weight of the original 

uranium. Announcement of the significance of these two findings was near. 

Lise Meitner in Sweden, a refugee physicist from Germany, and her 

nephew Otto H. Frisch in Denmark, informed of the work of their former 

colleagues in Berlin and pursuing Fermi's line of investigation, hit on the 

answer. Meitner and Frisch conjectured that the uranium nucleus, with low 

stability of form, had divided into two nuclei of roughly equal size, releasing 

in the process enormous quantities of energy—the "confusion" Fermi had 

observed. They estimated the total energy resulting from that splitting of 

the uranium atom as about 200 MeV (200 million electron volts) •179 Their 

letter explaining the Hahn and Strassmann observations and Frisch's experimental verification, "Disintegration of uranium by neutrons: a new type of 

nuclear reaction," appeared in Nature magazine on February 11, 1939.180 

With full knowledge of Frisch's experiments, Niels Bohr arrived in 

this country the month before the appearance of the paper, and while visiting at Princeton told Einstein, in residence there, and Eugene P. Wigner, 

Princeton professor of theoretical physics, of its import. He also saw Prof. 

George B. Pegram at Columhia and Fermi, who had come to work in Pegram's 

laboratory. He impressed on them the significance of these experiments, 

told them of the work of Hahn and Strassmann, and something they did not 

'79The sum of the mass of the 2 fission fragments, totaling less than the mass of the 

original uranium nucleus, suggested that the matter that had disappeared had been 

transformed into energy. Although the matter transformed was small, Einstein's formula 

E—mc' indicated the enormity of the energy released, considering that the mass must 

be multiplied by the square of the speed of light, which is 185,000 miles per second. 

James P. Baxter, Scientists Against Time (Boston; Little, Brown, 1946), p. 420. 180 Nature, 143, 239. Niels Bohr's account of the verification, confirmed to him in a telegram from Frisch, appeared in this country in Phys. Rev. 55, 418 (Feb. 15, 1939). 
HEAVY WATER 361 

know, that Hitler had placed an embargo on Czechoslovakian uranium, the 

only source of the ore then known in Europe.18' 

Fermi and Leo Szilard at Columbia, Richard B. Roberts at the Carnegie Institution in Washington and other groups at Johns Hopkins, Princeton, 

and California independently confirmed the Hahn-Strassmann results.'82 

Their success at once raised the fear that other scientists in Germany had 

done the same, realized the probability of uranium fission, and soon the full 

resources of German science would be organized in a massive assault on the problem. 

Aware that the magnitude of difficulties that had yet to be. resolved 

required Government support, Szilard and Wigner in July 1939 conferred 

with Einstein in Princeton. In letters addressed to President Roosevelt, 

Einstein and Szilard explained the significance of the uranium experiments, 

the probability of achieving a chain reaction, and the urgency of proving out 

that probability before Nazi Germany did. Alexander Sachs, economist and 

381 Testimony. of Alexander Sachs, Hearings before the Special Committee on Atomic 

Energy * * on S. Res. 179 [McMahon Committee] (Nov. 27, 1945), Pt. 1, pp. 2—7. There seemed reason for alarm, but German research in nuclear physics was thwarted 

by Nazi ideology. That ideology is illuminated in a note that appeared in Science, 85, 

262 (1937): 

The Manchester Guardian prints in its issue of February 7 the following: "The Berliner Tageblatt reports a lecture given by Geheimrat (Privy Councillor) Professor 

Dr. Stark, president of the National Physical and Technical Institution (PhysikalischTechnische Reichsanstalt), on Dogmatism and Experience in Atomic Research.' Professor Dr. Stark, according to this report, rejected the theory of the form of the atom 

the moment it was put forward by Lord Rutherford and Niels Bohr—less on technical 

(sachlichen) grounds than from fundamental objections to their acceptance of views 

and dogmas of Jewish physicists. He now wished not only to criticize but to bring forward something better as an alternative. He described his new model of the atom 

with the aid of a short film. Its main feature is that the electron has not the form of a sphere, assigned to it by the Jewish physicist Abraham, but that of a vortex-ring 

(Wirbélring). Jewish influence, said Professor Dr. Stark, has gone so far that even non-Jewish scientists like Planck, Bohr, Von Laue, Schrodinger and Heisenberg had 

become partisans of the false doctrine (Irrlehre), and no young lecturer who gave a 

thought to his career dared to oppose the dominant theory. Some particularly pushing 

physicists married Jewish women in order to advance their careers. Now that these 

monstrous circumstances had been discovered, German and authentic (arteigene) physics 

would forge ahead. 'Privy Councillor Stark's lecture is to serve,' the report concludes, 

'as a new thrust to eliminate from German physics the effects of the Jewish mind.' 

Unfortunately, Stark said in conclusion, in the two decades no important discovery had 

been made by physicists of the German alignment." 

Szilard and Zinn, "Instantaneous emission of fast neutrons in the interaction of slow 

neutrons with uranium," Phys. Rev. 55, 799 (1939). Other confirming letters in that 

issue of Phys. Rev, appeared on pp. 509, 510, 511, 516, 797. That of Bohr and Wheeler, 

which suggested that fission was more likely in than appeared in Phys. Rev. 56, 

426 (1939). 
362 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

director of Lehman Bros., friend of Einstein, and since 1932 an economic 

adviser to the administration, with direct access to the President, offered to 

put the letters in the President's hands. 

The letters were transmitted on October 11, 1939. After reading 

them Roosevelt said he must have the advice of Dr. Briggs, his principal 

counsellor in the official family on scientific matters. With the President's 

permission, Sachs informed Dr. Briggs the same night of his visit to the 

White House.1S3 That week the President appointed an Advisory Committee on Uranium, with Dr. Briggs as chairman and Col. Keith F. Adamson of 

Army Ordnance and Commander Gilbert C. Hoover of the Navy Bureau of 

Ordnance his associates. to look into the cuestion of uranium fission. 

The first meeting of the committee on October 21, 1939, attended 

also by Mohler of the Bureau, Sachs, Szilard, Wigner, and Edward Teller, 

resulted in a report to the President, dated November 1, saying that a chain 

reaction, though unproved, was a distinct possibility. In tentative terms it 

speculated on the potential energy that might be released by splitting of 

uranium atoms, looking toward the possibility of both a new explosive, in 

which the military was interested, and a new source of energy, long sought by 

the Navy to drive its submarines without the need of frequent surfacing. 

Specifically, the report recommended that 4 tons of pure.grade graphite be 

obtained at once for research, and later acquisition, if justified, of 50 tons 

of uranium ore. 

Three months after the report, in February 1940, the sum of $6,000 

from Army and Navy Ordnance funds was made available to purchase a small quantity of graphite for experiments on its absorption qualities. The 

war in Europe was then 6 months old. Seven weeks later Hitler invaded 

Denmark and Norway, preliminary to his attack on the Low Countries and 

France. 

It was an awesome responsibility that had been thrust upon Dr. Briggs. 

in his 66th year—_and seventh as Director of the Bureau—he had gone 

through a series of investigations of Bureau operations and witnessed a serious reduction in Bureau funds and staff. The depression was still on, and so were many of the constrictions of a planned economy. And no end was in sight. A younger man might have seized on the adventure into the un- known promised by nuclear fission, but Dr. Briggs had learned to be cautious. 

Nor was he at all certain that this was the kind of research, or direction of 

Testimony of Alexander Sachs. Roosevelt's choice of Dr. Briggs was also probably 

dictated by the absence of any other real liaison between Government and science, and 

the fact that security as well as policy restricted him to official circles. See Richard G. 

Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939—1946; A History of the U.S. 

Atomic Energy Commission (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), pp. 19—20. 
HEAVY WATER 363 

research, in which the Bureau ought to become He and his 

committee hesitated. 

In April 1940, when the committee met at the Bureau for a second 

time, with Pegram and Fermi also in attendance, it learned that only the 

U235 isotope of uranium fissioned under bombardment by neutrons of thermal 

(slow) velocities—a significant discovery, provided U235 could be sufficiently 

concentrated. And it heard that a large section of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin had recently been set aside for research on uranium. Yet on that occasion, and at another meeting in June, the committee adjourned without making any definite recommendation except that funds should be sought 

to support further investigation of isotope separation and the possibility of a chain reaction with U235.'85 

A month later the committee, with Pegram, Urey, Jesse W. Beams of 

Virginia, Merle A. Tuve of the Carnegie Institution, Ross Gunn of the Naval 

Research Laboratory, and Gregory Breit of Wisconsin as new members under 

Dr. Briggs's chairmanship, became the Uranium (or S—i) Section of the 

National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), set up by the President under 

Dr. Vannevar Bush to mobilize science for war.lSG As with other research 

for national defense turned over to it, NDRC was to contract for S—i research 

and thereby accelerate the program. 

Responsible for formulation of the S—i program, Briggs at once urged 

support for the determination of the fundamental physical constants of 

uranium and graphite and experimentation in the chain reaction. Fermi 

began his first uranium and graphite pile at Columbia. Urey, with Briggs's 

encouragement, continued his study of heavy water as a graphite substitute in a chain reaction.187 

In June i94i, as the scope of research expanded, NDRC was subordinated to the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), 

established to direct the entire research resources of the Nation and close the 

gap between research and procurement for national defense. The S—i 

Section, now directly under Dr. James B. Conant as head of NDRC, but with 

Dr. Briggs continuing as chairman, was transferred to OSRD. When in 

September i94i reports of British progress in nuclear research aroused con- cern over the lack of results here, Samuel K. Allison of Chicago, Edward U. 

184 Continued investigation of heavy water had been the first area of research that the 

Visiting Committee in 1934 strongly recommended be discontinued at the Bureau. See 

above, p 34.5. 181 Henry D. Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (Princeton University Press, 

1945), pp. 48—49; Hewlett and Anderson, pp. 22—23. 188 A facsimile of the letter from the President to Dr. Bush appears in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: an Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948), pp. 

155—156. 187 Hewlett and Anderson, pp. 26—29. - 
364 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40) 

Condon, than associate director of the Westinghouse Research Laboratory, 

and later Director of the National Bureau of Standards, Lloyd P. Smith of 

Cornell, and Henry D. Smyth of Princeton, with Henry T. Wensel, a Bureau 

specialist in temperature measurements, were brought in to strengthen the 

Uranium Section.188 

As laboratory research and experimentation evolved processes re- quiring large-scale plant construction, the final stages of research and production were taken over by the Manhattan District, organized in the Army 

Corps of Engineers in August 1942 to conceal the making of the bomb in the 

anonymity of the military establishment. A year later the S—i Section, 

though never formally dissolved, became inactive.189 

Acceleration of research and engineering development of the bomb was achieved under NDRC and OSRD by means of contracts let to universities, 

industry, and research agencies both in and outside the Government, a num- ber of the research contracts falling within the special province of the Bureau. That part of OSRD and Manhattan District development work in 

which the Bureau laboratories became actively involved is told in the next 

chapter. 

pp. 35—36, 44. 

41, 82; Smyth Report, pp. 83—84. 

Above, the standard yard and eli bed of Queen Elizabeth I, with inches marked in the yard 

bed. Below, the eli, with sixteenths of the eli marked. 
WORLD WAR Ii 

RESEARCH (1941-45) 

CHAPTER 'TI! 

ThE EVENT OF WAR" 

The second worldwide war was foreshadowed in the Japanese 

in of Ethiopia in 1935, and Hitler's 

march into the Rhineland in 1936. Isolated and safeguarded by successive 

Neutrality Acts passed in 1935, 1936, and 1937, which barred the sale of 

arms or munitions to any warring nation, America watched the piecemeal 

fall of small nations, Austria and Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Albania to Mussolini. With the German attack on Poland in September 1939, Britain and 

France declared war against the dictators and World War II began. The first 

amendments to the Neutrality Acts were enacted. 

By temperament strongly neutral and still in the grip of depression, 

the Nation had willed belief in Chamberlain's "peace in our time" until 

shaken by the occupation of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939. But cer- tain of war and of America's inevitable involvement was the small band of 

foreign-born scientists, their spokesman Niels Bohr, who had recently arrived 

in this country. Shepherding atomic research here, Bohn at once urged 

restriction in all Allied countries of the publication of further data on the 

possibility of nuclear fission. Many individual scientists refrained, but 

control of publication in American scientific journals did not become effec. 

five until almost a year later, following Hitler's invasion of Denmark and 

Norway. 

The National Bureau of Standards, convinced by the physicists on its 

Advisory Committee on Uranium of the certainty of a general war, began to 

put its affairs in order. On September 1, 1939, the day Germany marched 

into Poland, and one week before the President declared a state of limited 

national emergency, Dr. Briggs sent to the Department of Commerce a memorandum of the services the Bureau was prepared to render "in the event 

of war." 

In the event of a European war, the Bureau was ready to test all 

materials to be purchased under the President's recent Strategic Materials 

365 
366 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

Act, and to increase the output of its optical glass from the current 9,000 

pounds to 75,000 pounds per year. It was prepared to certify U.S. materials sent abroad, especially optical and electrical instruments, master gages, 

aircraft instruments, textiles, metals, and cement. 

Should the United States become involved, the Bureau was prepared 

to solve tech.nical problems of the military services submitted to it, as it had 

in the First World War. It would test supplies, particularly high precision 

instruments such as certain electrical and optical instruments, gages, screw 

thread standards, rubber, textiles, paper, leather, plastics, metals, and glass. 

It was also ready to assist in the development of new specifications for war 

materials. 

Attached to the memorandum of readiness was a copy of "The War 

Work of the Bureau of Standards," covering the activities of the Bureau in 

1917—18.' 

Although the Bureau signified its readiness, the Nation was as un- prepared for war as it had been two decades earlier. in 1939 the Army 

had 500 ancient tanks, 5,000 airplanes, 2 million old rifles, and scarcely 

enough cartridges for a normal year's training. Even 3 years later trainees were to qualify with the pistol for lack of rifles, and maneuver with simulated 

guns and tanks.2 The Navy's newest battleship was 20 years old, and the 

British fleet was still the first defense of our shores. Across the country, 

more than 9 million people were unemployed, and industry, despite the production potential it had achieved through the application of science, standardization, and operating efficiency during the depression years, clung to its 

wait-and-see attitude. 

As early as the spring of 1938 the President had promulgated the 

idea of "educational orders" to assist industry in tooling up for the produc. 

tion of certain war materials. Yet 2 years passed before the first order was actually issued.3 Other orders, little publicized, followed. The President 

knew that the majority in the Nation was far from committed to the idea of 

war. The central issue of the campaign of 1940 appeared in the Democratic 

Party Platform: "The American people are determined that war, raging in 

1 Memo, LJB for John M. Johnson, Assistant to Secretary of Commerce, Sept. 1, 1939 

(NBS Box 429, AG). 

2 Reinhardt and Kintner, The Haphazard Years, pp. 165, 188. 

The order, promptly accepted by the steering gear division of General Motors, called 

for 500 .30 caliber Browning machine guns. It was not received until June 1940. In 

March 1941 the first machine gun ever made by an automobile company was completed. 

Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy; the Story of American War Production 

(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), pp. 225—226. 
iN THE EVENT OF WAR 367 

Europe, Asia, and Africa, shall not come to America. We will not participate in foreign wars. * * 

Even as 'fear rose with the collapse of France and apprehension over 

the spectacle of beleaguered Britain, the isolationist temper prevailed. 

Preparations for national defense moved slowly, consistent with plans to 

supply and support Britain, without upsetting the commitment to the electorate. In June 1940, without fanfare, the President approved the mobilization of science through the creation of the National Defense Research 

Committee. Over violent protests, Congress enacted the Selective Service 

Act on September 16, 1940, drafting 1.2 million men for a year of defensive 

training—an act whose extension just 6 months before Pearl Harbor was to 

pass by a single vote. The Office of Production Management, set up on December 20, 1940, offered to provide counsel, but little more, for the 

mobilization of industry. 

• In the spring of 1941 the President's Office of Price Administration 

established rationing, to control the rising cost of living. Volunteers manning 5,600 price and rationing boards began measuring out allowances of 

canned goods, coffee, sugar, meat, butter, cheese, shoes, tires, gasoline, and 

fuel oil. The nation's undeclared war, marked by Lend-Lease, the President's 

declaration in May 1941 of an unlimited national emergency, and the arming 

of our merchant ships, ended with Pearl Harbor. 

The reluctance that delayed educational orders to industry for weap- ons production was reflected in a Bureau letter of February 1940. In reply 

to an inquiry from Military Intelligence, Dr. Briggs reported that the Bureau was conducting "very few projects * * * for the War Department." In 

the decade before the war Congress had appropriated every dollar requested 

by the military for research and development, yet as war neared the Nation 

remained pathetically unprepared from the standpoint of new weapons. 

Taking the initiative at the instigation of a few key scientists, the Council of 

National Defense, with the approval of the President, set up NDRC on June 27, 

Quoted in Edgar E. Robinson, The Roosevelt Leadership, 1933—1945 (Philadelphia: 

J. B. Lippincott, 1955), p. 257. 

In his annual message in January 1940, Roosevelt requested almost $2 billion for na- tional defense. In May he asked for a program of 50,000 planes a year, and with the 

fall of France imminent requested an additional $1.28 billion for accelerating the development of military and naval requirements. In July the President approved a bill 

authorizing a two-ocean navy and construction of 200 warships. 

Letter, LJB to Assistant CofS, Military Intelligence Division, WD, Feb. 29. 1940 (NBS 

Box 442, AG). 
368 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

1940 under Vannevar Bush, to initiate and speed the development of new and 

improved instruments of war.6 

Over the next year NDRC organized four divisions with multiple subunits to propose and direct research, in armor and ordnance; bombs, fuel, 

gases, and chemical problems; communication and transportation; and 

detection, controls, and instruments. Wholly manned by physicists, chemists, and engineers from the universities and the laboratories of industry, 

NDRC was authorized to originate and support military research needs and 

to utilize as necessary the facilities of the Bureau and other Federal agencies. 

At the inception of NDRC, the Bureau through Briggs' Uranium Committee had just one specifically assigned project, that of investigating "the possible relationship to national defense of recent discoveries in the field of 

atomistics, notably the fission of uranium." It was the first of more than a score of NDRC projects assigned to the Bureau. 

The mobilization of science and scientists began as the military serv- ices sent to NDRC lists of projects in which they were engaged and investigations they believed important but had not started for lack of funds or 

manpower. To them NDRC added projects of its own, in some cases over 

the early indifference or even opposition of the services. The projects were apportioned among the NDRC divisions and negotiations opened to assign 

them by contract to the institutions best qualified to work on them. As 1941 

began, a total of 184 contracts had been recommended.8 

Rounding out the organization of scientific research for national 

defense, an Executive order of June 28, 1941, established the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). Vannevar Bush, NDRC chief, 

moved up to OSRD as James B. Conant assumed direction of NDRC. OSRD 

extended the range of research beyond weaponry to include medicine. With 

enlarged authority it was also better enabled to correlate NDRC research and 

that undertaken by the military services themselves and, with the need to 

accelerate the atomic bomb program, to bridge the gap between research and 

procurement of the device.9 

8 Irvin Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War (OSRD, Science in World 

War II. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), pp. 3—7. The Council of National Defense, cre- ated in 1916 "for the co-operation of industries and resources for the national security 

and welfare," consisted of the Secretaries of War, Navy, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, 

and Labor. 

Ibid., p. 19. 8 Ibid., pp. 18, 20. For the negligible impact on the military of technological advances 

up to 1940 in weaponry, radio, radar, and aviation, see Reinhardt and Kintner, The 

Haphazard Years, pp. 131 if. 

°As finally reorganized in December 1942, NDRC consisted of 19 divisions, in almost all 

of which the Bureau had some degree of involvement: Ballistic research; effects of impact and explosion; special projectiles and rocket ordnance; ordnance accessories; new 
IN THE EVENT OF WAR 369 

Largely as a consequence of the assignment of NDRC projects, many 

of them of a classified nature, the annual report of the Bureau for 1941, for 

the first time, declared its contents restricted to nonconfidential research. A 

year later so much of Bureau work was classified that further publication of 

the report became pointless. Equally valid perhaps was the reason offered by 

the Department of Commerce, that printing of the reports would cease in order 

to effect savings of paper, manpower, and printing funds.'° 

The open reports for the years just prior to the war identify the preliminary stages of many of the Bureau's later investigations. The last refer. ence to Bureau work on heavy water, for example, appeared in the report for 

1939, describing the preparation in the cryogenic laboratory of pure deu. 

terium (D2), for measurement of its properties at the Bureau and at Columbia 

University. The substitution of deuterium oxide (D,O) for part of the 

water in standard cells was also noted, the difference of drift between cells 

with normal and heavy water providing a check on the constancy of the standard cell." 

-Still unclassified in 1939 was the intensification of work on the paraflIn hydrocarbons, in search of an optimum synthetic aviation fuel. (The 

next annual report, more wary perhaps, emphasized the antiknock characteristics of these hydrocarbons in automotive engines.) 

The formation of the Interdepartmental Screw Thread Committee, a joint War, Navy, and Commerce Department board, was reported in 1940, to 

missiles (of which Hugh L. Dryden was a section chief directing an investigation of jet 

propulsion and certain guided missile research) ; subsurface warfare; fire control; ex- plosives; chemistry; absorbents and aerosols; chemical engineering; transportation development; electrical communication (of which J. H. Dellinger headed the radio propagation section) ; radar; radio coordination; optics; physics; war metallurgy; and miscellaneous weapons. The Bureau was also concerned in three of the five OSRD panels 

outside the divisions: Applied mathematics, vacuum tube development, and radio propagation. Ibid., pp. 84—97. 

Considerable Bureau wartime research was done under NDRC and OSRD auspices, 

and as a consequence the reports and correspondence relating to that research are to 

be found principally in the OSRD records now stored in the National Archives. See 

General Records of OSRD, Transfer of Funds—NBS, in NARG 227, and Master Subject 

Index, Summary Technical Reports of NDRC. Wartime research for NACA and for 

the Navy and War Departments was reported directly to these agencies, the reports and 

records maintained in their files. - A typescript of the annual report for 1943, containing open material only, and with the 

Commerce note on suspension of publication, is available in NBS Box 482, PRA. An 

MS annual report for 1944 is in NBS Box 494, PRA. None has been found for 1945 

except that portion prepared by the division of weights and measures, in NBS Box 506, 

PRA. 

NBS Annual Report 1939, pp. 51, 53. 
370 WORLD WAR I! RESEARCH (1941-45) 

make mandatory the interchangeability of parts in industries retooling under 

educational orders. New research had begun on fire-detection and fire. 

extinguishing equipment for airplane engines, on better aircraft metals, and on vibration problems that had arisen as airplane engine weights decreased 

and speeds increased. Optical glass production had gone up sharply, in 

order to provide an emergency reserve.12 And "as part of the national 

defense program," an extensive survey was begun of all standardization, simplification, and code activities of the Nation's technical societies and trade 

associations, looking to a complete revision of the Bureau's National Directory of Commodity Specifications. 

Among the progress reports on the hundreds of projects on which 

the Bureau had been working during the past decade, the 1940 annual re- port made special note of the successful preparation of an iron with less 

than 0.01 percent impurities. This nearly elemental iron was expected to 

permit better determination of the fundamental properties of the metal than 

ever before A new investigation was begun that year for the bone 

char industry in the production of bone char and vegetable carbons. Although the use of bone char for clarifying and decolorizing raw sugar was several centuries old, virtually no fundamental data existed on the functioning of decolorizing media. The exploration of techniques for determining the characteristics of the raw materials, the principles of decolorization 

of bone char, and bone char revivification continued through the war years 

and after.14 

Reported at length that year was the first tabulation of results of an investigation begun in 1936 of truck-weighing scales. As the Bureau had 

been called on to determine the inequities of commercial weights and measures in 1910, railroad car scales in 1915, and mine scales in 1918, so in 

the thirties Bureau surveillance of the trucking industry was sought as the 

juggernauts of the highway began to overtake the railroads in moving proThe Bureau was awarded a contract by the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department in November 1939 for 11,400 pounds of optical glass as a national reserve, with 

the request to keep confidential the fact that the glass was for Army aerial camera lenses and Navy binoculars. Monthly Report, LJB to Secretary of Commerce, November 1939 (NBS Box 440, PRM); memo, R. T. Stull for E. C. Crittenden, February 21, 

1940 (NBS Box 442, AG). After Pearl Harbor, all optical glass production became a classified project. 

"RP1226 (Thompson and Cleaves, 1939) and RP1472 (Cleaves and Hiegel, 1942) described the preparation and properties of the iron. By 1949 the Bureau was preparing 

5-pound ingots of the iron so pure that detection of aberrations "constituted a major 

problem" (NBS Annual Report 1949, p. 47). 

14 NBS Annual Report 1940, pp. 71—72; Annual Report 1948, p. 219. 
IN THE EVENT OF WAR 371 

duce and other commodities across the Nation.15 Testing more than 400 

commercial truck-weighing scales in the first year of its inquiry, the Bureau 

found 80 percent of them with errors exceeding the agreed on allowable toler- ance. Moving from State to State with its test vehicle, Bureau inspectors 

consistently reported three out of four scales with excessive errors, and partly as a result of these errors, a dangerous prevalence of overloaded trucks. The 

5-year program was completed in 1941 when all 48 States had been visited 

and their State and local agencies supplied with the inspection data collected 

by the Bureau and its specifications for proper test equipment and 

procedures.'6 

Still not deemed matters of secrecy in 1941 were references to shortages of strategic materials, the acquisition of stores of quartz crystal, and 

Bureau work in substitute materials. 

Among the first metals declared critical were aluminum, zinc, and 

tin, forcing industry to turn to porcelain-enameled iron for roofing and 

siding and for kitchen and bakeshop utensils. New technical specifications 

for Army and Marine Corps canteens, mess plates, and other ware made of 

enameled iron followed Bureau studies of their weather resistance and impact and torsional resistance.'7 Investigations were also made in the stressstrain properties of stainless steel as a substitute for aluminum alloy in aircraft production and in airplane firewalls and cowlingsls 

While stainless steel (soon to be in critical supply too) proved in some instances an acceptable substitute for aluminum alloy and enameled 

iron had its uses, their limitations did much to foster the plastics industry, 

then in its infancy. In 1936, a year after/ the establishment of its plastics 

section, the Bureau prepared a comprel1lensive survey of the young industry.'9 By 1941 sufficient knowledge was available to set up emergency 

specifications utilizing plastics in place of scarce metals in many Government purchases. With Navy and NACA funds, research began on the prop. 

erties and fabrication of these strong lightweight materials, and tests were 

made of their use as metal substitutes in such aircraft accessories as windshields and transparent enclosures. Utilization of the synthetic resins, as 

15 The investigations into weights and measures and railroad car scales are described 

in chs. II and III. In testing mine scales in 1918, the Bureau did not find a single scale 

—upon which the wages of coal miners were based—even approximating the reason- able tolerance set by the Bureau, and one scale for weighing loads of less than 2 tons was found out of balance by the extraordinary error of 616 pounds. NBS Annual Report 

]918, p. 29. 

'° NBS Annual Report 1937, p. 62; Annual Report 1941, pp. 67—68. "NBS Annual Report 1941, p. 80; Annual Report 1942, p. 120. 

NBS Annual Report 1941, p. 74; Annual Report 1942, p. 118. 19 C411, "Organic plastics" (Kline, 1936) ; Kline, "History of plastics and their uses * * s," a series of articles in Modern Plastics, vols. 17—18 (1940—41). 
372 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

well as cellulose derivatives, was also investigated, for their use as protective 

coverings of aluminum and magnesium alloy aircraft parts.2° 

Two decades of fundamental studies in electrodeposition were available to the Bureau in 1941 when it started adapting its knowledge of plating 

to production difficulties brought on by metal shortages. At the urgent 

request of OPM and industry, tableware, guns, cartridge cases, proj ectiles, 

surgical instruments, aircraft parts, reflectors, plumbing fixtures, hardware, 

and other materials with their new plated surfaces or finishes came to the 

Bureau for study and advice on improving serviceability. The vital importance of plating was amply demonstrated in one instance where iron were satisfactorily substi:tuted for all the nickel and part of the copper normally used in the making of printing plates.2' 

Although the Bureau was conducting little work besides testing for 

the War Department in the early months of 1940, by July the number of 

confidential projec9ts for the services, assigned through NACA and NDRC, 

had so increased that Dr. Briggs felt it necessary to obtain permission to 

close the laboratories to all but official visitors.22 The next year, with a special appropriation of $21,000, work started on fencing in the Bureau 

grounds, guards began their rounds, and plans were made to close off the 

public thoroughfare, Van Ness Street, that ran through the Bureau site.23 

By December 1941 fully 90 percent of the Bureau staff was 

in war research. Not long after, the grounds were declared a "prohibited 

zone," under patrol by the Military Police.24 Thus the Bureau was already on a war footing when the attack on Pearl Harbor made the United States a full.fledged belligerent. 

Under the first shock of war, apprehension arose that enemy air 

fleets might attack either of our coasts without warning. Calmer heads 

doubted the likelihood of 3,000-mile air sorties but encouraged both black. 

outs and brownouts, knowing that the brightly lit coastal cities provided 

illumination agains.t which ships well out to sea might be made visible to 

prowling enemy submarines. The Bureau assisted in the joint Army-Navy 

program to determine the characteristics of sky glow from artificial sources 

and the extent to which sky glow and shore lights might aid hostile ships 

offshore. It also worked with the War Department to establish requirements 

in blackouts, particularly with respect to street lighting, buildings, and 

highway movement. Even the blackout of the railroads, in force abroad, was studied, though never resorted to here. 

20NBS Annual Report 1941, pp. 77—78. See below, p. 422. n NBS Annual Report 1941, p. 74; Annual Report 1942, p. 114. 22 Memo, LJB to Acting Secretary of Commerce, July 10, 1940 (NBS Box 442, AG). 

22NBS Annual Report 1941, p. 63. 24 Hearings * * * 1943 (Jan. 12, 1942), p. 208; MS NBS Annual Report 1943, n.p. 
IN THE EVENT OF WAR 373 

In the spring of 1942 the Office of Civilian Defense instituted dimouts 

and blackouts in full force. At the request of OCD, the Bureau tested textiles 

and paper as blackout materials, devised masks to eliminate upward light 

from automobile headlights, improved Army blackout headlamps, and deter. 

mined the acoustic properties of suitable air-raid alarms, including sirens, 

steam and compressed-air whistles, and loudspeakers. A Bureau letter circular went out to city and town authorities on alarm systems they might set 

up with available materials, and an "Air Raid Protection Code for Federal 

Buildings" was distributed to Federal offices throughout the country.25 

The construction of Army camps, bases, and temporary Government 

office structures that began with passage of the Selective Service Act went 

into high gear after 1941. The Bureau's building specifications for their 

fabrication saved much vital material. (Labor costs were something else 

again.) In the stress of the emergency, glaring deficiencies in building codes 

that had resisted Bureau efforts at change were rectified by Federal edict, 

25 NBS Annual Report 1942, PP. 110, 115; Lyman J. Briggs, NBS War Research: the 

National Bureau of Standards in World War II (September 1949), pp. 103—104 (hereafter cited as NBS War Research) ; LC685, "Devices for air raid warnings" (1942), 

superseded by LC706 (1942). 

A mockup mask devised at the Bureau for cutting the upward glare of sealed beam 

headlights, one of dozens of such blackout or brownout devices to reduce skyglow over the coastal cities in the first years of the war. 
374 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

accomplishing, the Bureau noted wryly, long overdue "legitimate economies." 

New knowledge of construction, for example, had made obsolete the use of 

2 x 6 beams in roof rafters, where 2 x 4's were more than adequate, and 

multiplied by tens of thousands of buildings saved forests of precious wood.26 

Time, labor, and material-saving studies available in the Bureau's 

building and housing studies had long urged the use of precast concrete 

flooring, of prefabricated wood and sheet-steel frames, walls, floors, and 

roofs, of metallic roofing materials, and of fiber and plywood paneling as 

insulation materials. These as well as the elimination of nonessentials and 

substitution of less scarce or noncritical materials were to find their way 

into defense housing projects through new building code requirements.27 

The greatest inertia in the building world, adding disproportionately 

to construction costs and most prodigal of labor and materials, was in 

plumbing. Bureau research since the 1920's on plumbing practices and 

plumbing hardware had little impact until the war, when a new manual, 

designed to save "thousands of tons of critical metals," became the basis for 

emergency plumbing standards made mandatory in all Federal construction.28 

The shift from educational orders to all-out war production almost 

immediately quadrupled Bureau testing and certification of measuring instruments and apparatus, particularly of the precision gage blocks that served as master standards in the production and inspection of war materials. 

Within 6 months Army Ordnance set up 13 district gage laboratories across 

the country to serve gage manufacturers, and established gage test facilities 

at all its arsenals turning out guns and shells. The need for quantities of the blocks led to their hasty manufacture by inexperienced firms, 

forcing the Bureau to reject large numbers of seriously inaccurate or defective sets before its standards were met.2° 

Early wartime tasks witfrhigh priority assigned to the Bureau included 

investigations in the conservation of petroleum, in the production of synthetic 

rubber, and the testing and stockpiling of quartz crystals. The concern in 

the twenties over America's dwindling petroleum resources waned with the 

discovery of new fields in the Americas and the importation of oil from the 

Caucasus and the Middle East. The flood of oil created a vast new industry 

and by 1940 propelled more than 32 million automobiles, buses, and trucks 

over the roads. But as oil tankers became prime targets of enemy 

Hearings * * * 1941 (Dec. 9, 1939), pp. 122, 124. 21 NBS Annual Report 1941, p. 85; Annual Report 1942, pp. 125—127; BMS88, "Recommended building code requirements for * * * war housing" (1942). 

Ibid, and BMS66, "Plumbing manual" (1940). 

NBS Annual Report 1942, p. 107. 
IN THE EVENT OF WAR 375 

submarines, the supply tightened. Gasoline rationing became severe, however, not so mach to save gas as to conserve the rubber in automobile tires. 

Convinced by their ration cards that the critical shortage was in 

gasoline, inventive citizens besieged the Office of the Petroleum Coordinator 

with gas-saving devices. Almost a hundred of their expedients came to the 

Bureau for assessment, among them naphthalene fuel dopes, air bleeds or 

"squirrel cages" in the intake manifold, speed governors in the fuel line, a vacuum gage calibrated to read miles per gallon, and a variety of attachments to the exhaust line—all interesting but not to the purpose.3° 

Far more critical was rubber. Cut off from natural rubber resources 

by the Japanese conquests in the Pacific, this country began all-out development of synthetic rubber. With precision techniques learned in the 1920's 

oii isoprene when it was a laboratory curiosity, the Bureau was to supply 

endless measurements of the thermodynamic properties of artificial rubbers 

and their basic materials, data vital to their manufacture.3' 

As crucial in wartime as petroleum and rubber was a component of 

radio whose supply was endangered because it had to be imported. That was the wafer-thin quartz crystal, a silicon dioxide fonned in the earth 

under pressure, whose piezoelectric property made it possible to hold radio 

transmission and reception to a precise frequency. As the heart of all radio 

apparatus, huge quantities of the crystal were to be needed in the radio com- munication apparatus of the armed forces in everything from walkie-talkies 

to radar, as well as in the warhorn realm of electronic equipment. 

The best quartz crystal was mined almost exclusively in Brazil, and 

when attempts to produce an artificial crystalline quartz met with only fair 

success, large-scale importation and stockpiling of the crystal began. 

Charged with examination and certification of the raw material, a special 

unit in the optical division of the Bureau by 1942 was testing 75,000 pounds 

of raw crystal per month, of which approximately a quarter proved suitable 

for making radio oscillators.32 

As war approached in 1941, Congress appropriated $100,000 to en- large the optical glass plant at the Bureau and $230,000 for a permanent 

radio laboratory at Beltsville, Md., to replace the wooden structure destroyed 

by fire the previous November. With the acquisition of more powerful 

radio equipment at the Beltsville laboratory, transmission of standard radio 

and audio frequencies and other services was extended so that good reception was possible throughout the United States and fair reception over most 

NBS Annual Report 1942, p. 110. 

Ibid., pp. 116—117. The synthetic rubber program is described on pp. 411—412. 

"NBS Annual Report 1942, p. 111. For more on the crystal program, see pp 408—410. 
376 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

of the world.33 Lost to the Bureau was the expanse of open fields (scarce in 

the Washington area) on which the radio propagation research laboratory at 

Meadows, Md., was situated. It was requisitioned in 1942 for the construction of Andrews Air Force Base, and the laboratory moved its recording 

equipment to new structures at Sterling, Va. 

On the 12.5 acres of "Pembroke Park" that the Bureau acquired in 

1942, adjacent to the west and north of its Washington site, Congress au- thorized construction of a new and much needed Materials Testing Laboratory. It was completed in April 1943 at a cost of Erection of a 6-foot wind tunnel for bomb and projectile rôsearch completed the wartime 

construction at the Bureau under direct appropriations.34 

The war saw virtually no change in the organizational structure of 

the Bureau beyond creation of a special projects section for work on guided 

missiles and a new division for proximity fuze and other ordnance research. 

The staff of 950 in 1939 rose to 1,204 by mid-1941. Two years later it 

totaled 2,263, including over 200 in uniform, and approximately that level was maintained to the end of the war.35 

More spectacularly, total working funds, direct and transferred, which 

reached a new high—in excess of $3 million—in fiscal years 1940 and 1941, 

soared to $71/2 million in 1942, and to their peak of $13'/2 million by 1944. 

In 1940 transferred funds had been one-sixth of regular appropriations to 

the Bureau. A year later, with NDRC and service assignments, they were 

one-half, and by 1944 had grown to almost twice the amount of direct 

appropriations.36 

"Memo, LJB for Acting Secretary of Commerce, July 10, 1940 (NBS Box 442, AG); 

NBS Annual Report 1941, p. 65; Science, 98, supp. 8 (1943); Science, 101, supp. 10 

(1945). 

"NBS Annual Report 1941, p. 61; Annual Report 1942, p. 103; MS Annual Report 1943, 

n.p. With the Thom estate, known as "Pembroke Park," the Bureau site comprised 67.8 acres. The estate is described in Hearings * * * 1940 (Apr. 21, 1939), pp. 184—186. 

The new wind tunnel, authorized in 1943, was completed at a cost of $110,000 2 years 

later. See G. B. Schubauer, MS "History of the Aerodynamics Section," March 1956 

(NBS Historical File). Other construction, under transferred defense funds, included a number of Quonset huts, enlargement of the glass plant, storage and laboratory facilities 

for the quartz program, and new quarters for the ordnance (proximity fuze) project. 

Except for the main ordnance building and the addition of a story to the Far West build. 

ing, all were temporary structures. 

MS Annual Report 1943. Of the 2,372 on the Bureau staff in 1944, directors and 

supervisors numbered 116, research scientists 679, laboratory assistants 576, and clerical, 

mechanical and other workers 901. Report to the Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization, Apr. 13, 1944 (NBS Box 489, AGL). 

'° See app. F. The agencies supplying transferred funds in 1942—44, as well as the 

• amounts and in some cases the identity of the projects, are reported in NBS Box 464, 

AG; Box 477, AG and FP; and Box 489, AGL. 
THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB 377 

By February• 1943, Dr. Briggs reported, the entire staff and facilities 

of the Bureau were wholly engaged in war work. All conference and lecture 

rooms had been converted to laboratories, and double and triple shifts were in effect in some sections to make maximum use of space and equipment. 

The prewar 39-hour week had long since been extended to 44 hours and no overtime pay was permitted. 

The rising cost of food, clothing, and rent worked some hardship, 

but almost everyone at the Bureau subscribed 10 percent of his salary for 

war bonds. All worried about the 5 percent Victory tax and new income 

taxes to come, considering their prewar civil service salaries. And because 

of the pay, the Bureau had had to recruit boys too young for the armed 

forces as shop assistants and for training as mechanics and instrumentmakers. 

With few exceptions, they were lost within a year or two to the defense 

industries.37 

Within a year after the war began, Dr. Briggs was to recall, "just 

about everything at the Bureau was classified." The tight security thrown 

around the work in the laboratories became constricting at times, and on occasion Dr. Briggs felt he had to exercise some discretion. But that discretion did not extend to anything connected with the research on the atomic 

bomb.38 

THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB 

Under the direction of Dr. Briggs during the first 2 critical years of 

its inception, the work that led to the atomic bomb grew thereafter beyond 

the powers of the Uranium Committee to control. It became a technological 

feat, stretching the capabilities of the greatest concentration of the Nation's 

scientists and engineers ever assembled. The massive requirements for final 

production had to be lodged eventually in the vast anonymity of the military 

establishment. 

The Bureau staff was engaged in scores of other fundamental investigations in physics, applied mathematics, chemistry, and engineering for the 

immediate prosecution of the war and few more than 60 members gave full 

time to the bomb program. Apart from special assignments at Oak Ridge 

and at Los Alamos, most of the Bureau participants carried out their work 

in the Washington laboratories. The Bureau was nevertheless to serve to 

the end of the war as "a central control laboratory for determining the 

purity of uranium and other products * used," that work, it was said, 

Letter, LJB to Department of Commerce, Aug. 11, 1942 (NBS Box 464, AP); letter, 

LJB to chairman, Senate Commission on Appropriations, Oct. 15, 1942 (ibid., AG); 

Hearings * * * 1944 (Feb. 26, 1943), p. 77. 

Interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1961. 
378 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

"so closely guarded that the Bureau's participation in the atomic bomb project was not known to the members of the staff not associated with the 

undertaking." 

This, of course, was not entirely so. Even before the close of the 

photoelectric phase of the proximity fuze project in 1943, when most of 

that group were sent out to Los Alamos, many at the Bureau suspected or 

knew generally that some kind of new weapon using uranium was under 

development. Yet so weighted was the wrap of secrecy that even some directly involved in research on "Tuballoy," the Briticism adopted by the Bureau as the code name for uranium, had no inkling of the real purpose of their 

research.4° Wholly engrossed in his determination of the energy states of 

uranium, one member of the Bureau recalls thinking that the metal might 

be for a new type of small power plant, possibly for airplanes, to enable them 

to carry bigger bomb loads, or for submarines, in order to carry a larger 

store of torpedoes. "The last thing in the world I thought the uranium could 

be used for was in a bomb," he was to say.41 The story of that secret re- search bears retelling. 

In the year after verification in this country of the splitting of the 

uranium atom, Enrico Fermi sought to demonstrate a chain reaction in na- tural unconcentrated uranium. His colleague at Columbia, John R. Dunning, was investigating the two isotopes of uranium, the rare 235, less than 1 percent of the natural element, and the abundant isotope 238, comprising 99.3 

percent of the element. In March 1940, Dunning conclusively demonstrated 

that was the isotope that fissioned with slow neutrons.42 

That same spring Edwin M. McMillan and Philip H. Abelson at the 

University of California made an even more spectacular discovery; that 

neutron absorption by U238 resulted in two new elements with atomic num- bers 93 and 94. They were named neptunium (Np) and plutonium (Pu). 

Study of the latter indicated it was probably as fissionable by thermal (slow) 

neutrons as U235. So nebulous was the "bomb project" at that stage, however, that further investigation of plutonium was delayed while McMillan 

went off to MIT to work on a more pressing matter, radar.43 

'° Briggs, NBS War Research, p. 8. 

"Tuballoy" came from "Tube Alloys," the meaningless and unintelligible expression 

used by the British for their uranium bomb program. 

41 Interview with Dr. Carl C. Kiess, May 1, 1964. For Harold Urey's similar reaction 

concerning his heavy water research, see ch. VI, p. 359n. 

Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, 1939—1946: A History of the United States 

Atomic Energy Commission, pp. 13—14, 22. 

Ibid., pp. 33—34; McMillañ and Abelson, "Radioactive element 93," Phys. Rev. 57, 

1185 (1940). The discovery held out the possibility that element 94 could be produced in a pile and then separated chemically, without the tremendous expense of building isotope separation plants. Moreover, if plutonium was fissionable it would utilize 

all but a small fraction of the metal in a natural uranium pile. 
THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMiC BOMB 379 

With attention focused on the work at Columbia, three crucial questions confronted Dr. Briggs and his advisory committee in the early sum- mer of 1940: (1) Were there any circumstances under which a chain reaction 

could actually be achieved? (2) Could the isotope 235 be separated on a large scale? (3) Could moderators such as graphite or heavy water and other 

materials be obtained of sufficient purity and in sufficient quantity? 

The possibility that deuterium (heavy water) might be a better 

moderator of a chain reaction than graphite was not overlooked. The British were convinced that a chain reaction would go in relatively small units 

of uranium and heavy water, and in February 1941 Urey at Columbia began 

investigating mdthods for large-scale concentration of deuterium.45 Although heavy water proved more effective than graphite in slowing down 

neutrons and showed a smaller neutron absorption, its high efficiency in 

much smaller quantities than graphite was outweighed by the difficulties oi 

producing useful amounts. Subsequent experiments with a uranium and 

heavy-water pile demonstrated that such a pile couJd not be shut down as 

completely or as rapidly as the graphite pile. Important as heavy water was in later nuclear weapons research, and in scientific, biological, and industrial research, it played little part in the wartime achievement.46 Procurement, therefore, centered on graphite. 

A group at the Bureau under Clement J. Rodden at once started work on methods of analysis for the development of a highly purified graphite. 

Because of the strong neutron-absorbing characteristics of the boron found 

in the commercial product, a graphite low in boron was absolutely essential. 

The work of Rodden in devising a reliable method for boron determination, 

later successfully applied to boron in uranium as well, enabled carbon manufacturers to produce a much more highly purified graphite. By the middle 

of 1942 this problem was essentially solved.47 

Two investigations into the possibility of separating the isotopes of 

uranium started in the fall of 1940. At Columbia a group under Dunning 

"Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (Smyth Report), p. 55. 

"A fine summary of British encouragement of and contributions to the project appears 

in Groves, Now It Can Be Told, pp. 406—408. See also report of the Directorate of Tube 

Alloys, Statements Relating to the Atomic Bomb (London: Her Majesty's Stationery 

Office, 1945), pp. 13 if; its summary in Rev. Mod. Phys, 17, 472 (1945); and Margaret 

Cowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939—1945 (London: Macmillan, 1964). 

Smyth Report, pp. 95, 147—149, 153. In July 1942, marking the genesis of the hydrogen 

bomb, Oppenheimer first disclosed the theoretical calculations of his group at California 

indicating "that a much more powerful reaction than nuclear fission might be produced 

by the thermonuclear fusion of deuterium, the heavy hydrogen isotope," and therefore 

"the possibility of a * * * weapon using a more easily attainable material" than or U". Hewlett and Anderson, p. 104. 

4TSmyth Report, p. 95; NBS War Research, p.8. 
380 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

initiated research in a gaseous diffusion method for the separation and con- centration of U235. At the Bureau, Philip H. Abelson of the Carnegie Institution attempted separation of the two isotopes by thermal diffusion of 

uranium hexafluoride, the only gaseous compound of uranium. Although an 

exceedingly corrosive material, the hexafluoride was workable because it was stable as a liquid at slightly elevated temperatures and moderate pressures. 

Abelson's work, carried out with Navy funds, was transferred to larger 

facilities at the Naval Research Laboratory in the summer of 1941.48 

Efforts made in the Bureau laboratories and at Westinghouse and 

General Electric to find a method for manufacturing uranium powder or 

pure ingots progressed slowly and the Columbia group turned to the processed ore, uranium oxide, which was available in small quantities from 

Canada. It was evident that both Fermi's uranium pile and isotope separation depended upon obtaining uranium in a highly purified metallic form 

or at least as a highly purified uranium oxide. The problem came to the 

Bureau, and in the summer of 1941 a group under James I. Hoffman found 

that ether extraction of uranium oxide after conversion to uranyl nitrate 

removed virtually all impurities from the oxide.49 

As a final step in the production of uranium metal, determination 

and analysis had to be made of the residual boron content of the reconverted 

oxide. Studies by Bourdon F. Scribner and J. A. Scherrer opened the way 

to subsequent reduction of the boron content, by reaction with calcium 

hydride. After months of experimentation, their coworker Clement Rodden 

distilled an extremely pure calcium making this last step possible. The ether 

extraction and boron reduction processes, as effective with pitchblende and 

carnotite ore concentrates as with uranium ores, became standard procedures 

in the purification of all uranium used in piles.5° 

The winter of 1940—41 was a time of decision. Besides the investigations in gaseous and thermal diffusion methods for isotope separation, 

Jesse W. Beams at Virginia was working on a centrifuge process and 

Ernest 0. Lawrence at California on electromagnetic methods of separation. 

While Dr. Briggs felt that quantity separation of isotopes was important from a military standpoint as probably the only way to a chain reaction in a mass 

small enough for a bomb, separation would be difficult and expensive. Pilot 

plant construction ought therefore to wait until further studies disclosed the 

most promising method. Characteristically, his real interest was in power 

"Both the thermal and gaseous diffusion processes were to be used in the large-scale 

plants for the production of at Oak Ridge, the gaseous method eventually proving 

the more efficient of the two. 

Hewlett and Anderson, pp. 28—29, 86; Smyth Report, p. 93; NBS War Research, pp. 8—9. 

'° Hewlett and Anderson, pp. 66, 87; NBS War Research, p. 9. 
THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB 381 

production and not a bomb, and therefore in the uranium-graphite experiment 

and in quantity production of heavy water, which might go better in a pile.5' 

The cautious progress of the bomb project under Dr. Briggs's advisory 

committee was apparent in the meager funds and the assignment of them 

proposed in July 1941. The committee recommended grants of $167,000 for a pilot plant to produce heavy water for Fermi's chain-reaction studies, 

$95,000 for the centrifuge work on elements 93 and 94, $25,000 for gaseous. 

diffusion experiments, $10,000 for other isotope separation studies, $30,000 

for investigation of the chemistry of uranium compounds and studies of separation methods, and just $8,000 for an investigation of element 94, plutonium.52 The total was $2 billion short of the final cost of the first atomic 

bomb. 

So far as the general public was concerned, the shroud of secrecy that 

descended after 1940 on what the President called "atomistic research" was almost absolute. The single letter on the subject from an inquiring citizen 

found in Bureau files was wide of the mark. The reply was more pertinent. 

In June 1941 a man in Meredith, N.H., wrote to the White House protesting an unnamed scientist's claim that with the smashing of the atom the time 

would soon come when "every householder would be able to store a thousand 

years' fuel supply in his cellar." The New Hampshire man saw nothing but 

disaster in this enormous power confined in his home or, more dangerously 

in the possession of unfriendly persons, and sought reassurance. 

Dr. Briggs's personal reply to the letter, which had been sent on from 

the White House for an answer, was only vaguely comforting. It also 

reflected something of his own feeling at the time. There was no need, he 

wrote, "to feel unduly alarmed about smashing atoms. Up to the present 

time at least this has been accomplished only by putting into the system as a whole a great deal more energy than can be got out of it." 

Although production of Lend-Lease equipment and munitions mounted 

month by month and such priority projects as radar and rockets, the prox. 

imity fuze, and new air, surface, and subsurface weapons progressed, no comparable signs of achievement sustained the physicists working on the 

bomb. British reports in the spring of 1941 that the Germans were producing heavy water in quantity in Norway and were acquiring materials that 

could only be used in work with uranium prompted demands for greater 

effort and more results. The fear grew that time was running out. 

51 Hewlett and Anderson, pp. 37, 40; James P. Baxter, Scientists Against Time, p. 425. 52 Hewlett and Anderson, p. 40. 

Letter, LJB, June 17, 1941 (NBS Box 455, IPXA). Cf. Leo Szilard's statement in a letter of Jan. 25, 1939, that the possession of atomic energy is not "very exciting * * * 

if the energy output is only two or three times the energy input." Quoted in Lewis S. 

Strauss, Men and Decisions (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 172. 
382 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

Partly in order to accelerate the contract research on uranium projects initiated by NDRC and provide better coordinated direction, OSRD 

was established in June 1941, with direct access to the President. Urgently 

required was information on the critical mass of a bomb, design data on a gaseous diffusion plant for large-scale separation of uranium isotopes, and 

assessment of a heavy-water pile. Apart from the NDRC assignments of the 

Advisory Committee (now OSRD's S—i Section), at the direction of OSRD 

the problem of large-scale uranium isotope separation was turned over to 

groups under Lawrence and Urey, and that of production of element 94 

(plutonium) to Compton's group at the new and cryptically named "Metallurgical Laboratory" at the University of Chicago.54 

By the end of 1941 research groups at Columbia, Princeton, Chicago, 

California and elsewhere had achieved considerable basic knowledge of 

nuclear properties and of the physical constants of the materials involved. 

Sufficient mathematical calculations had been made to suggest the probability that the critical size of a bomb either with concentrated U235 or the new element plutonium was almost certainly within practical limits.55 On the 

other hand, Fermi had constructed an experimental graphite and uranium 

pile at Columbia but no chain reaction had been achieved principally because 

of the poisoning effect of the boron in the uranium. No appreciable amount 

of U235 had been separated from only traces of plutonium had been 

produced, and the production of large quantites of uranium metal, heavy 

water, and pure graphite still remained largely in the discussion stage.56 

One week before Pearl Harbor, Dr. Briggs's S—i Section made the 

decision recommending a major all-out effort to construct the bomb. Eleven 

days after Pearl Harbor, at another meeting in Dr. Briggs's office at the 

Bureau, Arthur H. Compton, as head of a committee of the National Academy 

of Sciences, outlined the time schedule that the project must strive to meet: 

By July 1, 1942, to determine whether a chain reaction was possible. 

By January 1943, to achieve the first chain reaction. 

Smyth Report, p. 71; Hewlett and Anderson, p. 45. 66 If plutonium was still an unknown quantity in November 1941, it was known with some certainty that a spectacularly destructive fission bomb would result from bringing quickly 

together a sufficient mass of between 2 and 100 kg. (4.4 and 220 

pounds) —although nothing like even 2 kg of the material was yet in sight (Hewlett and 

Anderson, p. 47). On this basis it was conjectured that from 1 to 10 tons of would be 

required to construct the bombs necessary to devastate the major military and industrial 

objectives in Germany. Tonnage production, either by the gaseous diffusion or centrifuge 

method, was believed to be 3 or 4 years away (Baxter, pp. 427—428). 

°°Smyth Report, p. 73. 
THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB 383 

By January 1944, to extract the first element 94 from uranium. 

By January 1945, to have a bomb.57 

Speed became essential. To hasten decisions, the S—i Section, grown 

too large for action, was reorganized in June 1942 as the S—i Executive 

Committee under James B. Conant of NDRC, with Briggs, Compton, Lawrence, Urey, and Eger V. Murphree (of Standard Oil Development Co.) as members. By then, five possible approaches to bomb production had 

emerged holding high promise: separation of U235 by centrifuge, diffusion, 

or electromagnetic methods, and production of plutonium in a uraniumgraphite or uranium-heavy water pile.58 All were scheduled to be explored 

through the pilot plant stage, and all depended to a large degree on what 

soon became the principal function of the Bureau, the development of ana- lytical procedures for controlling the purity of critical materials in the reactors 

and in the bomb. 

Some of these materials required as many as 20 individual chemical 

analyses, and spectrographic determinations of as many as 30 elements in 

their raw state, before methods for refinement could established.59 By 

the end of 1945 nearly 9,000 samples of materials were to come into the Bureau 

laboratories and almost 30,000 separate analyses completed. Equally ex- tensive investigations in the metallurgy and metallography of uranium were necessary, to determine, for example, the kinds of crucible materials in which 

uranium could be melted without contamination. Much work was also done 

at the Bureau toward establishing radioactivity measurements and safety procedures in handling the bomb materials.60 

The analytical work of the Bureau was accelerated in June 1942 with 

the approval of funds for three pilot plants for U235 production and one for 

plutonium. The theoretical design of the plants had been accomplished and 

their construction assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers under the disguise of the "DMS (Development of Substitute Materials) project." In 

August 1942 the DMS project became the Manhattan District project, its 

director Brig. Gen. Leslie R. Groves. 

Hewlett and Anderson, pp. 54—55. Hewlett and Anderson, p. 71. 

The analytic research of the Bureau was reported in the classified Manhattan District 

Technical Series. The few papers published by the Bureau after the war include a sum- mary account of analysis of the U spectrum, by Kiess, Humphreys, and Laun in RP1729 

(1946) ; the development of a highly sensitive method for spectrographic determination of 33 volatile impure elements in U-base materials, by Scribner and Mullin in 

RP1753 (1946); and determination of the thermoelectric properties of U, by Dahi and 

VanDusen in RP1813 (1947). For the work of the Bureau's mathematics group on the 

atomic bomb and other wartime projects, see OSRD records, NARG 227, file MTP, General Correspondence. 60 NBS War Research, pp. 9—15; interview with William F. Roeser, Dec. 3, 1963. 
384 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

If many of the scientists connected with the bomb project under 

NDRC and OSRD secretly hoped that some principle might emerge proving the inherent impossibility of an atomic bomb, by mid-1942 that hope was past. Theoretical possibility had become high probability, and in December 

General Groves entered contract negotiations for the design and construction at Oak Ridge, Tenn., of a giant industrial complex beyond anything the 

original members of the S—i Committee could possibly have contemplated. 

The commitment had been made, and with the transfer of all OSRD con- tracts to the Army in May 1943, the research responsibilities of the S—i 

Committee ended.6' 

By the fall of 1942 enough pure graphite, uranium oxide, and uranium 

metal were arriving at the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago from industry 

to justify building an actual self-sustaining chain reacting pile. Little more 

than 6 tons of uranium metal were at hand, just barely sufficient for the pile 

Fermi and his associates erected under the west stands of Stagg Field. 

There on December 2, 1942, the first nuclear chain reaction was produced 

in a system using normal uranium. 

The immediate objectives of the Metallurgical Laboratory were 

proved, that a controllable chain reaction could be produced in unseparateci 

uranium, and that separation of fissionable plutonium from the U238 in the 

pile was more feasible than separation of the uranium isotopes. The ultimate 

objectives of the laboratory still remained, to determine a process for separating the plutonium chemically from the pile, and to obtain theoretical and 

experimental data on a "fast neutron" reaction, such as would be required 

in an atomic bomb.62 

The decision to build a pilot plant for the relatively large-scale extraction and purification of plutonium had been made in January 1942. Construction of the plant known as the Clinton Engineer Works began just above 

the town of Oak Ridge. The Clinton pile started operating in November 

1943, its successful procedures and the data obtained in its performance 

guiding construction of the large-scale plant going up at Hanford, on the 

Columbia River, in the State of Washington. The first quantity production 

of plutonium, from three of the five piles at the Hanford complex, began 

in September 1944.63 

On the principle that time was more important than money, and that 

every probability and process that offered a chance of success must be ex- plored, a number of large-scale separation plants for U235 and for deuterium were ordered constructed. At least seven processes for separating uranium 

Hewlett and Anderson, p. 115; Smyth Report, p. 224. 

Hewlett and Anderson, p. 112; Smyth Report, pp. 98—99; Baxter, p 432. 

"Smyth Report, pp. 106—107, 111. 
THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB 385 

isotopes had become available and two of them, the gaseous and liquid diffusion methods, were successfully pursued to the production stage. 

Construction of a steam power plant for the gaseous diffusion process, 

one of the largest ever built anywhere, based on research at the Naval 

Research Laboratory, began in June 1943 at the Clinton Works. Before 

the summer of 1945 it was in operation, furnishing enriched U235 for concen- tration at the nearby electromagnetic plant. The plant for electromagnetic 

separation of uranium isotopes, based on the research of Lawrence at the 

Radiation Laboratory in California, had gone up at Clinton beginning in 

March 1943. By the winter of 1944—45 it was in operation, producing U235 

of sufficient purity for use in the bomb.64 

While the basic scientific and engineering research in plutonium and 

had been in progress, in the spring of 1942 Gregory Breit at the Metallurgical Laboratory initiated the experimental planning on a "fast neutron" 

reaction such as would be required by the bomb. Almost a dozen universities, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the Bureau became en- gaged in basic mechanics and instrumentation for the project. That summer a group at Chicago under J. Robert Oppenheimer of California's Radiation 

Laboratory began the theoretical work on the physics of the bomb.65 

Upon transfer of the project to the Manhattan District, search was made for a safe and secret site for the laboratory where the bomb was to 

be assembled. A remote mesa at Los Alamos, N. Mex., on which a handful 

of empty structures marked the site of a former boarding school, was found 

that November. In March 1943, Oppenheimer arrived to direct operations, 

construction of the laboratory began, apparatus from the laboratories at 

Harvard, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Princeton. arrived, and the first of an 

extraordinary body of scientists and technicans, including a British group 

headed by Sir James Chadwick, settled in. 

Drawing on research groups from almost a dozen universities, the 

Metallurgical Laboratory, and the National Bureau of Standards, the Los 

Alamos staff comprised theoretical and experimental physicists, mathematicians, armament experts, specialists in radium chemistry and in metallurgy, 

specialists in explosives and in precision measurement, and their technical and 

housekeeping assistants. Among Bureau members was the group from the 

proximity fuze program, drafted in the spring of 1943, and Wichers, SchoonThid, pp. 185, 201, 204—205. 

°' Hewlett and Anderson, pp. 43, 104; Smyth Report, p. 103. 

A chain reaction in Fermi's uranium pile required neutrons slowed by graphite. In mid1941 the British predicted that fast neutrons acting on no more than 10 kg of pure 

would produce a chain reaction. A year later Oppenheimer, Teller, and Serber confirmed 

the theory of the fast-neutron reaction in U" or in plutonium when sufficient quantities were brought together in a critical mass. 
386 

, ... . : .. \ ' 

~"lI~l;}'~~~;f~;lI~~~§m LOS ~":SPRI_ ' ,./ The following notes are based on a set of five 

lectures given by R. Serber during the first two weeks of April 1943, as an "indoctrination course" 

in connection with the starting of the Los Alamos 

Project. The notes were written up by E. U. Condon. 

h...9b ject 

The object of the project is to produce a practical 

idlitars wearon in the form of a bomb in which the energy Is re· ease y a ast neutron chain reaction -in one or more of the 

materials known to show nuclear fission. 

2. Energy of Fission Process 

The direct energy release in the fission process is 

of7the order of 170 .MEV per atom. This is considerably more than 

10 times the heat of reaction per ati>m in ordinary combustion pro· cesses. This is 

Since the weight of 1 

energy release is 

The energy release in Hen~9 

170'106 • 4.8'10-10/300 ==2.7 '10- 4 erg/nucleus. 

nucleus of 25 is 3.88'10-22 gram/nucleus the 

7'1017 erg/gram 

TNT is 4'1010 erg/gram or 3.6'1016 erg/ton. 

1 kg of 25 ":\::: 20000 tons of TNT 

3. Fast NeutFon Chain Reaction 

Release of this energy in a large scale way is a possibility because of the fact that in each fission process, which 

requires a neutron to produce it, two neutrons are released. Con: 

sider a very great mass of active material, so great that no neutrons are lost through the surface and assume the material so pure that no neutrons are lost in other ways than by fission. One neutron released in the ~ass would become 2 after the first fission, each 

of these would produce 2 aftGr they each had produced fission so in the nth generation of neutrons there would be 2n neutrons availG.ble. 

Since in 1 kg. of 25 there are 5'1025 nuclei it would 

require about n 80 generations ( 280 ~ 5'1025 ) to fish the whole 

Idlogram. ~~ile this is going on the energy release is making the material very hot, developing great pressure and hence tending to cause an exposion. In an actual finite sotup, some neutrons 'are lost by ". d,~ffusion out through the surface. There will be thereforo a certain ~;: ~i'z e: RL 13ay .. ,!\ .!iJlhere for which the surface losse~ , of neutrons are 

:.:~~~:;;~::;~ot :l;S~:~":'i:i~:~!;~:' .e~ '~ fr .j ; 1i ~~rt?iJ 

The first page of "The Los Alamos Primer," reproduced in just 36 copies for key scientists 

and technicians on the mesa in New Mexico. An air of uncertainty, of speculation 

concerning the calculations, is found on almost every page of the "Primer." 
THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB 387 

over, Snow, and Gordon, brought out in January 1944 to take charge of 

purification of U235 scrap so it could be used again, and to prepare especially 

purified reagents for use in analyses of the uranium and plutonium.°6 

The newcomers were briefed in a series of five lectures given by 

Robert Serber, Oppenheimer's colleague at the Radiation Laboratory at 

California. The lectures were set down shortly after their delivery by 

Dr. Edward U. Condon (to succeed Dr. Briggs as Director of the Bureau 2 

years later) in a 26-page pamphlet entitled "The Los Alamos Primer." 67 "The object of the [Los Alamos] project," the primer began, "is to 

produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the 

energy is released by a fast neutron chain reaction in one or more of the 

materials known to show nuclear fission." The materials were designated as 25 [U235], 28 [U238], and 49 [plutonium 239]. "Material 49," the primer 

went on, "is prepared from neutron capture reaction in 28. only microgram 

quantities have so far been produced. There is another project going on presently to produce 49 for us in kilogram quantities." 

On the basis of current calculations, the primer continued, "the 

simplest estimate of the minimum size of the bomb is a critical mass of 

200 kilograms, in a sphere twice that size." Upon that assumption, "the 

immediate experimental problem is largely concerned with measuring the 

neutron properties of various materials and with the ordnance problem * * * 

to determine the critical size and time scale, working with large but subcritical amounts of active material." 

The hazard of radiation that preoccupied every laboratory experiment and industrial process involving live material and that called on so much engineering effort in the construction of the plants also haunted 

Los Alamos. But the consuming concern at Los Alamos as the bomb 

approached realization was predetonation. The primer attempted to estimate 

the possibility of a premature or incomplete explosion, particularly one that might give the enemy a chance to inspect or recover the materials of 

the bomb. 

Three sources of neutrons were recognized that might provide back. 

ground giving rise to the danger of predetonation: (1) cosmic rays, 

(2) spontaneous fission, or (3) nuclear reactions which produce neutrons. 

Thus, while "there will always be some chance of predetonation," every 

Twelve other members of the Bureau, including physicists, chemists, glassblowers, 

instrumentmakers, and metallurgists, were at other installations of the Manhattan Dis. 

trict. Letter, LJB to War Manpower Commission, May 10, 1945 (NBS Box 502, AP). 

Thirty-six copies of the primer, classified "Secret—Limited Circulation," were mimeographed for the use of key members of the project. Quotations here are from Dr. Condon's 

personal copy. The primer was declassified on Feb. 25, 1963. Certain of its information 

is alluded to in the Smyth Report, pp. 213 if. 
388 WORLD WAR I! RESEARCH (1941-45) 

calculation so far made indicated that "in any event the bomb will generate 

enough energy to completely destroy itself." 

The thought of may have seemed somewhat remote when 

the lectures were first given, for in a final section of the primer that discussed 

the mechanics of shooting that would bring the pieces of the bomb together 

with the right velocity, forming a critical or spontaneously exploding mass, 

it was admitted that "this is the part of the job about which we know the least 

at present." Two years after its organization, Los Alamos had the answer. 

By early 1944 fear of German success began to recede as the magnitude of the required research and industrial effort in this country became 

evident. Germany no longer had such resoUrces.68 By the spring of 1945 

Oak Ridge began producing U235 in significant amounts and Hanford was shipping increasing quantities of plutonium to Los Alamos. The bomb, was a near certainty, though no one yet knew how powerful it would be. 

Only the emergency of war could have justified the cost, in excess 

of $2 billion, of the manmade atomic explosion that occurred on the morning 

of July 16, 1945. The detonation took place in a remote section of 'the 

Alamogord.o Air Base, far to the south of Los Alamos. It was 10 weeks 

after the suicide of Hitler and the war in Europe had ended. 

THE RADIO PROXIMITY FUZE (NONROTATING TYPE) 

In the shadow of the atomic bomb were two other spectacular developments of World War II, the airburst proximity fuze and radar. Neither 

idea was new. A fuze that would explode a shell or bomb when directly 

over its target, rather than on impact, had been sought since World War 

I. The experimentation leading to radar began in Great Britain in 1919 

and in this country, at the Naval Research Laboratory, in 1923.69 The 

Bureau was to have little to do with radar, much to do with the proximity 

fuze. 

An artillery or antiaircraft shell, or bomb, rocket, or mortar round 

with a VT (variable time) proximity fuze has from 5 to 20 times the effectiveAs the defeat of Germany neared, a scientific mission somewhat ineptly named ALSOS 

(the Greek word for "groves"), closely followed the advancing Allied columns and sped 

through the laboratories and industrial plants of the occupied countries and across the 

Rhine, to assess the progress the Germans had made in their development of the bomb. 

Incredible was the discovery that nothing like a real effort had been made anywhere, 

owing as much perhaps to the death or flight of Germany's first-rank scientists as to 

Nazi ideology. 

"In this country Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor, first superintendent of the radio division of the 

Naval Research Laboratory established after World War I, is credited with discovering the principle of radar by bouncing back a radio beam directed at a ship on the 

Potomac. Baxter, p. 139. 
THE RADIO PROXIMiTY FUZE 389 ness of a round fitted with a contact or pre-set time fuze. In the case of very 

large bombs whose damage is almost entirely due to blast and airburst a!- 

most doubles the area of destruction created by bombs with conventional 

fuzes.7° 

Bombing runs and antiaircraft fire with ordinary fuzes rarely achieve 

hits with more than 5 percent of the expenditure. Where foxholes or shallow 

depressions in the ground offer good protection against anything but a 

direct hit, even a deep foxhole gives scant protection against a projectile 

exploding 20 or 30 feet overhead. To get that overhead-burst effect in 

World War I, artillery counted on tree bursts or attempted to bounce shells 

off rock walls or hillsides to reach troops below. The potential increase in 

effectiveness and the estimate that manpower, supply, and other logistical 

factors were enhanced by five through possession of a proximity fuze, thus 

warranted almost any degree of expenditure and effort to perfect it. 

The radio proximity fuze is essentially a tiny radio sending and receiving station about the size of a 100-watt light bulb. It operates by continuously 

sending out radio waves. When the waves approach a sizable object—a 

ship, plane, building or other structure, or open ground—they are reflected 

back to the receiver in the fuze. As the waves reach a sufficient intensity 

indicating their effective proximity, they operate an electronic switch that 

detonates the fuze and the projectile. 

The British began intensive efforts to perfect and produce their proximity fuze in 1937. Remembering the zeppelin raids of the First War, they 

intended to use the fuze primarily as a defense against enemy bombers. Their 

work became known to scientists in this country in the spring of 1940, and 

that June NDRC assigned research for a similar fuze to the Department of 

Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where Dr. 

Alexander Ellett of the University of Iowa was working on miscellaneous 

ordnance components.7' Under a working arrangement with NDRC, Ellett 

brought the problem to the. Bureau, where the team of Diamond, Hinman, 

and Astin, which had constructed the radiosonde and radiotelemeter, was 

most familiar with principles that might be adapted to the fuze. 

By November 1940 NDRC had determined that two types of radio 

proximity fuze were needed, one for rotating projectiles, sought by the Navy u Statistical data based on Army and Air Force field tests with radio and conventional 

fuzes, and agreeing with British findings, indicated these ranges of comparative effective- ness. [Wilbur S. Hinman, Jr.) The Radio Proximity Fuzes for Bombs Rockets, and 

Mortars (pamphlet of the Ordnance Development Division, NBS, 1945), pp. 5, 31—34 Hereafter cited as Hinman. See also Harry Diamond, "The radio proximity fuze," 

Nati. Radio News, 11, 16 (1945). 

Liaison with the British fuze development groups began in August 1940 and continued 

to the end of the war. See John S. Rinehart, MS, "Administrative history of Division 4, 

NDRC" (November 1945), p. 224 (author's copy). Hereafter cited as Rinehart MS. 
390 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

for the antiaircraft guns protecting their ships; another, nonrotating, for 

Army and Air Force weapons, specifically for bombs and rockets and, later, 

for mortars. The radio fuze for rotating projectiles was assigned to a group 

headed by Merle A. Tuve and Lawrence A. Hafstad in the Department of 

Terrestrial Magnetism. Its final development was carried out at the Johns 

Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. That for nonrotating projectiles was transferred to the Bureau under ElIett, where Diamond and Hinman's group 

worked on the nonrotating radio fuze, a group under Dryden investigated an accoustic fuze, and Mohier began studying components of a photoelectric fuze.72 

By early 1941, through the application of radioteletnetering techniques, Lauriston S. Taylor and Astin had demonstrated that acoustic fuzes were not practicable. They then joined the photoelectric fuze group under 

Dr. Joseph E. Henderson at the Carnegie Institution, and upon transfer of 

that group to the Bureau, Astin took over as director. The transfer was effected with the creation of OSRD in June 1941, when Diamond became chief 

of the radio and photoelectric fuze groups at the Bureau and Ellett the NDRC 

contracting officer.73 

The basic principles of the rotating and nonrotating fuze were similar 

except that the antiaircraft shell fuze had to withstand being fired from a gun. Its stability in flight resulted from its rotation, whereas the bomb and 

rocket fuze produced at the Bureau had to depend upon fins. And unlike 

the shell fuze, the bomb fuze had to operate at wide ranges of temperature, 

including the extreme cold (down to F) encountered at high altitudes. 

The group of eight that began work on the fuze on December 28, 1940, was to draw on staff members from many of the other Bureau laboratories 

and on scientists and technicians from university and industrial laboratories 

all over the country. In the last 2 years of the war, with the assignment of 

Army and Navy groups for testing and production, over 400 persons were 

engaged in the Bureau project alone.74 

The original assignment of the Bureau was to develop a fuze that 

would set off a rocket attached to a bomb when the bomb had fallen within 

several hundred feet of a battleship. By this means, the bonTb was expected 

to attain impact velocities high enough to penetrate and sink the ship. Much 

too complex and specific for the state of knowledge at the time, this requirement gave way to design of a general purpose proximity fuze.75 

Rinehart MS, pp. 200—204: Baxter, pp. 226—227. 

Rinehart MS, p. 15. 

Hinman, pp. 41—47, has a roster of all who worked on the NBS fuzes. 

Hinman, p. 9. Essentially the same account of NBS fuze research as in Hinman appears in Joseph C. Boyce, •ed., New Weapons for Air Warfare (OSRD, Science in 

World War II, Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), pp. 176—224. 
THE RADIO PROXIMITY FUZE 391 

A variety of principles were available for obtaining proximity detonation against a target, including photoelectric and reaction oscillator types 

wider British investigation, a beating oscillator arrangement proposed by 

the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, a pressure type based on the radio 

altimeter, and one on acoustic principles. The most promising for the nonrotating fuze, however, proved to be that utilizing the Doppler effect of 

reflected radio waves. Hinman and Diamond devised a diode detector ar- rangement that acted when the amplitude of the reflected signals exceeded a predetermined value, and with that the section began its experiments.76 

Tests of the first series of crude box models using the radio principle were made between January and April 1941. Despite the fact that only a third of the cumbersome models functioned properly, they proved that a radio proximity fuze was practicable. Turning it into an operational service 

item was to take almost 2 more years. 

Much effort was expended in the early months on the electronic circuits activating the fuze and then on its mechanical switches and safety 

mechanisms, since a serviceable fuze had to be so safe that anyone could 

handle and even abuse it without danger.77 While the circuits and mechaiiisms proved out on the early models tested at low altitudes, dropping the box 

fuzes from 10,000 feet and higher produced dismaying results. The higher 

velocities in the drop set up vibrations that the radio tubes and other com- ponents could not withstand. 

In the next series of models, instead of the original shock mounting, all 

components were made so stiff and rugged and mounted so rigidly that they 

were capable of resisting the severest mechanical vibrations. Circuit elements were either immersed in wax or fixed to a frame and given a heavy 

protective wax coating. As for the electronic tubes, small hearing aid tubes 

offered the best solution to difficulties with the large and structurally weak 

commercial tubes that had been used. Raytheon, Hygrade Sylvania, General Electric and others, already at work on this problem for the shell fuze 

project, subsequently produced small, high quality, exceedingly rugged tubes 

for both the shell and bomb fuzes. 

A new method of arming the fuze, to improve its exploding time, was introduced in February 1942. It consisted of a special type of circuit 

that provided a delay in the charging time for producing the current that 

set off the detonator. Another improvement eliminated use of the bomb 

body as the antenna of the radio fuze, by building two bars into the fuze 

itself, providing an antenna separate from the projectile.78 In May 1942, at 

Hinman, p. 9; RP1723, "Radio proximity fuze design" (Hinman and Brunetti, 1946). 

W. B. McLean and J. Rabinow were the chief designers of the switches and safety 

mechanisms (NBS War Research, p. 20). 

78 Hinman, pp. 11—13. 
392 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

1' The miniaturization of the electron tube for use in the radio 

proximity fuze. 

this stage in the basic design of the fuze, the Army set up a specific requirement. They wanted a VT fuze for their new 4.5-inch airborne rocket, then on the drawing boards, for use against the German Luftwaffe. 

With fuze dimensions agreed upon, its design was completed in 2 days 

and construction of test models began. Complicated mechanical and plastic 

parts were fabricated by hand. Temporary switch and safety mechanisms 

had to be used. The batteries available were still too large for a service fuze 

but National Carbon and Burgess Battery were working on smaller ones.79 

The final design of the fuze head consisted essentially of a radio transmitter 

and receiver, a selective amplifier, an electronic switch, a detonator, an electric power supply, and arming and safety devices.80 Since the 4.5-inch rocket was not ready, the fuze was set in a 3l/4-inch substitute rocket. Test operations off the coast near Wilmington, N.C., started a month after receiving the 

requirement. 

George W. Vinal's electrochemistry section in July 1941 produced a satisfactory lowtemperature wet (perchloric acid) battery for use in the fuze, measuring 2% x 21/2 inches, 

later replaced by a commercial dry battery (New Weapons for Air Warfare, p. 184). 

C. H. Page and A. V. Astin, "Survey of proximity fuze development," Am. J. Phys. 15, 

95,98 (1947). 
THE RADIO PROXIMiTY FUZE 393 

Actually, tests of two fuzes were made at that time, the radio fuze 

developed by Diamond and Hinman's group and the photoelectric fuze by 

Taylor and Astin. Functionally, the photoelectric fuze was excellent. 

Equipped with a photoelectric cell and lens and triggered by its sensitivity 

to changes in light intensity, the fuze detonated its projectile when an object 

passed between a portion of the lens and the sky. Drawbacks of the fuze 

were its dependence upon light, making it useless at night, and its tendency 

to anticipate its target as sunlight moved into and out of the lens. With the 

help of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, methods for solving both difficulties 

were found, but the success of the radio fuze finally led to suspension of the 

photoelectric project in October 1943.81 

For the tests in June 1942, construction of both radio and photo. 

electric fuzes for the Army rocket began on small-scale production lines at 

the Bureau and at Westinghouse. More than a thousand of the two fuzes 

were made in the Bureau's model shops, "bugs" were ironed out at the proving ground, and late that year, as complete specifications for the fuzes went 

to industry, full production began.. Under procurement for the Signal Corps 

by agreement with Army Ordnance, almost 400,000 of each type were turned 

out in 1943 and an additional 400,000 of the radio fuzes before the end of 

the war.82 

While the radio fuze for the rocket was primarily designed for use 

against aircraft in its limited use overseas it functioned equally well from airplanes and from ground rocket launchers against troops and gun emplace. 

ments. Its most spectacular use was in multibarreled projects mounted on the General Sherman tank, the 60 VT-fuzed rockets, released in 6 seconds, 

completely smothering the target area with their concentration of projectile 

Well before the end of 1942 the fuze program had completely outgrown the laboratory in which it began overflowing into a number of tempo. 

rary structures put up in the open area across Van Ness Street. Upon the 

assignment of additional fuze types and other ordnance projects to the group 

that December, the Bureau organized the sprawling units into the ordnance 

development division, under the direction of Harry Diamond, for better 

administration of the work. 

A month later Army Ordnance renewed its original request for a 

radio fuze for bombs. The bomb fuze was not, as originally planned, to 

be used against enemy battleships—the Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Prinz Eugen, L . ninetiart pp. 111—112; A. V. Astin, ed., Photoelectric Fuzes and Miscellaneous 

Projects," vol. 3, Summary Technical Report of Division 4, NDRC (Washington, D.C., 

1946), p. 20. 83 Hinman, pp. 15—17, 31; NBS War Research, p. 21; Baxter, pp. 239—240. 

p. 17. 
An NBS proximity fuze model shop where test models of the fuzes, as well as early production models, were made prior to full-scale production. 
THE RADIO PROXIMITY FUZE 395 

and other raiders of the German Fleet had either been sunk or immobilized— 

but for air-to-air use against enemy bomber formations. Attack planes with 

these proximity fuze bombs were to climb above enemy air armadas and 

release their sticks over the formation. 

Work on the bomb fuze was well under way before it was realized 

that such targets had grown scarce, that the Allies, not the enemy, were 

now sending out bombers in flood formations. The requirement was changed 

to an air-to-ground bomb fuze, to effect airbursts over troops and other 

targets of opportunity. When this fuze later arrived overseas it was also 

fitted into fragmentation bombs. In napalm (gel gas) bombs, the fuze 

eliminated ground penetration, to which the standard napalm bomb was subject, doubling the area covered by the gel. In these various forms it was used with deadly effect by the 12th Air Force in Italy against both troops 

and materieL54 

Since a bomb is not subject to setback at release, that is, the shock 

of acceleration upon which the arming of the rocket fuze depends, a different 

arming mechanism became necessary. The difference in fuze space in the 

bomb also required some physical redesign. The greatest concern in the 

bomb fuze, however, was with the dry battery used as a power source. As 

had been learned with the rocket fuze, it deteriorated rapidly in storage, 

lasting about a year ordinarily and not more than a month or 2 under tropical 

conditions. At the subzero temperatures encountered in high-altitude runs, 

the dry battery wouldn't work at all. Another means for powering the fuze 

had to be found.55 

The solution was found by eliminating the batteries and using the 

arming system of the conventional bomb fuze. In that fuze a small winddriven vane spinning as the bomb falls actuates the arming mechanism only 

after a certain number of turns of the vane. By attaching a miniature 

generator to the vane, sufficient electric power could be obtained for the 

proximity fuze. The generator assured almost indefinite storage life, performed well over extreme temperature ranges, and increased the safety 

factor since the fuze could in no way detonate the bomb unless the vane was running at high speed. 

The generator designed by Zenith Radio, measuring % by 2% inches 

and built to run at 50,000 r.p.m., went into mass production. With it went a rectifier assembly made by General Electric about half the size of a cigarette, to convert the alternating voltage of the generator to direct current 

for the fuze. Tests of the new bomb fuze began in May 1943, and by 

British tests further disclosed that air-burst chemical bombs filled with a persistent agent 

such as mustard gas contaminated seven times the area covered by a surface burst. Hinman, pp. 33—34; Baxter, p. 241. 

Hinman, p. 18. 
Five types of NBS radio proximity fazes mounted on the weapons for which they were designed. Mr. Harry Diamond, at left, 

holds the 81-mm mortar shell with the mortar fuze. Dr. Alexander Ellett, Chief of Division 4, NDRC, holds the mortar faze unmounted. Left to right on the table are a ring-type bomb fuze adapted for rockets, mounted here on a 5-inch high-velocity rocket; a later developed rocket fuze on the same rocket; a bar-type bomb fuze on a 260-pound fragmentation bomb; and a ringtype fuze on the 500-pound general purpose bomb. 
THE RADIO PROXIMITY FUZE 397 

November specifications for quantity production were ready. Army Ordnance called for the fuze on all its bombs between the 100- and 4,000-pound 

sizes. Approximately 1 million were made by Zenith, Emerson, Philco, and 

other radio manufacturing companies.86 

Subsequent modifications made in the bomb fuze included a device 

designed at the Bureau by Jacob Rabinow to provide delay in arming and 

permit the fuzed bombs to drop safely through deep formations of bombers, 

and replacement of the vane mechanism with a miniature turbine, making 

the whole rotating system in the fuze more compact. Design of special 

components was initiated by Astin's group to insure optimum heights of 

burst, and finally a new generator appeared, measuring a mere 11/8 by 13/s 

inches,87 

As the sophisticated generator-powered bomb fuze went into production, the Navy through OSRD asked that it be adapted to their 5-inch 

aircraft rocket. The major modification consisted in changing the arming 

system from its vane gear back to the use of the acceleration provided by the 

firing of the rocket. Production of both air.to.ground and air-to-air versions 

began in December 1944, and both the Army and Navy used them in considerable numbers in the last months of the war.88 

A late adjunct to employment of the proximity fuze bomb was a special bomb director mechanism, which together with toss bombing, insured bringing the missile close enough to its target for maximum effect. 

The toss-bombing principle and basic design of the mechanism, the acceleration integrater bomb release, was first suggested by Col. Harold Morton 

of Army Ordnance in January 1943 and developed under Alexander Ellett 

at the Bureau.89 

The object of toss bombing is to compensate for the gravity drop of 

the missile in flight. Instead of depending on an educated guess about the 

point of bomb release, as fighter pilots did in attacking bomber formations 

or in dive bombing, the bomb director automatically computed the release 

point as the pilot commenced pulling out of his dive. The resulting trajectory of the bomb tossed it toward its target, allowing the pilot more time 

to take evasive action against ground or ship fire. 

Some 500 bomb director sets were produced for the Army and Navy 

toward the end of the war, although only a few more than a hundred, fitted 

Hinman, pp. 20, 31; Baxter, pp. 239,241. 87 Hinman, pp. 21—23; NBS War Research, p. 23. 88 Hinman, p. 24. 

Letter, Acting Assistant Chief of Air Staff-4 to Col. H. S. Morton, Office of Chief of 

Ordnance, Nov. 8, 1945, and attached correspondence (copy in NBS Historical File); 

Rinehart MS, p. 158. 
398 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

in the P—47 fighter plane in the European theater, saw service.9° They also 

directed the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

The progressive reduction in size of the nonrotating radio fuze was 

eagerly observed by Army Ordnance, since they wanted it for their trench 

mortars. The fuzes in production, for all their miniaturization, still weren't 

small enough when the request came to the Bureau in the late spring of 1944. 

Besides the necessity of designing a fuze oniy one-third the size of those in the 

bomb and rocket, while retaining all their functions, the fuze for the Army's 

81-mm mortar shell had to be capable of withstanding a firing shock of 

10,000 times the force of gravity or 10 times that of the rocket fuze. 

The extreme requirements in size and ruggedness were largely met 

by what was called a "radical innovation in electric construction" when the 

subcontractor, Globe-Union, Inc., found a way to produce a considerable part 

of the electric circuit of the fuze by painting conducting material onto ceramic 

plates and Production of three models of mortar fuzes with these new "so-called printed circuits" started a month after the surrender of Germany. They were initially turned out at the rate of 100,000 a month. In 

the expectation that the war in the Pacific would last until mid-1946 or early 

1947, the rate had just been tripled when the war ended.9' 

The pressure to complete development and hasten production of fuzes 

both at the Bureau and in industry increased as preparations for the Normandy invasion began. Large quantities of bombs and rockets with the 

proximity fuze were assembled for use in the preinvasion air assault to 

soften up the beachhead. Teams headed by OSRD and Bureau members went 

to England to indoctrinate the U.S. Air Force in the maintenance and use of the fuzes. Then, shortly before D-day, the Air Force announced its decision not to use the fuze. In view of Allied air superiority, it was felt that 

enemy recovery of one of the fuzes would make the weapon more advantageous to them than to us. The proximity fuze for shells had been used 

by fighter planes in the Pacific since early 1943, but their use had occurred 

only over water where they were not recoverable. In Normandy, the fuze 

°°Astin, ed., "Bomb, Rocket, and Torpedo Tossing," vol. 2, Summary Technical Report 

of Division 4, NDRC (Washington, D.C., 1946) ; Astin, ed., "Photoelectric Fuzes and 

Miscellaneous Projects," pp. 8—10. '°' Although the metalizing art was believed well known, Globe-Union rightly considered 

its printed circuit technique a trade secret, with great potentialities for the future, making possible economic mass production, saving space and weight, and increasing the 

reliability of electrical equipment. See Astin, ed., "Radio Proximity Fuzes for Finstabilized Missiles," vol. 1, Summary Technical Report of Division 4, NDRC (Washington, 

D.C., 1946), pp. 241—242, 248, 253—256; C. Brunetti and A. S. Khouri, "Printed electronic 

circuits," Electronics, April 1946, p. 104. 

Hinman, pp. 26—27; Baxter, p. 241; Rinehart MS, p. 182. 
A GUIDED MISSILE CALLED THE BAT 399 

might be retrieved from the beach or beachhead. The same negative decision withheld use of the director mechanism for toss bombing. 

So great were precautions to keep the proximity fuze out of enemy 

hands that it was not officially released for general use in the theaters until 

December 1944, 6 months after D-day. Even then its use was forbidden 

where enemy observers might identify the nature of the fuze. Among added 

precautions, the fuzes in rockets for use against aircraft were designed to 

destroy themselves before striking the ground in case of a miss, and bombs 

and rockets for air-to-ground strikes had an auxiliary contact fuze that functioned on impact in case of failure of the VT fuze. The single exception to 

the early restriction was use of the shell fuze in the British defense against the 

German V—i robot bomb in the summer of 1944. 

Following instruction courses given at the Bureau and at Aberdeen 

Proving Ground to Navy and Air Force teams, the first major combat use 

of the bomb fuze, by the 7th Air Force, occurred during the preinvasion 

bombardment of Iwo Jima in February 1945. in Europe both bomb and 

rocket fuzes, the latter in the new 4.5-inch rocket carried by fighter planes, 

were first used against German flak batteries and other ground targets in 

ApriL92 

In 1944, as large-scale production was reached, over 8 million radio 

proximity .fuzes were made, almost a quarter of them bomb, rocket, and 

mortar fuzes.°3 By then fuze plants were monopolizing 25 percent of the 

total facilities of the electronic industry and 75 percent of all molding plastics 

firms. And even more sophisticated fuzes were on the way. As production slackened with the end of the war, research was resumed in a search for 

better components and more versatile fuzes.94 

A GUIDED MISSILE CALLED ThE BAT 

The Bureau borrowed on the wartime radar research carried out elsewhere for its construction of the "Bat," the first fully automatic guided 

missile ever used successfully in combat. 

The guided missile program began late in 1940 when NDRC initiated 

research on a new weapon it believed might be useful to the services, a Hinman, pp. 36—40; Baxter, pp. 240—241, 234—235. 

Of the 8.3 million fuzes produced, 61 percent went to the U.S. Army, 26.7 percent to 

the U.S. Navy, and the remaining 12.3 percent to the British armed forces (Baxter, p. 

236 n.). It has been estimated that of the fewer than 2 million NBS fuzes made, probably no more than 20,000, primarily bomb fuzes, were used in the European and Pacific 

theaters (Astin, ed., "Bomb, Rocket, and Torpedo Tossing," p. 8). 

Baxter, p. 242; Rinehart MS, p. 260. 
400 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

winged bomb which would automatically seek out its target and guide itself 

to hit the target. NDRC was proved right, but its missile was still a year 

away when in August 1943 German planes, out of range of antiaircraft lire, 

began to sink Allied shipping in the Bay of Biscay by means of radio.con. 

trolled bombs fitted with glider wings.95 

The aerodynamic characteristics of the prototype weapon that was designed and constructed under RCA contract in 1940—41 presented a number of stubborn difficulties. Early in 1942 NDRC asked the Bureau for help 

by taking over the aerodynamic and servomechanism (control) development 

of the weapon. Hugh L. Dryden, chief of the mechanics and sound division of the Bureau and NDRC consultant, whose fundamental work on "Aerodynamics of aircraft bombs" was still basic in that field, was put in 

charge.96 

Under the code name "Robin," several full-scale missiles of new de. 

sign, intended to carry a standard 2,000-pound bomb, were constructed for 

the Bureau at the Vidal Research Corporation. Tests began in April 1942. 

The nose of the flying bomb vehicle contained a special RCA television transmitter with pickup tube for viewing the course of the bomb in its flight. A 

ground operator directed the bomb by manual remote radio control, watching a television receiver in front of him. The test results were not encouraging. Electrical interference and the noise and vibration of the glider seriously affected the television equipment and the servomechanism repeatedly failed 

under the varying conditions of flight.97 

Among the observers of the flight tests were Navy Ordnance officers 

concerned at the time with a radar homing missile under development by 

the Naval Research Laboratory and the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. 

While one group at the Bureau continued work on the television-guided 

"Robin," another, convinced by the Navy of the possible superiority of radar 

in the Bureau's glider system, began modifying "Robin" to incorporate 

radar homing principles. 

Two basic types of a radar missile were available. One envisioned a glider bomb with a radar receiver tuned to an enemy transmitter that en- abled the bomb to home in on the transmitter. The other type contained 

both transmitter and receiver, in which the transmitter emitted short pulses 

of high intensity, guiding the missile by the returning echoes from the enemy 

object. As both types came under study in a new special projects section 

set up in Dryden's division at the Bureau, the section expanded to more than 

Baxter, p. 194. 

The 210-page MS report of Feb. 28, 1927, is in NASA Library, File N—7569. 

°' NBS War Research, p. 30. 
A GUIDED MISSILE CALLED THE BAT 401 a hundred members, occupying the whole of the temporarily vacated hydraulics laboratory.98 

The first radio-operated guided missile ready for testing was the 

"Pelican," a passive type using a radio receiver only, mounted in the nose 

of a 450-pound glider bomb. The plane carrying the Pelican illuminated the 

target with its radio transmitter and the bomb picked up the reflected waves 

and homed in on them. Foreseeing early use for the weapon, the Navy put 

the Pelican under highest priority and augmented the staff with a Navy Ordnance Experimental Unit at the Bureau and a Pelican Test Group at Lakehurst, N.J., where the flight tests were to be made.99 

With receivers provided by Zenith and gliders by Vidal, final assem- bly was made at the Bureau. The first flight demonstrating homing control 

took place in December 1942. In the haste to construct test models and get 

them into production as their design proved satisfactory, minor difficulties 

with instrumentation were accepted which seriously flawed the production 

tests. As it turned out, only slight changes in the target selector circuits of 

the Pelican were necessary to overcome the repeated failures of the missile, 

but by then the greater promise shown in a concurrent project, the "Bat" 

missile, a 1,000-pound flying bomb, claimed the major Bureau effort.'°° 

As bats emit short pulses of sound and guide themselves by the echo, so the Bat missile, sending out shortwave radiation, was directed by the radar 

echoes from the target. Unlike the Pelican, the sending and receiving radar 

set in the Bat made the weapon self-sufficient, since it illuminated its own target. Bell Telephone Laboratories and MIT scientists designed the radar 

robot pilot of the Bat, while groups under Hunter Boyd and Harold K. Skramstad at the Bureau worked out its aerodynamic and stabilization 

characteristics.10' 

Flight tests of the Bat, its 10.foot glider wing supporting a dummy 

bomb, started in May 1944. That autumn, in comparative tests between the 

Pelican and Bat against a ship hulk anchored 60 miles off shore, both performed well and were accepted. In one respect, as it turned out, the Pelican 

was somewhat the superior of the two, since its range of 20 miles exceeded 

War Research, p. 31. 

"Baxter (p. 195) describes the Pelican as originally an antisubmarine weapon, using a standard depth bomb and a scaled-down air frame steered by its radar receiver from a transmitter in the attacking plane. When the submarine threat receded, "the idea 

of a glide bomb which would follow a radar beam directly to the target was * * * too 

good to abandon," and research on the glide missile continued as a weapon against 

shipping. 

"'NBS War Research, p. 33. 

'°' Ibid. A notable report on fundamentals was Dryden's "Some aspects of the design 

of homing aero-missiles," NBS Report to Division 5, NDRC, October 1945, and attached 

correspondence (NARG 227, OSRD, Division 5, Box 655). 
402 

.:. 

The "Bat," borne by a Navy torpedo bomber, rides with folded tail fins until, upon 

release, they open into proper flight position. 

The first fully automatic guided missile to be successfully used in combat, the Bat was designed for use against enemy shipping, and particularly against surfaced sub. 

marines. The Bat's outstanding features were its self-guidance after release, its long 

range, high accuracy, low angle of flight, and high pay load. 

The "Pelican," developed with the cooperation of the Navy Bureau of Ordnance and the 

MIT Radiation Laboratory. Here it is rigged with instrumentation for flight tests, the 

16 mm gunsight aiming point camera directly beneath the wing pointing at a panel of 

signal lamps indicating radar controls being applied, and the 16 mm camera, slightly 

lower and forward, pointing at the ground ahead of the glider. 

II 
RADIO AND RADIO-WEATHER PREDICTING 403 

that of the Bat. But the decision had been made and only the Bat went 

overseas. In the final months, land-based Navy patrol squadrons in the 

Pacific made effective use of it against Japanese naval and merchant ship. 

ing and against land targets in the forward areas.'°2 

Complex and formidable as the Pelican and Bat seemed at the time, 

they were but pale prototypes of the missiles to come in the postwar years. 

RADIO AND RADIO-WEATHER PREDICTING 

An important weapon in subduing the German submarine menance 

was the high-frequency direction finder, called "Huff-Duff," a play on its 

initials, h—f—d—f. Its progenitor was the radio compass or direction finder 

designed by Frederick A. Koister of the Bureau in 

When early in the war the Allies established the convoy system for 

the Atlantic crossing, the U-boats began stalking the convoys in wolf packs, 

using their wireless to direct the group operations. The wireless gave away 

their positions to British and American Huff-Duff stations and allowed radarequipped planes from land bases or carriers to find them. 

Errors in accuracy in existing Navy, Signal Corps, and commercial 

directi&n finders sometimes caused the search planes to miss the enemy packs. 

In April 1941, NDRC requested the Bureau to study the errors in highfrequency finders and determine techniques for measuring these errors. Out 

of the research came new techniques for assessing a variety of errors possible in the direction finders themselves, and correlation of these errors with 

the influence of atmospheric disturbances on the finders. The results were 

set out in two important papers prepared for NDRC, one by Diamond, Lyons, 

and Post on "High-frequency direction finder apparatus research by the 

NBS," the other by Kenneth Norton on "The polarization of d•owncoming 

ionospheric radio waves." The latter paper NDRC acclaimed as "a 

thorough development of the physics of ionosphere reflections [that] has 

become a classic on the subject," and much of the subsequent research on direction finders, both in NDRC and in Allied research centers, was based on the fundamental theories set down in these two reports.'°4 

By June 1943 Huff-Duff, together with Asdic, radar, Loran, sonar, and 

voice and radio communication, had driven the wolf packs from the North 

102 NBS War Research, p. 34; Boyce, New Weapons for Air Warfare, Pp. 225—235. 103 See ch. III, p. 142. 

See C. C. Suits, C. R. Harrison, and L. Jordan, eds., Applied Physics, Electronics, 

Optics, Metallury (OSRD, Science in World War II, Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 

pp. 135—136, 140. 
404 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

Atlantic.105 The Huff-Duff investigation, however, was only a single aspect 

of a much more extensive project at the Bureau involving the ionosphere 

and its wide range of effects on radio communications of all kinds. Studies 

of these effects, as manifestations of radio-weather, had already led to 

techniques of predicting, with growing accuracy, their influence on communications. 

For good reason, then, a month after Pearl Harbor a Bureau letter 

circular on radio-weather predictions was withdrawn from circulation and 

all further open publication on the subject ceased. Its data on radio distance ranges had become military secrets and remained so throughout the 

war.106 

The influence of the ionized layers of the earth's upper atmosphere, 

the ionosphere, on radio wave propagation had been recognized ever since 

the independent experiments of Breit and Tuve and of Appleton in 1925 

proved its existence.107 Through the next decade Norton, Kirby, Gilliland, 

and Newbern Smith at the Bureau devised a number of techniques for ex- tending the range of ionospheric measurements.lOS Because of the scarcity 

of ionospheric data and because few realized its importance, use of such 

data in radio communications before the war was relatively small. The 

military value of precise knowledge of the usability of various radio frequencies at specific times over specific transmission paths thus gave an enormous 

impetus to the compilation of sky data during the war. 

From the point of view of the services, the extreme crowding of the 

radio-frequency spectrum made propagation data necessary for the best 

selection and allocation of available frequencies. Security considerations 

also dictated that the frequencies used be those least likely to be intercepted 

by the enemy. Design of new equipment, especially antennas, depended upon 

knowledge of radio propagation conditions. Finally, not only all radio aids 

for air navigation over the North Atlantic, but radio direction finding, radiotelephone, radar, telegraphy, and radioteletype required better knowledge of 

propagation ranges, accuracy, and receivable intensities. 

106 Baxter, pp. 38, 45; NBS War Research, pp. 43—44. The Mathematical Tables Project 

of the Bureau, located in New York, did important work for the Navy on its Loran tables 

and other computations. Interview, Dr. Franz L. Alt, June 30, 1964. 

'o' LC658 (1941). Excepted from classification were the standard frequencies and 

other broadcasting services provided by the Bureau (see LC591, 1940). 

For the work of Breit, Tuve, and Appleton, see RP632, "Studies of the ionosphere 

and their application to radio transmission" (Kirby, Berkner, and Stuart, 1934) - RP597, "A continuous recorder of radio field intensities" (Norton and Reymer, 

1933); RP752, "An analysis of continuous records of field intensities * * *" (Norton, Kirby, and Lester, 1934); RP1001, "Characteristics of the ionosphere * * (Gilliland, Kirby, Smith, et al., 1937); RP1167, "Application of graphs of maximum 

usable frequency * * 'p" (Smith, Kirby, and Gilliland, 1939). 
RADIO AND RADIO-WEATHER PREDICTING 405 

An aircraft disaster in the European theater, attributed to failure ckf 

communications resulting from a magnetic storm, led the British and, 

after, the Australians to establish their propagation services in 1941, in order 

to furnish radio weather predictions to their Armed Forces.109 A similar 

program had its inception in this country when NDRC asked the Bureau to 

prepare a textbook for the services on basic principles of radio skywave 

propagation. Assembled by a group under Newbern Smith in Dellinger's 

radio section, the Radio Transmission Handbook—Frequencies 1000 to 

30,000 kc, appeared a year later, in January 1942. In addition to the principles, it gave such computational procedures as were then available, offered 

preliminary versions of prediction charts, and provided radio predictions for 

that winter. A supplement in June gave the summer predictions. 

So valuable was the information in these handbooks to service radio 

communication systems that NDRC asked the Bureau to continue the work, 

and in the summer of 1942, by order of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the 

Interservice Radio Propagation Laboratory (IRPL) was established at the 

Bureau. It was directed to centralize radio propagation data and furnish 

the resulting information to the services.'10 

The data were compounded of a number of variables of which little 

was known. First of all, 'long-range radio communication depends upon the 

ionosphere, which acts as an infinite series of tiny radio mirrors to reflect 

signals back to earth. Communication is imperiled, no matter how good the 

transmitting or receiving equipment, unless radio waves are propagated with 

sufficient strength to be receivable. That strength depends upon knowledge 

of the ever-changing characteristics of the ionosphere, which vary with latitude and longitude, geomagnetic latitude, layer height, ionization density, 

energy absorption, and radio noise. The latter, radio noise, is both geophysical, caused principally by thunderstorms, and extraterrestrial (stellar 

and solar), resulting from meteor activity and solar storms.'11 

To predict useful frequencies over skywave paths anywhere in the 

world, the Bureau had first to obtain adequate ionospheric data on a worldwide basis. With the data, it had to establish methods for calculating maximum usable frequencies over long paths, methods for calculating skywave 

Unavoidable because it results from the event, yet similar as a phenomenon, is the 

total blackout of radio communications experienced by the astronauts in their space flights 

while reentering the atmosphere. The heat of the falling capsule during reentry ionizes 

the air around it, sealing off both incoming and outgoing radio signals and stopping registration of the instruments tracking the capsules. 

Suits, Harrison, and Jordan, Applied Physics, Electronics, Optics, Metallurgy, pp. 148—9. For the wartime financing of IRPL, first by the Bureau, NDRC, Army, and Navy, 

and after 1943 wholly by the Army and Navy, see memo, Deputy Secretary, Joint Communications Board, JCS, for Director, NBS, May 24, 1945 (NBS Blue Folder Box 24). 

Dellinger, "The ionosphere," Sci. Mo. 65, 115 (1947). 
406 WORLD WAR I! RESEARCH (1941-45) 

field intensity, determine minimum required field intensities, and methods for 

forecasting ionospheric storms. 

At the time, ionospheric observations were available to IRPL only 

from the Bureau laboratory in Maryland, two observatories in Australia, and one in New Zealand.h12 Before the end of the war, through the cooperation 

of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the U.S. Army and Navy, the 

Canadian Navy and Air Force, the new British and Australian propagation 

services, the British Admiralty, the National Physical Laboratory, the British 

Broadcasting Corp., and the U.S.S.R., 44 stations were regularly reporting 

ionospheric observations by cable and radio, in cipher, to IRPL. 

As a first step, the Bureau evolved a technique for predicting ionosphere characteristics on a worldwide basis, using standard statistical methods 

and recording the data on comprehensive charts published for the services 

each month. Next, a simple rapid method was devised for obtaining the 

maximum usable frequency (m.u.f.) over sky paths in any part of the world 

for distances up to 2,500 miles.. The method made possible preparation of 

world charts giving predictions of mu.f. 3 months in advance. The preparation and distribution of these charts, which began in April 1942, was the most important achievement of the Bureau in the field of skywave 

propagation.113 

The urgent need to know distance ranges and lowest useful high frequency (l.u.h.f.) necessitated many more calculations of skywave field intensities than were currently available. The Bureau's intensity-recording pro. 

gram, begun early in the previous decade, was expanded by installing re- corders at new ionospheric stations set up in the services and elsewhere on 

the North American continent. Commercial radio companies supplemented 

these records with their observed worldwide radio traffic log sheets. With 

the data on skywave field intensity, knowledge of the minimum field densities necessary to overcome atmospheric radio noise was also required. A 

study began of thunderstorms, the common source of this noise, whose principal generating centers are in the East Indies, Central and South America, 

and Africa, with secondary centers in the tropical oceans. 

A final major problem of IRPL was forecasting ionospheric storms, 

the great magnetic storms, invisible but of vast energy, triggered by solar 

flares and eruptions that often blanket the earth and for periods of 

The Bureau's ionosphere recording equipment and field intensity recorders were located 

at its field station at Md., until 1942 when the Air Force took over the site for 

Andrews Air Base. The Bureau found another meadowland, an area of 450 acres, at 

Sterling, Va., near Chantilly, 23 miles northwest of the Bureau. That too was lost when 

in 1954 it became the site of the Dulles International Airport. By then other field stations of the Bureau, including those at Boulder, Cob., were providing adequate coverage. 

"3NBS War Research, p. 36. 
RADIO AND RADIO-WEATHER PREDiCTING 407 a few hours to several days disrupt all sorts of electrical and electronic 

equipment114 in a magnetic storm, the ionosphere tends to absorb signals 

instead of reflecting them, often temporarily knocking out long-distance telephone lines and scrambling telegraph transmission and the transatlantic 

radio circuits upon which overseas flights depend. The military importance 

of the North Atlantic flight path, which reaches into the auroral zone or zone 

of maximum disturbance, thus made it imperative to know when communications were likely to be interrupted. 

Studies of the behavior of radio direction finder bearings and other 

ionospheric and cosmic data over the North Atlantic path gathered by monitoring stations in Europe showed that it was possible to predict the advent 

of a radio disturbance to shortwave communications and issue warnings a few 

hours to half a day or more in advance. Using these data the Bureau's shorttime warning service was inaugurated in 1943.115 

By the autumn of 1943 adequate solutions to the major difficulties in 

radio weather predicting had been found and the result was the IRPL Radio 

Propagation Handbook that appeared in November as an IRPL issue, an 

Army training manual, and a Navy publication. It described the behavior 

of the ionosphere and the theory behind maximum and lowest useful frequencies. It discussed the preparation of prediction charts and the techniques for determination of useful frequencies over any path at any time, to 

the extent that they had become known.'16 The new world of radio explored 

by the handbook bore only remote resemblance to that described in the handbooks on elementary electricity, radio circuits, and radio measurements that 

supplied the needs of World War I. 

From 1925 to the end of World War II, the radio section of the Bureau was almost wholly engaged in studies of the ionosphere and in radio engineering projects, including its blind landing system, the radiosonde, the 

proximity fuze, and guided missiles. With a single important exception, 

radio standards work went into somewhat of an eclipse in that period. The 

exception was in new precision frequency measurements. 

For an interesting account of magnetic storms, particularly the great storms of March 

1940 and February 1958, see John Brooks, "The subtle storm," The New Yorker, Feb. 

7, 1959. 115 Dellinger and N. Smith, "Developments in radio sky-wave propagation research and 

applications during the war," Proc. IRE, 36, 258 (1948). 

"TWo months after the IRPL handbook came out, the Bureau began a 2-week training course in the principles of radio weather predicting and methods of problem solution for 

Army Air Force, Signal Corps, and Navy officers and enlisted men. Some after training 

went to oversea communications groups and took charge of assignment of radio operating 

frequencies in the field. Others were sent to training units to organize additional radio 

weather predicting courses. 
408 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

As a requirement of the radio wave propagation studies, a group 

under Harold Lyons undertook in 1944 to establish national primary standards of microwave radio frequencies. Assisted by the military, OSRD, and 

industrial laboratories, the Bureau set up frequency standards with an ac- curacy of 1 part in 10 million covering the microwave range continuously 

up to 30,000 megacycles. All frequencies in the study were derived from a special group of quartz crystal oscillators which constituted the national 

primary standard of frequency.'17 

At this point some note is appropriate about the multimillion dollar 

stockpile program in quartz crystals that occupied over a hundred members 

of the Bureau during the war. It was known that tremendous numbers of 

quartz crystal oscillator plates would be required by the armed services in 

their tank, plane, and field radio equipment, in naval communication apparatus, in radar and other detection equipment, and in many electronic precision instruments. In radio the plates not only serve to tune both transmitters and receivers to a desired frequency and to hold the frequency of transmitters within very narrow limits, but also to permit quick changes from 

one frequency to another merely by changing the crystal in the circuit. 

The quartz crystal from which the plates are cut is almost worldwide 

in distribution but except in Brazil is of inferior quality and available only 

in insignificant amounts. Just prior to the war, Great Britain, Germany, and 

Japan, in a scramble to stockpile the crystals, were taking 94 percent of 

Brazilian output. A mere 4 percent satisfied U.S. requirements. 

When in early 1940 quartz crystal was declared critical, it was established that the United States must stockpile at least 100,000 pounds 

of usable quartz. In March the Procurement Division of the Treasury asked 

the Bureau to help formulate specifications for crystals of radio grade and 

to test those to be purchased for the stockpile. Through the first half of 

1941 the total amount of raw crystals received came to less than 50,000 

pounds. 

With our entrance into the war, quartz crystal, still critical, became a strategic material as well, that had to be denied to the enemy at any cost.'18 

The Metals Reserve Company of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 

taking over from the Procurement Division, at once contracted for the entire 

CRPL report, "Radio standards," n.d., p. 8 (NBS Historical File); NBS War Research, p. 39. 

Other materials also subject to preemptive or preclusive buying, regardless of cost, 

by the U.S. Commercial Co. set up under the RFC in March 1942, included wolfram 

(the source of tungsten used to harden steel), rabbit furs, wool and blankets from Spain, 

Turkish sausage casings, and all of Portugal's sardines. See Jesse H. Jones, Fifty 

Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the RFC, 1932—1945 (New York: Macmillan, 

1951), pp. 387 if. 
RADIO AND RADIO-WEATHER PREDICTiNG 409 

output of Brazil. So important was it considered to sequester the crystal 

that almost all that was brought out of Brazil came by air freight, to avoid 

the possibility of interception by enemy shipping.119 

As Brazil expanded her mining of quartz to satisfy the insatiable demand for the strategic material, the quality fell To handle the volume 

coming in and salvage and test usable crystal from the raw material, the 

inspection group under Frederick J. Bates of the polarimetry section at the 

Bureau rose from the original 3 members assigned to the project to 63 trained 

inspectors and 13 laborers working in two shifts. By July 1942, with close 

to 100,000 pounds coming in each month (a year later, five times that 

amount), three shifts were necessary. The staff finally totaled 166, housed 

in three temporary structures along Connecticut Avenue, simply to grade and 

test the incoming quartz. 

Jones, pp. 448, 575—576. Worldwide exploration in search of the crystal during the 

war brought the Bureau 73 shipments from 16 foreign countries, but mainly from Mexico, 

Guatamala, and Colombia. Exploration at home resulted in over 300 shipments from 

25 States and Alaska. None of these sources produced significant amounts. NBS War 

Research, p. 50. 

'-'° size of the mined crystal ranged between less than a pound up to 290 pounds 

and the value between $1 and $30 per pound, depending upon quality. 

Quartz crystal inspection and testing laboratory, through which more than 6 million 

pounds of the crystals passed. These are 1-pound raw pieces, from which the small 

oscillator plates needed in radio and other electronic equipment will be cut. 
410 WORLD WAR I! RESEARCH (1941-45) 

In 1943 a quartz research laboratory was added to the complex, 

where technicians under Francis P. Phelps undertook X-ray measurement 

studies of the crystals, standardization of quartz plates, and fabrication of 

experimental plates from mother crystal.12' Before the war, optical perfection of the crystal had been used as the criterion of electrical performance. 

The quartz laboratory showed that this was not necessary, and as a result new specifications established for the agencies using the crystal made possible 

regrading of more than 2 million pounds previously rejected by the Bureau. 

At the peak of production, 111 firms in this country were drawing on the stockpile at the Bureau to manufacture almost 2 million oscillators each 

month for the radio equipment of our Armed Forces, for commercial use, 

and for shipment to our Allies. Shortly before the project closed at the end 

of April 1946, the Bureau reported it had classified and graded over 6 million 

pounds of crystalline quartz, or 60 times the original stockpile requirement.122 

RESEARCH IN CRITICAL MATERIALS 

Quartz crystal found a place on every list of critical and strategic ma- terials drawn up on the eve of war. As in 1917, the course of the war in 

Europe 'had made our entrance certain before 'this country began to take stock 

of its raw material resources and requirements. When it did, it found disquieting lacks not only in quartz crystal but in antimony, chromium, cocoanut 

char, ferro-grade manganese, magnesium, manila fiber, mercury, mica, quinine, silk, tin, and tungsten. Badly needed too were aluminum, asbestos, 

cork, graphite, hides, iodine, kapok, optical glass, toluol, vanadium, and wool. 

It was also evident that enormous quantities of steel and petroleum must be 

produced, and almost unlimited amounts of copper. But leading all the lists, 

and most frightening, was the rubber shortage, upon which the wheels of war 

rolled.'23 

As once 'before, the Bureau was to make important contributions to 

research in many of these materials, to the search for substitutes, and to 

better utilization of available supplies. At the outset, in the emergency, it 

had an active part in many phases of t'he establishment of the new synthetic 

121 NBS War Research, pp. 45—46. 122 NBS War Research, pp. 49—50; letter, EUC to Executive Director, Office of Metals Reserve, Jan. 18, 1946 (NBS Blue Folder Box 71). 

NOTE.—A memorandum of Apr. 1, 1942, in the building data files of the NBS plant division discloses that at that early stage of the program the value of the quartz stored at 

tile Bureau was $5 million. Assuming a medial value of $10 per pound, the total value of 

all tested and stockpiled quartz must have come close to $60 million. 

Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy, pp. 9—10, 38. 
RESEARCH IN CRITICAL MATERIALS 411 

rubber industry—generally acknowledged the outstanding national accom- plishment of World War IL 

Until the war, synthetic rubber in this country remained a laboratory 

curiosity.124 No one, not even Dupont with its experimental Neoprene, believed large-scale production feasible. New technical research and stark 

necessity were to make it so. Following a visit by Lawrence A. Wood and Norman P. Bekkedahl of 

the rubber section to the maj or German synthetic rubber research laboratory 

at Leverkusen in 1938, the Bureau prepared a circular based on their observations and on the published literature available.125 Widely called for after 

the defeat of France, the circular went through further reprintings as the 

rubber-producing areas of the British, Dutch, and French in the South Pacific fell before the Japanese advance. 

In February 1942 leaders in the petroleum and chemical industries 

were brought together. They agreed to pooi their patents and trade secrets 

and undertake operation of the synthetic rubber plants that the Government 

proposed to finance. The initial goal of the plants was set at 400,000 tons a year, a deliberately optimistic figure although it was far below the 900,000 

tons of natural rubber consumed in 1941, most of it to make the automobile 

tires on which the American public had come to depend for locomotion.126 

Until the war, the raw materials of experimental synthetic rubbers 

came largely from organic chemicals, manufactured gas, and byproducts of 

the coking industry. Militating against these rubbers was the production of 

their components. Neoprene, for. example, though it had excellent resistance 

to oil, required huge quantities of chlorine, and chlorine was in chronic short 

supply. What made the new industry possible were the synthetics derived 

from petroleum and, to a ]esser degree, the distilling industry's grain alcohols.127 These synthetics were butyl rubber, well adapted for gas masks, barrage balloons, and inner tubes, and Buna N and Buna S, tougher rubbers 

suitable for tire casings. After considerable experimenting and testing, ma- 

'24For early Bureau interest in the possibilities of synthetic rubber, see letter, GKB to J. M. Morris, MIT, Feb. 4, 1926 (NBS Box 173, ISR). 

C427, "Synthetic rubbers: a review of their composition, properties, and uses" 

(Wood, 1940). Although synthetic rubber cost three to four times as much as natural 

rubber, by 1940 Germany and Russia, seeking self-sufficiency, had gone over wholly to 

the synthetic. Experimental in this country but in most cases in production abroad 

(under other names) were Dupont's Neoprene, a chloroprene polymer; the German Buna 

rubbers, from butadiene derived from the cracking of petroleum; Thiokol, an organic 

polysuiphide made by the Thiokol Corp. in this country; Vistanex, Standard Oil's 

isobutane polymer, from petroleum; and Koroseal, Goodrich's vinyl chloride polymer. 128 Jones, Fifty Billion Dollars, pp. 399, 406. 127 Butadiene from alcohol cost cents per pound in 1945, from petroleum 10—14 cents. 

Hearings * * * 1949 (Jan 20, 1948), p. 546. 
412 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

jor production finally centered on Buna S, the butadiene.styrene composition 

known as GR—S (Government Rubber—Styrene) •328 Apart from its studies in 1942 of the polysuiphide Thiokol as an interim synthetic for retreading tires, the Bureau rubber section was initially 

kept busy testing new processes for making rubber that were submitted by 

public spirited citizens. Rubbers were brought in that had been distilled 

from the oil of vegetable refuse, from gelatins, glycerine, and tannic acid, 

and even concocted from rubber itself. None could be wholly ignored. There was always a chance that a new composition or process might be found. 

But none was, and Donald Nelson, director of the War Production Board, 

paid a mixed tribute when he said of the hopeful that each with his product 

was sent "to the Bureau of Standards, on whose hard-working scientists we inflicted all these 'inventors.' 129 Bureau participation in the fledgling industry expanded early in 1943 

when it was directed to assist the Rubber Research Co. in standardizing the 

quality of the synthetic rubbers coming into production. More than 50 

reports described the test and analytic procedures developed by the Bureau, 

including methods for determining the styrene content of the GR—S copoly- rner and the purity of its styrene, butacliene, and other hydrocarbon com- ponents, and procedures for determining density, specific heats, and thermodynamic values of GR—S and of the polymerization of styrene. 

The studies led to the preparation of a series of standard control 

polymers making uniform production possible. The controls, specifications, 

and rapid routine methods of analysis established for the first of the synthetic 

rubber plants were proved out as each of the other plants came into produc. 

lion. By late 1944, 19 Government-owned plants across the Nation were 

making synthetic rubber meeting identical specifications, resulting in a product more nearly uniform in quality than natural rubber.13° The new billiondollar industry turned out over 700,000 tons of rubber that year, and as the 

war ended was operating at a rate in excess of a million tons annually. By 

then 87 percent of the rubber consumed in the United States was synthetic and 

the industry was producing one-third again as much rubber as the country 

had actually used before the war.'3' 

Buna S was essentially a compound of butadiene, from grain alcohol or from petroleum 

products, and styrene, from ethyl benzene derived from petroleum and coal tar. 

Nelson, p. 300; NBS War Research, pp. 117—118. 130 Frank Freidel, America in the 20th Century (New York: Knopf, 1960), p. 399; 

Hearings * * * 1946 (Feb. 2, 1945), pp. 261, 270—273; NBS War Research, pp. 115— 116. 

Feeding the 19 rubber-making plants were 15 others producing butadiene, 5 making 

styrene, and 9 producing other necessary chemicals (Jones, p.415). 

"' Jones, pp. 401, 414. Only the 'Federal Government could afford the construction of 

whole industries such as aircraft manufacture, nonferrous metals (magnesium and 
RESEARCH IN CRITICAL lilA TERIALS 413 

Dr. Briggs was given a bad moment or two over an incident during 

the rubber crisis. Early in 1945, the very active Senate Special Committee 

Investigating the National Defense Program (the Truman Committee) called on him to explain how a study he had made in the bouncing characteristics 

of golf balls and baseballs could possibly contribute to the war effort. The 

Committee pointed to a paper he had just published, wonderfully entitled: 

"Methods for measuring the coefficient of restitution and the spin of a ball." 132 Dr. Briggs explained and the committee subsided. Prodded to con- serve rubber, even in miniscule amounts, the Services of Supply had asked 

the Bureau about a substitute material being used in the baseballs it was 

supplying recreation centers at training camps. Extending an investigation 

he had made of golf balls in an idle hour before the war, Dr. Briggs took on the SOS request himself. The work, he reported to the committee, had 

been done by a high school boy. He had merely made the analyses, with 

assistance from Dr. Dryden and Dr. Buckingham on the theoretical con- siderations. 

In baseballs with balata cork centers (made official in the major 

leagues in 1943), the coefficient of restitution or liveliness of the ball, Dr. 

Briggs found, was measurably reduced over that of the prewar rubbercushioned cork center (official in 1938) - The coefficient was still lower in 

baseballs with reclaimed rubber centers. "A hard-hit fly ball with a 1943 

center," Dr. Briggs reported, "might be expected to fall about 30 feet shorter 

than the prewar ball hit under the same conditions." 133 It was an important 

finding, contributing to the peace of mind not only of the professionals but 

of the sluggers in the training camps. 

The rubber shortage was not solved without considerable anguish 

to the American motorist, who was first persuaded to turn in any extra 

tires of natural rubber he might have above the five for his car, and was 

then severely rationed on gas, to save the rubber he had left. It was a long 

wait before he got his first synthetic tire. 

As the first of the synthetics came out of the molds, the Department 

of Commerce requested the Bureau to road test them, along with tires made 

wholly of reclaimed rubber, for possible military service as well as civilian use. The early synthetic tires of Buna S proved satisfactory in all respects 

but resiliance and adhesiveness, and they ran hot, especially with heavy 

aluminum), machine tools, synthetic rubber, and shipping required by the war. The 

RFC financed some 920 new defense plants for the War and Navy Departments at a cost of $6 billion (Jones, pp. 316, 328, 342, 345). 

"RP1624 (1945). " Letter, James M. Meade, chairman, Special Committee, to LBJ, Mar. 30, 1945 (NBS 

Box 504, IN). 
414 WORLD WAR 11 RESEARCH (1941-45) 

loads or increasing speeds.134 Nevetheless, the public had to get along with 

them since no natural rubber could be spared. Although later synthetic tires were far more satisfactory, tire production was restricted, for much of the new rubber was going into other products. Among materials made of the new rubber and tested by the Bureau for military or domestic use were rubber 

parts for landmines, cords for barrage balloons, pontoon fabrics, crash pads 

for tanks, gaskets, soles and heels on shoes, jar rings for home canning, 

flexible hose, and wire and cable insulation.135 

While the Bureau, to be sure, could do nothing about the sharp re- strictions placed on the use of motor vehicles or the national speed limit, 

set at 35 miles per hour, it did hurry out a letter circular on how to prepare 

one's car for dead storage.136 And it saved many civilian motorists, as well as the military, a devastating headache that threatened when the standard 

antifreeze compounds, ethylene glycol and ethyl alcohol, were declared critical. The market was soon flooded with substitute compounds with salt or 

petroleum bases. The War Production Board at once stopped their manufacture or sale when the Bureau demonstrated the dangerously corrosive 

action of salt compounds, even with inhibitors, and the rapid disintegration 

of radiator hose caused by even the most highly purified petroleum com- pound.137 

Second only to the shortage of rubber was that of steel and steel plate, 

for the building of ships, war plants, and expansion of steel plants themselves. To feed the blast furnaces, branch rail lines and spurs and abandoned 

trolley lines all over the country were torn up and buildings and bridges 

that had fallen into disuse were demolished for their metal. 

Equally critical were some of. the alloying agents used in steel production, particularly in the making of armorplate and projectiles. The ex- tensive review that was made of specifications of Government buying agencies was not only important but imperative, and the work of the metallurgical 

experts at the Bureau and in industry to produce "lean-alloy" steels, using 

less tungsten, less molybdenum, less vanadium, while retaining the essential 

RP1574, "Measuring the rate of wear of tire treads" (Roth and Holt, 1944). 

Hearings * * 1944 (Feb. 26, 1943), p. 82; M185, "Rubber research and technology at the NBS" (Wood, 1947) ; RP1554, "Buna-S-Gilsonite for insulation of com- munication cables" (Selker, Scott, McPherson, 1943) ; NBS War Research, p. 117. 

LC694 (March 1942). 137 NBS War Research, p. 180; Hearings * * * 1944, P. 81. A number of gasoline 

additives also came on the market with the usual claims of greatly increased mileage 

and improved power. Not one except an additive containing iron pentacarbonyl was found useful in the slightest, and while the pentacarbonyl acted like tetraethyl lead 

to suppress knock, it greatly increased engine wear (Hearings * * * 1944, p. 80). 
RESEARCH IN CRiTICAL MATERIALS 415 

properties of the steel, became one of the most important jobs done in 1942 

and 194.3.138 A significant contribution was the finding made by a Bureau 

group headed by Thomas G. Digges under NDRC contract, that boron, available in unlimited quantity, might be substituted for a part of the chrome 

ores commonly used in making hard steel.139 

The anticipated shortage of chromium-nickel stainless steel launched 

an investigation under W. H. Mutchier for a substitute for the firewalls 

between the engine and cockpit of planes. Low-carbon sheet steel with 

either a thin stainless-steel coating or aluminum coating was found most 

satisfactory, withstanding high-temperature flames for periods up to 15 minutes without failing. Another acceptable substitute was steel coated with a special heat-resistant vitreous enamel, in place of stainless steel, in the exhaust 

manifolds on airplane engines and landing 

Bureau specialists in metallic erosion and corrosion, in protective 

coatings, and electroplating were on constant call by industry and the services. 

Over 5,000 industrial or service items were submitted for solution of coating 

problems or determination of the effectiveness of metallic or organic (i.e., 

emulsion or wax) coatings applied against high humidity or salt water. They 

included food cans, almost all munitions, helmet parts, lifeboat, aircraft navigation, and field equipment, electrical instruments, proximity fuzes, and various firing mechanisms. Even so small an item as the match came to the 

Bureau for a coating. With the protection devised for their use in the tropics, 

the matches withstood 5 days' exposure to 95 percent relative humidity or, 

equally well, immersion in water for 5 hours.14' 

Under William Blum, the electrodeposition section saved tons of 

precious copper and nickel in the manufacture of printing plates for the Government Printing Office when it showed that these metals could be replaced 

by iron deposited from suitable plating baths. The section also made improvements in the properties of chromium plating of gun barrels that in the 

case of machine guns increased the life of the barrel by 30 times over steel 

barrels. Substitution of steel for brass in cartridge cases, it was found, re- quired coating the cases with electroplated zinc. A baked phenolic varnish 

also worked well. Other items made serviceable by electroplating with 

138 Nelson, p. 351. 130 Report, NBS to Secretary of Commerce, Mar. 10, 1943 (NBS Box 482, PRM); 

RP1705, "Spectrographic determination of boron in steel" (Corliss and Scribner, 1946); 

Suits, Harrison and Jordan, eds., Applied Physics, Electronics, Optics, Metallurgy, pp. 

359—360; NBS War Research, pp. 142—144. 140 MS Annual Report 1943; NBS War Research, p. 149. 

Division V report, January 1943 (NBS Box 488, PRM). 
416 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

substitute metals included tableware, signal mirrors, and lifesaving equipment.142 

If in fall of 1941 the Nation's production capacity in steel was tight, 

the real pinch was in copper and aluminum. Nation-wide scrap drives 

brought in millions of domestic pots and pans and cleared cellar collections 

of nickel, tin, aluminum, copper, brass and other metals, but it was still not 

enough. To get more copper—the metal of communications systems—the 

Army in the summer of 1942 furloughed 4,000 soldiers who had previously 

worked in copper 

One substitute for copper, when required as an electrical conductor, 

is silver, which apart from its high cost is as good and in some cases an even better conductor. As an early expedient, half a billion dollars' worth of 

silver coins and bullion were borrowed from the Treasury and converted into 

bus bars, transformer windings and the like.144 Another copper substitution 

resulted in the "white" pennies that became common from 1943 on. To 

satisfy the military demand for copper in its cartridge brass, the U.S. Mint was urged to find something else for the 5,000 tons of copper that went into 

the 1-cent piece annually. Bureau tests of pennies stamped from zinc-plated 

steel sheets indicated that they would give at least a few years' service, and 

over a billion went into circulation. When the bronze coin came back again 

in 1944, the copper content had been reduced from 95 to 90 percent. Wear 

and tear, it had been determined, would not be affected, and the public was not likely to notice the difference. 

The Bureau also presided over some tampering with the 5-cent piece, 

changing its composition from 75-percent copper and 25-percent nickel to 

50-percent copper and 50-percent silver. It made for a more valuable coin, 

but at the time copper was precious and silver was noncritical. The addition 

of a trace of manganese and aluminum made it tarnish-resistant and as ac- ceptable as the original in coin-operated devices.145 

Unlike copper, in the case of aluminum there were few or no mines 

to be worked. The industry was small to begin with, and limited domestic 

142 John E. Burchard, ed., Rockets, Guns and Targets (OSRD; Science in World War 

11, Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), pp. 357, 396—397; Nelson, pp. 251—252; NBS War Research, pp. 152—156, 170, 179. 

Under preliminary development at the Bureau at the end of the war was a unique method 

of plating by chemical reduction, called "electroless plating," that was to eliminate electrical equipment, deposit coatings of more uniform thickness, and make possible thicker 

coatings. See Abner Brenner, "Electroless plating comes of age," J. Metal Finishing, 

52,3 (1954). 

143 Nelson, pp. 173—174; Jones, pp. 442—443. 

Nelson, p. 355. 

Jones, pp. 336—337; NBS War Research, p. 178; interview with Dr. William Blum, 

Oct. 15, 1963. 
RESEARCH IN CRITICAL MATERIALS 417 

supplies of low-silica bauxite, the source of aluminum, meant that 70 percent of all bauxite had to be imported. Urgent investigations were begun 

under contract at a number of laboratories to develop 'processes for using 

some of the less pure bauxite and clays in this country. 

At a high-level conference attended by Dr. Briggs and James I. Hoffman in the spring of 1942, it was decided to construct and operate a pilot 

plant at the Bureau for the extraction of alumina (aluminum oxide) from 

clays. By autunm both an alkaline and an acid recovery process had been 

successfully investigated. Pilot plant production started in the alkaline 

plant under a Bureau 'team directed 'by Lansing S. Wells and in the acid plant 

under Hoffman and Robert T. Leslie. 

As the submarine menace waned, increasing supplies 'of high-grade 

bauxite ore from the Guianas reduced the need for the new processes. Both, 

nevertheless, were fully verified in the pilot plant, the alkaline process re- covering about 95 percent of the alumina in clay, the acid process resulting 

in alumina with an average purity of 99.6 percent—almost the equal of that 

from high-grade bauxite. From May 1943 on, the acid-process plant was in almost continuous operation, finally producing alumina at the rate of 50 

pounds a day. In a continuing emergency, large-scale production would 

have been entirely practicable, •but otherwise clay could not compete with 

the imported ore.'46 

Along with quartz crystal, optical glass appeared on all lists of critical 

materials. Between the two wars, the Bureau had been the only research or- ganization in the country engaged in both research and production of optical 

glass, with funds supplied chiefly by the Navy Bureau of Ordnance.147 Prior 

to 1940, fewer than 20 people working in the glass plant turned out about 

9,000 pounds annually, the entire output going to the Naval Gun Factory for 

its optical requirements. 

With war orders from 'the Navy, Army Ordnance, Army Engineers, 

the Treasury's Procurement Division, and OSRD, the optical glass plant ex- panded. An addition to the kiln building and construction of a second plant 

with Navy funds more than doubled facilities. The refractories section increased its manufacture of pots from 70 to 2,300 annually, and by working 

in three shifts production went up from 15,000 pounds of optical glass in 

1940 to more than 240,000 pounds in 1942 and in 1943. Even so, the 

Bureau could not supply more than half the requirements, and Bausch & Lomb, Haywood Optical, and Libbey-Owens Ford furnished the remainder. 

RP1756, "Development of a hydrochloric process for the production of alumina from 

clay" (Hoffman, Leslie, et al., 1946); NBS War Research, pp. 166—168. 141 Bausch & Lomb began making optical glass in World War I. It maintained its facilities in the interim years, but admittedly "had no appetite for military business in peacetime." See Fortune, 22, 76, 98 (1940); memo, GKB for Bureau of Foreign and Domestic 

'Commerce, Feb. 4, 1926 (NBS Box 152, AG). 
418 WORLD WAR I! RESEARCH (1941-45) 

An assortment of optical glass specimens made at the Bureau. Center bottom is a co- incidence prism used in range finders. One o/the most intricate and costly of optical 

devices, it was made at the Bureau by cementing together a number of small prisms. 

Of the services, the Navy was the great consumer. A single big rangefinder 

for one of its guns contained as many as 160 optical elements. 

Altogether, the Bureau furnished close to a million pounds of high. 

quality optical glass to the Armed Forces. Where the Bureau previously 

made no more than six types of optical glass, military and research requirements called for 28 types before the war ended. At peak production 400 

workers under Alfred N. Finn and Clarence H. Hahner were employed around 

the clock, not only to produce the glass but to mold it into prisms and lenses 

for readier use in gunsights, heightfinders, periscopes, rangefinders, and 

binoculars.148 

In the optics division (optical glass was a product of the ceramics 

division), investigations were carried out on improved rangefinders, in methods and instruments for testing airplane cameras and lenses, and in optical 

measurements and materials for camouflaging ships and shore installations. 

Assistance was also furnished the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics in the design 

of special aircraft searchlights for use in night attacks on submarines, and in 

photoelectric equipment for night photography. 

A simple yet new and vitally important device that came out of the 

optics division was the heliographic signaling mirror or "solar searchlight," 

"8Hearings * * * 1943 (Jan 12, 1942), P. 208; Hearings * * * 1945 (Jan 11, 1944), 

p. 189; C469, "Optical glass at the NBS" (Glaze and Hahner, 1948); NBS War Research, pp. 99—101. 
RESEARCH ZN CRiTiCAL MATERIALS 419 as some called it. Early in the war the Joint Chiefs of Staff called for a practical means of aiming reflected flashes at potential rescue craft, both 

planes and ships, as part of the equipment in liferafts and boats. A member 

of the Bureau staff at the time, L. L. Young, hit on the rearsight method of 

aiming mirror flashes, employing reflections from both its front and rear 

surfaces immediately around a sighting hole in the center of the mirror. 

Incorporating suggestions made by General Electric, which undertook their 

manufacture, more than a million of the mirrors, of tempered glass with a surface of vaporized aluminum film, were produced for the air and transport services.149 

The optics division took part in or carried out alone more than 

30 separate investigations, most of them under NDRC auspices. Dr. Briggs's 

comprehensive report of war research indicates that quite apart from the 

special groups working for the Manhattan District, on the proximity fuze, 

on guided missiles, and in radio propagation, each of the other divisions 

was engaged in as many or more projects as optics. Enumeration of the 

projects, let alone a description, is beyond the scope of this history. Only a few representative studies can be mentioned. 

A laboratory tool of limited interest until the war was a magnetic 

balance for inspecting certain kinds of steel. Devised by a member of the 

electrical division in 1.932, it was modified by a Bureau chemist 5 years 

later for gaging the thickness of metal, paint, or enamel coatings on nickel, 

steel and other metals, making possible nondestructive testing of the coatings. 

Only a few had been made by the American Instrument Co., under the name 

Magnegage, until the wartime rash of substitute materials and the necessity 

of plating made the gages important in many industries, in order to expedite 

acceptance of military supplies and conserve scarce metals by avoiding the 

use of unnecessarily thick coatings. Arsenals found the Magnegage invaluable for measuring the thickness of the chromium in the lands and grooves 

of large caliber guns."° 

Expansion of Bureau investigations in aviation fuels, lubricants, and 

motor fuels resulted in greater knowledge of their composition and better 

control in their production. Many of the war plants making aviation fuels 

had no previous experience in quality control procedures, and for them 

the Bureau provided the necessary calibration of primary and reference 

standard fuels, based on specifications prepared for the American Society 

for Testing Materials (ASTM), and of "referee" fuels to ensure even quality 

in production. 

John A. Miller, Men and Volts at War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), p. 104; 

NBS War Research, pp. 110—Ill. 150 RP532, "A magnetic balance * * 'p" (Sanford, 1932); RP994, "Magnetic methods 

for measuring * * * coatings on nonmagnetic base metals" (Brenner, 1937) ; RP1O81, 4' * coatings on iron and steel" (Brenner, 1938); NBS War Research, p. 60. 
420 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

Of fundamental importance was the wartime work of the petroleum 

laboratory, originally set up in the summer of 1937 with the support of 

the Army Air Corps, Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, and NACA to synthesize, 

if possible, an improved aviation fuel. With the war the investigation 

turned to study of the paraffin hydrocarbons, found as impurities in primary 

standard reference aviation fuels, and investigation of those of superior 

value as components of military aviation gasoline. Working with data and 

samples provided by the American Petroleum Institute, the Bureau laboratory 

isolated and synthesized some 78 hydrocarbons and prepared 66 of them in a higher purity than ever before.'51 In the case of 21 of the hydrocarbons, no evidence could be found in the literature to indicate they had ever been 

made before. An added result of the project was the discovery of a possible 

method for augmenting the supply of aviation gasoline, using re.formed 

cracked naphtha. Of considerable interest to NACA and the American Petroleum Institute, it became the subject of continued postwar research)-"2 

When the early losses of oil tankers by enemy action imperiled the 

supply of vehicle fuels to our Allies, the Bureau was asked to find out whether 

substitute fuels from vegetable matter, which the Allies might produce locally, were possible. Attempts to run cars and trucks on gas substitutes was an old 

story, but the Bureau looked into it again. The studies of engine performance with alcohol, charcoal, shale oil, naphtha, vegetable products and other 

known substitutes all pointed to - alcohol as most promising. Engine tests 

using gas produced from charcoal showed that approximately 11 pounds of 

charcoal produced energy equal to a gallon of gas. But the fact that it took 

2 minutes to start up the engine and that the little gas generator required 

i"' C461, "Selected values of properties of hydrocarbons" (1947); NBS Annual Report 

1948, p. 217. 

Bureau studies in the chemistry of petroleum oils went back to World War I (see ch. 

V, pp. 276—277), and cooperative research with the API in the separation of petroleum 

into its constituent hydrocarbons began in 1928. 

The practical problem in the twenties was engine knocking, as compression ratios increased. An octane number scale for expressing the knock rating of motor gasolines was adopted in 1930, with n-heptane for the low and isooctane for the high, and in 

1934 the Bureau was asked to set up specifications for these primary standard reference 

motor fuels. Since that time the Bureau has maintained these national reference standards, on which all octane number measurements throughout the country are based. In 

1.946 the octane scale was also applied to aviation gasolines. 

In the course of its preparation of pure samples, the Bureau found among the aliphatic 

hydrocarbons several with higher octane numbers than any previously known—the 

components of later aviation fuels. See RP1027, "Paraffin hydrocarbons isolated from 

crude synthetic isooctane * * (Brooks, Cleaton, and Carter, 1937) ; RPJ16O, "Properties of purified normal heptane and isooctane * (Brooks, 1938). 

NBS Report 274.6, "Hydrocarbon synthesis at the NBS, 1937—1953" (Howard, ed., 

1953); NBS War Research, pp. 75—78; interview with Thomas W. Mears, Apr. 14, 

1964. 
RESEARCH IN CRITICAL MATERIALS 421 

constant servicing were deemed serious drawbacks. Only alcohol seemed a feasible substitute, and it had to be high proof. Made at the request of 

the Army, studies of low-proof alcohols showed that a vehicle that got 200 

miles on a tankful of standard gasoline and 130 miles with absolute alcohol 

went only 25 miles on a tank of 70-proof alcohol. The waning of the submarine menace ended the unnerving prospect and the project153 

A high-precision wear gage, made by Samuel A. McKee of the Bureau 

in the course of the substitute fuel study, led to an interesting discovery. The 

gage itself was capable of detecting as little as one hundred-thousandth of an 

inch of wear in a motor. While making tests with it, the gage demonstrated, 

surprisingly enough, that most of the substitute fuels, if not as efficient as 

gasoline, produced significantly less wear and tear on the engine. It was not the sort of measurement many motorists then or later would be concerned about, but the gage fortunately had other uses.154 

Another kind of detector, devised at the request of the Air Force and 

NACA, was the Bureau's carbon monoxide indicator. In place of earlier 

cumbersome apparatus, Martin Shepherd of the chemistry division produced a sensitive, calorimetric indicating gel, put up in a small tube, that quickly 

signaled the presence of small amounts of carbon monoxide fumes. To 

produce the tu'bes, for attachment in the cockpits of fighter planes and crew 

quarters of bombers, a group of 30 took over a section of the gas chemistry 

laboratory and set up an assembly line. Over half a million units were 

turned 'out and distributed before the highly classified project ended.155 

In an unceasing search, substitutes for metals were found in wood, 

concrete, and plastics, and involved a 'host of products from shower stalls and 

sinks to fuel oil and gasoline storage tanks. No attempt was made as in 

World War I to build concrete cargo ships, barges, and tankers, 'but at the 

time of the steel shortage the 'Maritime Commission sought new Bureau studies 

of reenforced steel, with concrete ships in mind. Instead, the research led to 

the construction of a number of concrete oil storage tanks 'before steel plate 

became available again. Lined with liquid-proofing materials recommended 

by the Bureau, they were used to store a variety of motor fuels, including 

high-octane gasoline. Contrary to expectations, losses of gasoline by vaporization through the concrete proved of minor significance.156 

A challenge to the Bureau was the request made by Military Intelligence to find means of sabotaging enemy construction 'of concrete fortifications and similar military structures. Was there, Intelligence asked, a readily 

153 NBS War Research, pp. 79—80. 

Shepherd, "Rapid determination of small amounts of carbon monoxide," Anal. Chem. 

19, 77 (1947); RP1777 (Shepherd, 1947); NBS Annual Report 1947, p. 206; interview 

with Mrs. M. Kilday, May 12, 1964. 

War Research, p.95 
422 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

available material which, when added in small amounts to concrete while it was being mixed, would inhibit its gain in strength? It could not be too 

effective or act too fast, lest the sabotage become evident to the builders. 

The known inhibitors of concrete strength such as inorganic salts, 

alkalis, and acids, and even organic materials like dextrose and syrups, failed 

to meet the specifications. After considerable experimenting the answer was found in common sugar. It was highly effective in a matter of weeks 

when introduced in fractions of as little as 1 percent.'57 As it happend, 

most of the coastal fortifications of the enemy were completed when the answer 

came, and if the military had other uses for the knowledge, the Bureau 

wasn't informed of them. 

The growing importance of plastics that led to formation of the 

Bureau's organic plastics section in 1935 made that section with its experience 

the ultimate authority when war came. The War Production Board strongly 

promoted new plastic products and industry turned them out for the armed 

services, the Maritime Commission, and the Office of Civilian Defense. 

Among new plastic products sent for testing were helmet liners, resinous 

coatings used for protection of steel hardware, bayonet handles, Bureau. 

designed binocular housings, bugles, canteens, clock housings, compass dials, 

raincoats, food packaging, goggles, insect screening, shaving brushes, and 

aircraft housings. 

The original helmet liner, made of paper puip covered with fabric, was far from durable, lost its shape after wetting, and had low resistance to 

impact. A new liner, on which the Bureau worked with the Office of the 

Quartermaster General, was constructed of cotton-fabric laminated phenolic 

plastic, its production one of the first large-scale applications of the low. 

pressure molding technique. The Bureau also made exhaustive tests of 

Doron, a glass-fabric laminated plastic, as possible body armor. Some of 

this personal armor was introduced in the Pacific theater late in the war, 

after it had been shown superior fo an equal weight of steel or metal armor 

in its ability to stop flak and the small arms fire of most Japanese infantry 

weapons.158 

Only the extreme range of qualities sought in textiles and fabrics 

during the war attempted to compete with the proved versatility of plastics. 

The armed services, so it seemed to one harassed investigator, wanted textiles 

that were "infinitely strong and infinitely light, that gave perfect protection 

against heat and cold and finally were digestible in case of emergency." 159 They wanted fabrics that would keep out a driving rain and yet let perspira. 

NBS War Research, p. 96. 

NBS War Research, pp. 119—120. Ibid., pp. 122—123. 
RESEARCH IN CRITICAL MATERIALS 423 

tion through, and they wanted them fireproof, windproof, lightproof, mildewproof, gasproof, and even bulletproof. 

Not only the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, but the War Production 

Board, National Research Council, Board of Economic Warfare, and Office 

of Price Administration, sought the aid of the Bureau's textile section 

under William Appel in creating these fabrics.'60 Since few military fabrics 

had to possess more than two or three special characteristics simultaneously, 

the Bureau was able to help, providing much of the technical data that aided 

in their production. Too difficult even for modern science were the bullet. 

proof and edible fabrics allegedly sought, and a solution to their construction was still not in sight as the war ended. 

Among the many problems posed Scribner's paper section was a new paper for war maps, requested by the Corps of Engineers. In some of the 

swift-moving operations in the later stages of the war in Europe, deterioration of much.used maps became as troublesome as running off the edges of 

the maps at hand. Not long before that, however, the problem had been 

licked by production of a unique fiber.binding resin paper of great strength, 

capable of withstanding treatment that quickly disintegrated ordinary map 

papers. Maps printed on it remained serviceable even when soaked with 

water or oil and after being trampled in mud and subsequently washed with 

soap and water or gasoline. All agencies making war maps in this country 

adopted the new paper as standard and quantities of it were sent to Great 

Britain under Lend-Lease.16' 

Few were the crises of supply faced in World War I that did not 

have to be met again in 1940. A conspicuous exception was that of high 

precision gage blocks, making possible mass production of interchangeable 

parts. At least 10 manufacturers undertook to turn them out in quantity 

for industry, and as a result of queries, the Bureau prepared a letter circular for manufacturers and gage users providing criteria for the acceptance 

or rejection of gage blocks.'02 As early production difficulties were solved, 

the Bureau thereafter had only the responsibility for calibrating the blocks. 

Altogether, more than 76,000 gage blocks and accessories, both English and 

metric, passed through the Bureau's hands for the gage manufacturers, the 

armed services, war plants, and the Procurement Division. Of more than 

24,000 certified in 1944 alone, 50 percent went to the U.S.S.R. by way of 

Treasury's Lend-Lease.'63 

OSRD interest in this Bureau research, particularly in tropic-proofing and light-proofing of textiles, is briefly reported in W. A. Noyes, Jr., ed., Chemistry (OSRD: Science 

in World War II, 1948), pp. 470—471. 

NBS War Research, pp. 126—127; RP1751, "Experimental manufacture of paper 

for war maps" (Weber and Shaw, 1946). 

'62LC725 (1943). 

103 MS Annual Report 1944, n.p. 
424 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

Tens of thousands of other types of gages and measuring instruments were calibrated in the Bureau's expanded gage section. A handbook on screw thread standards, originally issued in 1939, was revised in 1942 and again 

in 1944, to keep up with the improvements in thread standards that evolved 

during the war.164 In other sections of the metrology division the certification 

of standard weights, volumetric glassware, thermometers and other instrunients soared as laboratories were set up or expanded in industry and as war plants came into production. Almost 100,000 standard samples of steels, 

irons, alloys, ores, ceramics, chemicals and hydrocarbons, oils, paint pigments, and other substances were distributed during the period, representing a fourfold increase over the prewar rate. 

Little publicized, yet significant in the conservation of critical materials, was the wartime effort of the simplification and commercial standards 

groups at the Bureau. At the beginning of the defense program in 1940 a number of industry advisory committees were set up as liaison between 

industry and Government on simplification. Simplified practice recommendations made by these committees were incorporated in regulations issued by 

the Office of Price Administration and later in the orders of the War Production Board, resulting in important savings in labor, machines, and both 

critical and noncritical materials.'65 

WPB orders limiting the sizes and weights of tubular radiators, for 

example, were estimated by that agency to have saved 23,000 tons of cast 

iron. Builders' hardware was reduced from approximately 27,000 to 3,500 

items. Sixty-five percent of all types and sizes of brass and bronze pipe 

fittings were eliminated and the variety of brass and bronze valves was re- duced from 4,079 to 2,504 types, saving thousands of tons of carbon steel, 

copper, and alloy steel. 

Forged axes, hammers, and hatchets were reduced from 636 to 303 

types, conserving vital alloy steels, and all use of these steels as well as high-polished finishes were eliminated from rakes, hoes, and forks, while 

their variety and sizes dropped from 915 to 129 types. Wrenches and pliers 

were reduced to one style and one grade per manufacturer. 

In order to concentrate manufacture on fewer essential types, dental 

excavating burs were mercifully reduced from 75 to 24 sizes, though all of 

them, from the point of view of the patient, may still have seemed too large. 

Other products similarly affected included concrete-reenforcement steel, 

H25, "Screw-thread standards * * 'u" (1939, superseded by H28, 1942, and revised 

in 1944); NBS War Research, pp. 163—164. MS Annual Report 1944 reported that 

53,000 copies of H28 were sold. 

ie For industry's reaction to "defrilling" (it approved, but warned its members against 

voluntary standardization without clearing with a defense agency), see Business Week, 

Nov. 22, 1941, p. 17, and May 1, 1943, p. 30. 
RESEARCH IN CRITICAL MATERIALS 425 

forged hand tools, wood saws, plumbing and heating tanks, refrigerator• 

valves and fittings, shovels and spades, and welded chain.166 

Among new commercial standards dictated by the war, porcelainenameled steel utensils replaced the aluminum, stainless steel, and copper 

pots and pans that were donated to the scrap drives. Extensive use was made for the first time of plywood and fiberboard in the construction of 

barracks, concrete forms, boats, pontoons and other normally all-wood prod. 

ucts. Mineral wool and fiberboard also proved satisfactory and in some cases superior replacements for cork as insulation materials.167 What with 

victory gardens, meatless Mondays, and ration books, the war was only 

months old when it became evident that life on the homefront was to be a matter of substitutes, do-it-yourself, or do without. 

Of the hundreds of consumer products merely simplified out of ex- istence by the war, most conspicuous was the automobile. A War Production 

Board order of January 20, 1942, stopped all production of cars and light 

trucks. The last passenger car rolled off the assembly line 3 weeks later. 

Domestic refrigerators came under severe curtailment next, and in a sweep. 

ing order in May, the manufacture of more than 400 other civilian products 

using iron and steel ceased.'68 The great conversion to war production had 

begun. 

An index to the vast potential of production in this country on the eve of war, though it was concealed by the doldrums in which industry con- tinued to languish and by the great pool of the unemployed, appeared in 

the incredible rapidity with which the Nation became fully armed and sup. 

plied for global warfare. By September 1943, hundreds of huge new rubber, 

steel, petroleum, aluminum, and magnesium plants had arisen and began 

reaching full-scale operations where fields or forests had ruled before. Tanks, 

guns, shells, tires, aircraft, and great catalogs of miscellaneous supplies and 

parts were pouring along assembly lines to waiting freight trains headed for 

the ports of embarkation. Supplies and equipment that did not cross with 

troopships filled convoys for the arming of the British, French, and Russians, or for the stockpiles that were being crammed into the English 

countryside. 

November 194.3 marked the high point in war production. Thereafter 

it began to slope downward. The successive targets for production of raw 

materials and finished products set during the preceding 3 years had been 

Nelson, p. 240; NBS War Research, pp. 172—173. In some instances sales to industry 

of the simplified practice recommendations for these products ranged as high as 25— 30,000 copies. Many had to be reprinted later to meet the continuing postwar demand. 

See NBS Annual Report 1946, p. 207. 

'°' NBS War Research, pp. 173—174. 

Nelson, pp. 224, 283. 
426 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45) 

met.169 With the consolidation of the Normandy peninsula, the word "reconversion" was heard for the first time. The supply lines were full and 

could be maintained with some slacking in production, even though the 

strategic planning staff foresaw the war against Japan lasting into 1947. 

When V—i Day came on August 14, 1945, 3 months and 6 days after 

victory in Europe, American industry had produced 86,000 tanks, 296,000 

planes, 4,800 merchant ships, and 71,000 ships for the Navy. In August and 

September of 1945 the Army sent out 30,000 telegrams canceling defense 

contracts and reconversion began.17° Two months later. in November 1945, 

the Bureau began its own reconversion—in organization, staff, and program—to research in the postwar world. 

109 Nelson, p. 395. Besides new magnesium and synthetic rubber industries, between 

1939 and 1945 aluminum production was tripled, machine tool capacity increased seven- fold, electrical output rose one and a half times its prewar rate, and more iron and steel were produced than in the entire prewar world. The total plant production in the 

Nation almost doubled. Freidel, America in the 20th Century, p. 400. 

'T0Kenney, The Crucial Years, 1940—1945, p. 100. 

The standard avoirdupois pound of 

Queen Elizabeth I, which is believed to 

have originally weighed about 7,002 

troy grains. It was used as a British 

standard from 1588 to 1825. 
THE NEW 

WORLD OF 

SCIENCE (1946—51) 

CHAPTER VIII 

"THE PECULIAR PEACE" 

The war ended with a monstrous 'bang. In "the peculiar peace" that followed, the word "fallout" equally described a metaphorical truth and a new phenomenon loosed on the world. In a decade compounded of inflation, 

strikes, shortages, Russian intransigence and aggression, and the new presence of the atomic bomb, the Nation was to be ruled by uneasy fears.1 

By the end of 1946, as price controls went off, living costs were an 

estimated 39 percent above those of December 1941, and strike after strike 

hobbled production and pushed prices still higher. Trolley and subway 

fares went up 2 cents and then a nickel. The 10-cent Sunday paper became 

15 cents, 'then 20. A public with massive war savings fretted over shortages 

of food, furniture, nylons, electric irons, and clothing. Even razor blades 

and alarm clocks were hard to find, a new car meant signing up on a multiple of long waiting lists, and housing was either not to 'be had or the new ones promptly started falling apart. In the summer of 1946 came the 

meat "famine" as producers refused to send their cattle to market. The 

black market, a way of life in Europe, came to America. 

"Had enough?" the Republicans asked the country, and in 1946 it 

elected the first Republican Congress since the days of Herbert Hoover. 

But the worst of the adjustment was already past. Raw materials were 

again becoming plentiful, the reconversion of industry neared completion, 

and production 'began approaching prewar levels. 

New sources of tension arose in the United Nations, born in the 

last year of the war, where Russia, using the veto to shield her expansion 

in Europe, goaded the assembly, staged stormy walkouts, and sabotaged 

issue after issue raised, including the most critical of all, international con- trol of atomic energy. Communism's growing threat in Eastern as well as Western Europe slowly impelled America to assume responsibility for re- storing their war-wrecked economies. 

1 The material of the introductory pages of this section is largely drawn from Eric F. 

Goldman, The Crucial Decade: America, 1945—1955 (New York: Knopf, 1956). 

427 
428 THE NEW WORLD OF SCiENCE (1946-51) 

The Truman Doctrine, announced on March 12, 1947, promised support to free nations resisting pressures from Communism, and a month 

later the phrase "cold war" was born. The aftermath of World War II was not to be depression but cold war. Out on Connecticut Avenue, Bureau 

reports echoed the national tension as it prefaced its plans for research with 

such phrases as "if war comes again," "in the event of any future emergency," 

"in time of emergency," and described some of its continuing programs as "the difference between obliteration and survival." 2 A reluctant Nation delayed action on the Truman Doctrine until 

the fall of Czechoslovakia under Communist domination in February 1948, 

Russia's menace of Finland, the impasse marked by the Berlin airlift, and 

the threat of Communist Party takeovers in France and Italy. Russian 

aggression, aided by hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos around the 

globe, could be contained only by long-range economic aid. Under mounting pressure, Congress adopted the Marshall Plan on April 2, 1948, to bolster 

the economies of Turkey and all the European countries outside the Iron 

Curtain. It called for an initial expenditure of $17 billion over approximately 

4 years. 

As the economies of the Western European nations swung upward 

under the Marshall Plan, containment became policy. The cold war was joined upon the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 

in March 1949, as 10 nations of northwestern Europe, Canada, and the 

United States agreed to joint action should any one of them be .attacked 

by Russia. In August of that same year the Marshall Plan received a serious setback when, despite $2 billion in aid, Chiang Kai-shek's nation 

fell to the Chinese Communist armies. 

The cold war took still another turn for the worse. Some American 

scientists had predicted that Russia would not have an atomic bomb before 

1952 or 1953. Others hazarded dates as late as 1956 or even 1960. But 

Stalin had expressed no surprise when at Potsdam he was first told of the 

event that had occurred at Alamogordo; Russian scientists may well have 

begun their study of the bomb as early as 1941, and certainly were at work 

by 1943, assisted by the knowledge that England and the United States were seriously engaged and, later, by acquisition of engineering designs of the 

structures raised in Britain and at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos. 

On September 23, 1949, 6 weeks after the actual event, the President an- nounced the explosion of an atomic device in the U.S.S.R. 

The cold war thus became a question of coexistence—a nebulous, 

uneasy way of life, shaped by the spectre of annihilation and made even more frightening by Truman's decision on January 31, 1950, to resume 

development of the hydrogen or fusion bomb. The Russians had dupliNBS Annual Report 1947, pp. xiv, xv; Annual Report 1949, P. 49. 
THE PECULIAR PEACE 429 

cated the fission bomb in 4 years; they were almost certainly at work on a fusion bomb, and might not require that much time again. 

Stalinism abroad had its fright.counterpart in McCarthyism at home. 

And the cold war became hot when on June 25, 1950, the American Ambassador to the 2-year-old Republic of Korea cabled that the Chinese-supported 

armies of North Korea had crossed the 38th parallel. Six days later American planes, ships, and infantrymen put the United States irrevocably into 

the war. The initial United Nations forces under General MacArthur's com- mand, consisting largely of South Koreans and American troops rushed 

from Japan, met Soviet-made tanks and fell back. At home the Nation 

went back on a war footing, back to wage and price controls. Two months 

after the start of the war a new boom was on as employment passed the 

62 million mark. 

It was August before the Americans and ROK's ended their retreat 

and another month before they took the offensive. They had advanced to 

the Yalu River in late November when 33 Chinese divisions crossed and hit 

the U.N. line. It fell back slowly to the 38th parallel and there stalemate 

set in. In June 1951 the Soviet Ambassador to the U.N. hinted that Russia was ready for a cease fire in Korea. The killing continued through 2 

years and 17 days of conferences before an armistice was signed on July 27, 

1953. 

Eight months earlier, on November 1, 1952, this country detonated 

the first hydrogen bomb. Less than a month after the Korean armistice, on August 12, 1953, the Atomic Energy Commission announced its detection of a similar thermonuclear explosion in the Soviet Union. And both 

nations were already engaged in the development of intercontinental missiles 

that would replace planes for the delivery of either the fusion or fission 

bomb. There appeared to be no alternative to continued research in weaponry; more truly, mankind had no alternative but peace. 

If World War II made science for the first time a political, economic, 

and social force in the Nation, the postwar years, under the pressure of 

"obliteration," magnified that fact manifold. Yet science could not remain 

mobilized in the Office of Scientific Research and Development, an emergency 

agency for military research, and with the end of the war the weapons re- search projects of OSRD were transferred to the War and Navy Departments 

for peacetime administration. In 1946 Congress divested the Army Engineer 

Corps of its Manhattan District and the atomic bomb project was returned 

to civilian control by creating the Atomic Energy Commission. 

Both the military and the AEC were to call on the Bureau for con- tinued technological research on their behalf. In the fall of 1944, Dr. Briggs 

and Maj. Gen. Levin H. Campbell, Jr., Chief of Army Ordnance, signed 

an agreement under which the Bureau would continue its research and design 
430 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

of proximity fuze devices. In May 1945 ground was broken for the con- struction of a half-million-dollar ordnance electronics laboratory on the 

Bureau grounds. Concurrently, the Navy asked for continuation of the 

guided missile work, and upon the establishment of the AEC, support was 

offered for enhanced programs on its behalf. The Bureau was thus committed 

to a large amount of developmental research in the postwar period.3 

At the same time, the store of basic research had been seriously depleted by the war and there was growing concern in the Federal Government for its replenishment. It was unlikely that this country could ever again 

rely on Europe for its basic science, or afford to depend on foreign research 

for its military strength.4 This prospect became a major concern of OSRD 

during the demobilization period; vide Vannevar Bush's Science—The Endless Frontier (1945). The question was raised by the science committee of 

the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion and was one of the first 

orders of business of the AEC. The naval establishment found its answer 

in the organization of the Office of Naval Research in 1946, to coordinate 

all research for the Navy and support basic as well as applied research. 

With its system of grants and contracts for research in the universities 

and in public institutions, the Office of Naval Research played a key role in 

the formation of the National Science Foundation. The establishment of 

the Foundation in 1950, "to evaluate science research programs undertaken 

by agencies of the Federal Government," settled the 100-year-old question of a permanent central scientific agency in the Government offering support 

to basic science.5 

Even before the establishment of its central agency, the Federal 

Government had sought to assure itself of a continuing fund of both basic 

and applied research through the creation of laboratories wholly supported 

with Federal funds but operated by non-Federal agencies, as were the Los 

Alamos Laboratory and Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, the Argonne Laboratory at the University of Chicago, the Lincoln 

Laboratory at MIT, and the Applied Physics Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University. 

'Memo of agreement, LJB for Chief of Ordnance, Oct. 31, 1944, and attached corre- spondence (copies in NBS Historical File). In addition to the Navy and AEC research, 

memo, Joint Chiefs of Staff for Director, NBS, May 24, 1945, requested NBS to assume all obligations of the Interservice Radio Propagation Laboratory (IRPL) as a postwar 

Bureau function (NBS Blue Folder Box 24, FPE—674c). The magnitude of the defense 

research commitment by 1950 is described in 20-page memo, Director, NBS for Secretary 

of Commerce, Nov. 28, 1950 (NBS Historical File). 

Don K. Price, Government and Science: Their Dynamic Relation in American Democracy (New York University Press, 1954), pp. 32, 46. 

Ibid., p. 60. 
THE PECULIAR PEACE 431 

Further augmenting its fund of research was the Federal policy of 

utilizing its own institutions through transferred funds and of entering into 

contracts with universities and industrial firms to carry out investigations 

required by its agencies. In the process of formation for many years, the 

policy was increasingly resorted to during the war and continued at an 

accelerated rate in the postwar years.5 

The history of transferred funds at the National Bureau of Standards, 

for the conduct of research and development on behalf of other Federal 

agencies, provides an interesting note on the progress of science in the Federal Government. The first such funds formally authorized were transferred 

to the Bureau in 1921 by the Army, Navy, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the Coast Guard, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the Department of Agriculture. They totaled slightly more than 

At the height of World War II they approached $9 million, or 

almost 70 percent of the Bureau's total operating funds. During the Korean 

war, transferred funds, almost wholly from the Department of Defense and 

the Atomic Energy Commission, were to exceed $40 million, or 85 percent 

of operating funds. A decade later they leveled off at approximately $14 

million annually, or 40 percent of the Bureau budget. How this imbalance 

came about merits some discussion. 

As early as 1942 the Visiting Committee to the Bureau began urging 

an end after the war to the Bureau's deep engagement with industry, almost 

wholly supported by transferred funds. The development of new weapons, 

new materials, and substitute materials during the emergency made the re- search for industry necessary, but in peacetime, the Visiting Committee felt, 

such research belonged in the universities and in the laboratories of industry 

and not at the Bureau. 

While research and development programs will, in the future, 

[said the Committee] be even more extensively adopted by Ameri- can industry, the importance of the Bureau of Standards * * * 

will undoubtedly increase in respect to its most important function, 

namely, serving as a court of last resort on those matters of standards which depend upon scientific [determinations] * * 41 Direct aid to industry, while very important, should not be allowed to 

Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, pp. 371—375. 

Exceptions to transferred fund research was the work of the U.S. Naval Radiotelegraphic 

Laboratory and the Signal Corps Radio Laboratory at the Bureau which from 1908 to 1932 were directly supported by those services (see ch. Ill, p. 140). The military research 

and defense funds of 1918—19 were emergency transfers of the President, outside legisla. 

tive authority. 
432 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

overshadow the Bureau's position of final arbiter on scientific and 

technical standards.8 

Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones was inclined to agree with his 

Visiting Committee. The Bureau involvement in both commercial and industrial interests seemed excessive. A survey made at his request in 1943 

recommended that such purely commercial activities of the Bureau as its 

simplified practices and trade standards divisions should probably be transferred to Commerce. Industrial standards, not development, was its role, and 

the survey urged "stronger legislative authorization for contributing [the 

Bureau's] measurement skills to the anticipated new [industrial] developments." 0 As Under Secretaiy Wayne C. Taylor wrote: 

The Department of Commerce proposes to ask for funds to enlarge 

the basic research work of the National Bureau of Standards during the transition period. If our country is to maintain its eco- nomic research in physics, chemistry, and metallurgy 

must be sturdily supported to provide the foundation for new industries and greater industrial development'° 

That burning issue of the thirties, consumer standards, also flared 

again, and briefly involved the Bureau, in the efforts of Jones and Taylor (and 

endorsed by Henry A. Wallace when he became Secretary) to expand the 

Department's interest in the field of standards for commerce, "particularly 

[in] the development of performance standards for goods sold to the ultimate consumer." 

8 Report of the Visiting Committee to Secretary Jesse H. Jones, July 11, 1942, p. 9 (NARG 

40, Secretary of Commerce, Box 114, file 67009/5). 

Report, Carroll L. Wilson, consultant to Secretary of Commerce, "Standards in Commerce—A Basis for Action," Dec. 8, 1943, revised Sept. 15, 1944, p. 7 (NBS Box 490, 

TDS—ASA). The report agreed with the view of the Visiting Committee "that the 

true function of the NBS lay in that domain of standarization that rested upon exact 

physical measurement, and not on such standardization as involved negotiations, opinion, 

judgment, and compromise." 

Letter, Taylor to Executive Secretary, Committee on Economic Demobilization, OPA, 

Mar. 10, 1944 (NBS Box 489, AG). The same intention appears in two studies made 

for Senator Kilgore's Subcommittee on War Mobilization to the Senate Committee on Military Affairs: the 326-page report, "The Government's Wartime Research and Development, 1940—44" (Senate Subcommittee Report No. 5, GPO, 1945), and the 418-page 

report, "Wartime Technological Developments" (Senate Subcommittee Monograph No. 

2, GPO, 1945), the latter prepared as a working basis for the postwar development of new industries and cheaper and improved products. The two studies were represented as sequels to the report, "Research—A National Resource," issued in 1940. 

Letter, Acting Secretary of Commerce Taylor to Gano Dunn, Jan. 6, 1944 (NARG 40, 

Box 114, file 67009/5) - For plans proposed by Jones and, later, Wallace to reorganize 

the Department to make "Washington the home of business," see Bus. Week, Mar. 30, 

1945, p. 82, and Feb. 8, 1947, p. 52; also Hearings * * H.R., 79th Cong., 1st Sess., 

on first deficiency appropriation bill for 1946, Pt. I, Oct. 29, 1945, p. 319. 
THE PECULIAR PEACE 433 

Dr. Briggs agreed that the Bureau might undertake certain basic re- search in consumer goods and materials but reserved his enthusiasm for 

resumption of industrial research. "We need a steady flow of new industries 

to take up the slack in employment," he wrote in April 1945, with strength. 

ened research facilities at the Bureau to handle its responsibilities.for "providing new opportunities for industry." 12 Frail and tired, he had little interest in the new fields of science created by the war. He was content to re- turn to the familiar, to supplying industry and small business with technical 

information, assisting industry with standardization, continuing basic re- search in standards. Meanwhile, the Bureau must complete the military 

projects on hand, and continue to serve other Government agencies and the 

State governments. 

Legislation to strengthen basic research at the Bureau, recommended 

in the survey for Jesse Jones, also won Wallace's aproval. Explicitly, 

Wallace proposed amending the organic act of 1901 to include areas of 

research previously covered by special legislation and, somewhat vaguely, "a 

limited enlargement of the Bureau's powers in a specified direction with re- spect to increased freedom in securing high types of personnel." 13 Vannevar Bush, on the committee, demurred at the apparent implication of the "enlargement?' He wanted no fundamental research for science 

or industry carried out at the Bureau except in the field of metrology. Nevertheless, he made unanimous the Visiting Committee's approval of the proposed legislation: 

I am entirely in sympathy with the Bureau's conducting basic re- search in the sciences, especially those which involve standards. 

However, the Bureau of Standards is the only body which has both 

the responsibility and authority to perform the exceedingly important function of establishing standards of all kinds, and in the 

future the Bureau is going to be subjected to a heavy and increasing 

burden in this regard as a result of the rapid progress of science, 

particularly in the field of atomic energy. The problem of formulating standards in their field alone will be a major challenge to the 

Bureau. 

Hence, while I 'believe that it [the legislation] is important to the 

effective organization of the Bureau and to its ability to conduct 

basic research in science, nevertheless I think it should be unmisMemo, LJB for Secretary of Commerce, Apr. 5, 1945 (NBS Box 502, AG) - Discussed in letter, Gano Dunn to Secretary of Commerce Wallace, Nov. 23, 1945 

(NARG 40, Box 114, file 6700915), and Wallace correspondence in Box 112, files 67009/1 

and 67009/12. 
434 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

takably clear that the major emphasis should remain on its unique 

assignment in the field of standards.'4 

The amendment of the organic act of the Bureau was to be ac- complished in 1950. With the cold war growing hot, the question of industrial research and of consumer standards had become academic. Furthermore, the postwar bent of the Bureau had already been determined by its new Director, Dr. Edward U. Condon. 

EDWARD UHLER CONDON 

On May 7, 1945, 4 months before the end of the war in the Pacific, 

Dr. Briggs quietly celebrated his 71st birthday. A year beyond the com- pulsory retirement age, he had served as Director since 1932 under five 

Secretaries of Commerce, Roy D. Chapin, Daniel C. Roper, Harry L. Hopkins, 

Jesse H. Jones, the first of the year, under Roosevelt's new Secre. 

tary, Henry A. Wallace. Anxious to return to the comfort and quiet of his 

old laboratory in West building, Dr. Briggs submitted his resignation to 

Secretary 

Two members of the Bureau, Dr. Eugene C. Crittenden and Dr. Hugh 

L. Dryden, came under consideration by the Secretary's Visiting Committee 

to the Bureau as Dr. Briggs' successor. Dr. Crittenden, at 65, was the 

senior, with 36 years of service in the Bureau. But he felt his health was not up to the task, and Dr. Briggs urged the candidacy of Dr. Dryden. 

Secretary Wallace, however, did not have the advice of his Visiting Com. 

mittee in selecting a successor.16 Moreover, he was strongly inclined to find 

someone outside the Bureau for the post. He first met his new Director of the 

Bureau at a conference of scientists in Chicago. 

The successful test of the. atomic bomb at Alamogordo in July 1945 

had almost at once aroused concern among scientists over the control of the 

14 Letter, V. Bush to Gano Dunn, Nov. 21, 1945, attached to letter, Dunn, Nov. 23. 

Dr. Briggs' first years of retirement were spent, at Secretary Wallace's request, com- piling the report on NBS War Research (1949). Letter, Wallace to LJB, Oct. 11, 1945 

(NARG 40, Box 112, file 67009; Pt. 1, 7—12). See also E. U. Condon, "Lyman James 

Briggs (1874—1963)," Year Book, Am. Phil. Soc., 1963, pp. 117—121. 

Interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1961 

Dr. Briggs put his request for retirement on the agenda for the meeting of the Visiting 

Committee on June 22, 1945, just prior to his notification to Secretary Wallace. The 

chairman of the Visiting Committee subsequently accepted responsibility for the failure 

of the Visiting Committee to submit promptly its nominations, in response to his re- quest, for the Secretary's consideration. In turn, Secretary Wallace acknowledged that 

he sent in his own nomination earlier than he had originally contemplated. Reports of 

the Visiting Committee to the Secretary of Commerce, July 5, 1945, and Oct. 31, 1945 

("Gen Corresp Files of the Director, 1945—1955," Box 6). 
EDWARD UHLER CONDON 435 

weapon and the peacetime development of atomic energy.'7 Ranged against 

continued military control were most of those who had worked on the bomb 

at Los Alamos and in the universities. One of the first of the many con- ferences that were called to discuss the future of atomic energy was that 

convened by Robert M. Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago. 

It met in September 1945 at the opening of the university's new Institute of 

Nuclear Studies. Lending his support to the conference, Secretary of Commerce Wallace attended and brought with him as special advisor, Dr. Philip 

M. Hauser, a sociologist on leave from the University of Chicago, then with 

the Bureau of Census. 

Meeting Dr. Condon, associate director of research of the Westinghouse Electric Corp., for the first time at the conference, Dr. Hauser found 

him "a most amiable and knowledgeable fellow * * * [with] broad interests in the physical sciences." Aware that the Secretary was searching for a replacement for Dr. Briggs, Hauser suggested to Wallace that "this was a man he should meet and consider for the post of Director of the National 

Bureau of Standards." As Wallace remembers it, he discussed the directorship with several others at the conference, but "Dr. Condon was the only one 

who was available and really interested." 15 Dr. Condon's name was submitted by President Truman to the Senate 

and confirmed without a dissenting vote. On November 7, 1945, he was formally appointed Director. 

As Dr. 'Condon told an Appropriations Subcommittee not long after, 

he was "born * * * actually in the town where the bomb was tested, but 

there [was] no connection between those two events." 19 Then in his 43d 

year, he had indeed been born in Alamogordo, N. Mex., on 'March 2, 1902, 

but had spent his early school years largely in California. Taking his doctorate in physics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1926, he went 

to Germany for a year's study, where the new quantum 'physics of Heisenberg, 

Born, and Dirac was being taught. He returned to lecture in 

physics at Columbia University and in 1928 went to Princeton as assistant 

and then associate professor. 

17 One result of that concern was the publication of One World Or None (eds. Dexter 

Masters and Katharine Way, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946), a report to the public on the meaning of the atomic bomb. Contributors to the report included Einstein, Bohr, 

Compton, Bethe, Langmuir, Oppenheimer, Szilard, Shapley, Seitz, Urey, Wigner, and 

Condon. 

Communications to the author from Henry A. Wallace, Jan. 7, 1964, and from Dr. 

Hauser, Jan. 29, 1964 (NBS Historical File). See also Wallace letter in New Republic, 

118, 10 (1948). For Wallace's possible prior interest in Dr. Condon, see letter, LJB to 

H. A. Wallace, Aug. 2, 1945, sub: Standing of certain scientists (NBS Box 504, IG). 

Hearings * * * 1947 (Jan. 29, 1946), p. 175. 
436 

Dr. Edward U. Condon, fourth Director of the Bureau and the first theoretical physicist 

to head its operations. Reorganizing the Bureau in the postwar period, he cleared 

attics of 50 years of accumulated lumber and began the modernization and systematizing 

of present Bureau operations. 
EDWARD UHLER CONDON 437 

While at Princeton, he coauthored the Frank-Condon principle in 

molecular physics; developed the theory of radioactivity decay, with Ronald 

W. Gurney; a theory of optical rotary power; the theory of proton-proton 

scattering, with Gregory Breit; and the theory of charge-independence of 

nuclear forces, with B. Cassen. His definitive treatise on the theory of atomic 

spectra, with George H. Shortley, established his reputation as an outstanding 

theoretical physicist.2° 

In 1937, Dr. Condon went to the Westinghouse Electric Corp. at Pittsburgh as associate director of research and there developed a program of 

nuclear research.2' Appointed a consultant tothe National Defense Research 

Committee in 1940, he helped organize the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, 

where America's microwave radar program was started, and wrote a basic 

textbook on the subject of microwaves for the laboratory. During the war 

he introduced and directed the microwave :radar research program at 

Westinghouse. 

While setting up the radar program, he served on Dr. Briggs's S—i 

Committee, meeting monthly at the Bureau. In April 1943 he went to Los 

Alamos at the request of General Groves as associate director under Dr. 

Oppenheimer. Later that year he was called to the Radiation Laboratory 

at the University of California to head the theoretical physics group working on the electromagnetic (mass spectrograph) separation of uranium isotopes. 

Toward the end of the war he started the nuclear reactor program at Westinghouse which later produced the power plant for the Navy's atomic submarine. 

Dr. Condon was no stranger to the Bureau laboratories when he 

became their Director. Actually, his acquaintanceship dated back to the 

late 1920's, when as a Princeton professor he attended the annual meetings 

of the American Physical Society, regularly held for many years at the 

Bureau. But Dr. Condon had no sooner seated himself in the Director's 

chair in South building, to learn something of the dimensions of his office, 

when 'he was called to Capitol Hill as scientific adviser to the Special Senate 

Committee on Atomic Energy. The hearings of Senator Brien McMahon's 

committee on the question of civilian control of atomic energy began on November 27, 1945, and lasted until April 8, 1946.22 

Biographical note, "About Edward U. Condon," What Is Science? ed. James R. New- man (New York: Washington Square Press, 1961), pp. 105—108; interview with Dr. 

Condon, Oct. 27, 1963. With P. M. Morse, Condon wrote Quantum Mechanics (1929) 

and with G. H. Shortley, The Theory of Atomic Spectra (1935), both standard works 

in their fields. 21 Time, 35, 44 (Feb. 12, 1940), called him "king of the atomic world at Westinghouse," 

where its new Van de Graaff generator, the only one in industry, was being used to make 

artificially radioactive substances for studies of nuclear structure. 

As a result of the hearings, Congress established the Atomic Energy Commission on Aug. 1, 1946, with complete civilian control over all atomic affairs of the United States, 
438 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946—51) 

In the interim, Dr. Crittenden served as Acting Director and Dr. 

Condon contented himself with brief visits to the Bureau to acquaint himself with its operations and activities. With only his Sundays free, he came 

with his master key and toured the unpeopled laboratories looking at work 

in progress, read the reports of current research left on his desk, and studied 

reports on operational procedures at the Bureau.23 

Late in January 1946, Dr. Condon appeared for the first time before 

the House Appropriations Subcommittee for the annual hearing •on the 

budget. Unaware of the deep affection of the committee members for Dr. 

Briggs and their long-standing interest in the Bureau under his direction, 

Dr. Condon brought up the subject of Bureau administration. The immediate order of business, Dr. Condon told the committee, was "to modernize 

and systematize the entire administrative activity of the Bureau, which has 

just grown up over the years without any special organization unit to co- ordinate and supervise the work.24 Dr. Briggs and two division chiefs 

acting as Assistant Directors had borne the responsibility not only for all 

research at the Bureau but for the work of the 141 members of the administrative staff.25 It seemed to Dr. Condon an impossible task. 

Dr. Condon asked for funds for three full-time Assistant Directors 

to administer the professional and scientific functions of the Bureau, and 

an Executive Director to supervise business management functions. These 

four, he said, would "do what Dr. Briggs was doing 'before." As for the 

Director of the Bureau, he should not have 13 division chiefs and 4 or 5 

administrative heads reporting directly to him for decisions and policy determinations. The greater part of his time should be devoted to "mainpeaceful and military. All Manhattan District facilities, including the Los Alamos 

weapons laboratory, the isotope separation plants at Oak Ridge, and the plutonium piles 

at Hanford, were turned over to the AEC. It became responsible for procuring ores of the fissionable heavy metals, uranium and thorium, for converting them into concen- trated pure metal, for manufacturing weapons as well as radioactive isotopes, electric 

power reactors for ship propulsion, and generators for electricity. The AEC was also 

charged with conducting all research necessary to keep the United States ahead of the 

world in atomic development. Finally, the act authorized free international exchange 

of basic scientific information when an international arrangement and techniques of 

inspection made that possible. See James R. Newman and Byron S. Miller, The Control 

of Atomic Energy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 194.8). 23 Interview with Dr. Condon, Oct. 27, 1963. 

Hearings * 1947 (Jan. 29, 1946), p. 183. 

The assistants were Dr. Crittenden, chief of the electricity division, and Dr. McAllister, chief of codes and specifications. The latter retired in the spring of 1945 and 

had not been replaced when Dr. Condon took over. 

440 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

Dr. Condon was not to project a father image as had Stratton, soften. 

ing the severity of his strictures. He was not to capture cooperation by his 

appeal for help, as had Burgess, or to inspire devotion by his presence, as had 

Briggs. Genial, gracious, and the world's best company away from his desk, 

Dr. Condon brought to an organization largely staffed with experimental 

physicists the new-broom outlook of the theoretical physicist. Perhaps more 

than most at the Bureau, he was aware that the war years had revolutionized 

science and scientific thought and, always a prolific writer, he had for some Appropriations Committee?" Dr. Condon could only deny it had been exciting; it had 

been rather depressing (p. 2237). 

Prior to that questioning, Dr. Condon had talked steadily for over 2 hours (pp. 2158—2181) on the scope of activities of the Bureau, in answer to the repeated queries of the sub. 

committee: "What does a 'Bureau of Standards' mean?" "Does the Bureau's work 

embrace all of science and technology?" 

At the next year's hearing, in March 1947, Congressman Karl Stefan of Nebraska 

replaced Rabaut as chairman. Stefan requested that Dr. Condon use layman's language 

before the committee, and raised again the joke about the scientist and the plumber, 

alleging that in reply to a New York plumber who had asked the Bureau about the use of hydrochloric acid for clearing drainage stoppages, a Bureau physicist had an- swered: "The efficacy of hydrochloric acid is indisputable, but the corrosive residue 

is incompatible with metallic permanence." Assuming that meant it was all right, 

the plumber wrote thanking the Bureau. The Bureau supposedly replied "We can- not assume responsibility for the production of toxic and noxious residue with hydrochloric acid and suggest you use an alternative procedure." The plumber wrote that 

he agreed with the Bureau: hydrochloric acid worked fine. Frightened at what might 

happen to the drainage of New York skycrapers, the Bureau was alleged to have 

resorted finally to simple speech: "Don't use hydrochloric acid. It eats hell out of the 

pipes." (Hearings * * * 1948, p. 289). The joke was brought to Dr. Condon's attention in each of the next 2 (Hearings * * * 1949, p. 538; Hearings * * * 1950, 

p.493). 

Representative Walt Horan of the State of Washington quizzed Dr. Condon about the 

purpOse of the Bureau: "The title 'Bureau of Standards' should have some meaning. 

Otherwise we are going to get lost in a maelstrom of scientific research. What does 

'Bureau of Standards' mean?" Continuing the questioning at the next hearing, Congress- man Stefan advised Dr. Condon: "Give it to us as Dr. Briggs used to do * * * so we can understand." At that and subsequent hearings, Dr. Condon was told, "Remember, we are laymen" (Hearings * * * 1948, p. 299; Hearings * * 1949, p. 526; Hearings * * * 1950, p. 485). 

Few men have written more clearly and simply about the complexities of modern physics or are more lucid in general exposition on any subject than Dr. Condon. His sole public 

rejoinder to his "problem of relations with Congress" occurred in a speech on Sept. 25, 

1951, wherein he urged at some length the establishment of a committee of Congress 

concerned exclusively with science and scientific research in the Government (Physics 

Today, 5, 6, 1952). 
EDWARD UHLER CONDON 441 

time expounded the new physics in a steady stream of articles in the 

periodicals.28 

The Bureau as presently established, Dr. Condon told the Appropriations Subcommittee, is "one of the finest scientific laboratories in the country, 

and it would be wise to maintain and extend its functions at this time, when 

there seems to be a disposition to recognize the importance of pure science 

in the Government's activities more than ever before." 29 As one who had 

made important contributions to pure science and at Westinghouse brought 

it to bear on industrial work, he was determined to advance pure science at 

the Bureau and to move the Bureau rapidly into the postwar world. "Think 

big!" he repeatedly told the Burçau staff. There was no alternative, and he 

challenged the staff with his cry, "Are you going to think in terms of peanuts or watermelons?" 30 Dr. Condon himself thought big. His outstanding characteristic, it 

proved unnerving to some of the older members of the Bureau, and frightening to congressional appropriation committees. At his second appearance on the Hill, in March 1947, he was to stagger the committee members with a 

proposed $25 million budget, up from $5 million the previous year.3' He 

talked of acquiring not one but three mass spectrometers for the Bureau, not one but two giant betatrons. He requested a fourfold increase in publication 

See "Making new atoms in the laboratory," Sci. Am. 158, 302 (1938) ; "Sharpshoot. 

ing at the atom," Pop. Mech. 74, 1 (1940); "Physics in industry," Science, 96, 172 

(1942) ; "Tracer bullets of science," Pop. Mech. 77, 170 (1942); "Physics gives us nuclear engineering," Westinghouse Eng. 5, 167 (1945); "Science and our future," 

Science, 103, 415 (1946); "Is war research science?" Sat. Rev. Lit. 29, 6 (1946) 

"Science and the national welfare," Science, 107, 2 (1948) ; "60 years of quantum 

physics," Physics Today, 15, 37 (1962). See also file of his speeches and addresses on electronics, nuclear physics and other fields of Bureau research in NBS Historical 

File. 

Hearings 8 * * 1947, p. 178. 

In the Steelman report to the President in 1947 on the role of the scientific agencies of 

the Government in the Nation's total scientific effort, the National Bureau of Standards was described as "n' * * the principal Federal agency for research in physics, chemistry, 

and engineering; it acts as custodian of the. Nation's standards of measurement, carries on research leading to improved measurement methods, determines physical constants 

and properties of materials, develops and prescribes specifications for Federal supplies 

and generally serves the Government and industry as adviser in scientific and technical 

matters and in testing, research, and development in the physical sciences." (The President's Scientific Research Board, Science and Public Policy, II, The Federal Research 

Program, Washington, D.C., 1947, p. 151.) 

The statement reflected the view of Dr. Condon, who served as an alternate on the 

President's Scientific Research Board that prepared the report. 

Interview with Dr. John D. Hoffman, Apr. 28, 1964. 

"Only 15 years later the Bureau's operating budget, exclusive of construction appropriations and transferred funds, would rise to $28.5 million. 
442 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

funds, to expand the regular series of Bureau reports.and prepare and publish 

multivolume tables of atomic energy levels, tables of the thermodynamic 

properties of chemical compounds, and a new and comprehensive handbook 

of physics. The Bureau had lately become the central agency in the Federal 

establishment for radio propagation research and service. Dr. Condon 

proposed that it also assume direction of all Federal research in synthetic 

rubber and in mathematical analysis and machine computers. 

Was all this, the committee asked, contemplated in the act that created 

the Bureau? What about the present program? "Are all of your tremendous, gigantic activities out there carried on under a two-page law?" Congressman Stefan asked. Did the Bureau actually intend to "spend about 

nine or ten million dollars during the next fiscal year on the basis of a twopage law?" 32 The committee began vigorously debating with Dr. Condon on what he thought the phrase "bureau of standards" meant and what such a bureau was really supposed to do. He explained point by point how the new science, enormously stimulated by the war, had changed the Bureau 

and the Nation. 

In many ways Dr. Condon was the very man for the Bureau in the 

years after the war, sparking new ideas and impulses among his associates 

and energetically recruiting a new scientific staff.33 He acknowledged that 

recent technological developments demanded continuance of the Bureau work 

on rubber, plastics, textiles, liquid fuels and lubricants, on structural materials, ceramic and electroplated coatings, metallic alloys, electronic devices, 

and new ranges of radio wave frequencies. But "it would be a serious 

mistake * * * to let these projects in the fields of applied science interfere 

with the Bureau's work on fundamental problems of physics and chemistry 

and on methods of measurement and the standards and instruments which 

provide the basis for measurements of every kind," as primary responsibilities 

of the Bureau.34 

New industries and wholly new technologies were to make unprecedented demands upon the laboratories. Perhaps no one at the Bureau corn- Hearings * * * 1949 (Jan. 20, 1948), p. 526. 

As he told the committee, in addition to the prewar cuts in staff, budget, and services, 

during the war much of the Bureau's basic research had been reduced and its best men put into war work, from which they had not yet been released. The Bureau was therefore very shorthanded in the field of fundamental research, and it was that area he 

sought to rebuild and expand. He hoped "to be allowed to do for peacetime fundamental 

research [in the Bureau] something of the sort that [had] recently been announced as part of the Navy's research plans, involving a high degree of collaboration, and 

intimate cooperation at the working scientists' level with universities throughout the 

country" (Hearings * * * 1947, pp. 178—179). Dr. Condon referred to the Office of 

Naval Research, organized later that year. 

Hearings * 4 * 1947, p. 176. 
EDWARD UHLER CONDON 443 

prehended better than the new Director the implications of nuclear technology, 

just emerging from its pioneer state, or the need for new instruments, ma- terials, and processes spawned by that technology. More than administration 

and organization, the thought at the Bureau needed redirection, and as the 

cold war and then the Korean war came and research for defense intensified, 

Condon's redirection paid off in the years that followed. 

New direction required new men, and Dr. Condon's arrival happened 

to coincide with an almost complete turnover of the top echelon. Age had 

begun to make its claims and many, like Dr. Briggs, past the retirement 

age, had waited only for the war to end. The five division chiefs who 

retired in 194.5 had been with the Bureau since World War I or earlier.35 

Submitting requests for retirement with them were two section chiefs and a 

number of nonadministrative scientists and technicians with long years of 

service.36 Still other division chiefs and 14 additional section chiefs reached 

retirement age over the next 4 years.37 By 1950 the top echelons of the 

working force was essentially new, and the average agejevel at the Bureau 

had plummeted by some 20 years.38 

In most instances division chief replacements were found among 

senior heads of sections. Continuity was further maintained by appointing 

Bureau-bred members to top administrative positions. The redirection of 

the Bureau was carried out principally through changes in organization, 

through new men that came in to head new fields of research, and the special 

assistants that Dr. Condon brought in from outside.39 

Appointed Associate Directors early in 1946 were Dr. Crittenden and 

Dr. Dryden, the latter, upon going to NACA as director of research in 1947, 

replaced by Dr. Wallace R. Brode, organic chemist and spectroscopist from 

Ohio State. From the Navy Bureau of Ships that spring came Dr. John 

H. Curtiss as assistant to the Director, to take charge of mathematical and 

statistical research and analysis. From Westinghouse came two other assistants, Dmitri I. Vinogradoff, as liaison between the Bureau and foreign 

scientific and engineering laboratories, and Hugh Odishaw, to oversee sciThey were Bearce of weights and measures, Dickinson of heat and power, Rawdon 

of metallurgy, P. H. Bates of silicate products, and Fairchild of trade standards. 

The section chiefs were Acree in chemistry and Stutz in mechanics. 

Retiring section chiefs were Curtis and Dellinger in electricity, Miss Bussey, Wensel, 

Van Dusen, and Ingberg in heat and power, Bridgeman, Brooks, and Peters in optids, 

Smither in chemistry, Tuckerman and Whittemore in mechanics, Wormeley in organic 

materials, and McAdam in metallurgy. 

Dr. McPherson of organic materials was to say that in 1943 he was the youngest 

division chief in point of service; by 1950 he was the oldest. Interview, Dec. 5, 1961. 

In a few instances, senior section chiefs were made assistant division chiefs as areas of 

the Bureau research were phased out or several sections were combined. 
444 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

entific and technical information and Bureau publications4° And in a reorganization of housekeeping elements,. budget and management, personnel, plant, and shops became formal divisions. 

Changes in Secretary Wallace's Visiting Committee to the Bureau 

included the appointment in 1945 of Harold C. Urey, research chemist at 

the University of Chicago and Nobel laureate, and in 1946 of Eugene P. 

Wigner, physicist at Princeton and director of research at the Oak Ridge 

laboratories, who was to receive the Nobel Prize in 1963. The appointment 

of two theoretical physicists resulted in a significant change in the composition of the Visiting Committee, long dominated by representatives of industry. 

Urey and Wigner joined long-time members Gano Dunn of the J. G. White 

Engineering Corp., Karl T. Compton, president of MIT, and William D. 

Coolidge, director of research at General Electric. 

In place of the informal notices and occasional memoranda on administrative matters that previous directors had issued were the numbered 

Bureau Orders, Administration Procedural Memoranda, and Bureau Memoranda introduced in December 1945. They were timely, for the next decade 

was to see more changes in organization, policies, and staff than in all the 

previous years put together. For one thing, the wartime influx of workers 

that raised the staff above the 2,000 level for the first time in Bureau history 

did not recede with the end of hostilities but increased steadily. Administration grew proportionately more complex. 

Between serving on the McMahon committee and familiarizing himself with the Bureau establishment, it was May 1947, a year and a half 

after assuming the directorship, before Dr. Condon completed his initial 

reorganization of the Bureau structure.41 in the new order, divisions were 

merged to bring related interests or functions together,42 new divisions and new sections were created,43 and still other sections were relocated as a matter 

of logic. Several sections, some of them one- or two-man units, were absorbed 

A third special assistant, Nicholas E. Golovin, trained in physics but then a management 

specialist from Naval Ordnance, arrived in the spring of 1949 to take over the analysis 

and planning of Bureau technical programs. 

Announced in NBS BuOrder 47—14, May 19, 1947. 

The new electricity and optics division included three sections from optics (photometry and color, optical instruments, and photographic technology) that depended upon 

electrical standards. Simplified practices and trade standards were combined as the 

commodity standards division. 

The atomic physics division grouped all Bureau facilities and activities relating to 

atomic and molecular physics and also certain phases of optics and of electronic 

physics. The Central Radio Propagation Laboratory stemmed from the radio section 

in electricity. Building technology division took over the fire resistance and heat transfer 

secticns of heat and power, the masonry section (renamed structural engineering) from 

silicate products division, and the whole of the codes and specifications division. The 

applied mathematics division had its origin in the New York mathematical tables project. 
EDWARD UHLER CONDON 445 

in larger units elsewhere." Two divisions saw little more than a name 

change as weights and measures became the metrology division, and clay 

and silicate products became the mineral products division.45 And as Dr. 

Stratton had once headed his own optics division, so Dr. Condon for a time 

doubled in brass, as chief of his new atomic physics division. 

Laboratory space became critical even before the President's decision 

in 1950 to construct the hydrogen bomb and the onset of the Korean war. 

Under the shadow of atomic war, talk of dispersal of military installations 

and defense facilities was translated into policy. The pressure for space 

and Truman's refusal to permit expansion of facilities in Washington led to 

the establishment of two Bureau stations far from the Nation's Capital, the 

Corona Laboratories in California and the Boulder Laboratories in Colorado. 

Two major Bureau projects stepped up when the Korean war began were those in nonrotating proximity fuzes for Army Ordnance and guided 

missiles for the Navy. Additional temporary structures across Van Ness 

Street were sufficient to accommodate the augmented fuze group, but the 

missile staff was approaching a hundred members and its development mission had been accelerated by the requirement for an expanded series of 

production models for possible use in the Pacific. The project needed space 

quickly and there was no time to build.46 On June 1, 1951, the project left 

Washington and moved into surplus Navy hospital structures, ide since the 

war, at Corona.47 

Still another cooperative project, for the Atomic Energy Commission, 

called for large.scale assistance from the Bureau and required facilities 

for which space was lacking in Washington. The year before, in 1949, a 220.acre tract had been donated by the citizens of Boulder, Cob., at the 

foothills of the Rockies, on what was then the outskirts of the city, for new radio facilities for the Bureau. On the slope back of the site marked out 

"Underground corrosion went to metallurgy. The huge special projects section (i.e., 

guided missiles) in mechanics became part of the ordnance development division, and a ballistics group in electricity was transferred to the new division. Transferred to chemistry and no longer separate units were the polarimetry, radiometry, and interferometry sections of optics. Combined with the temperature measurements section of 

heat and power were the division's thermometry and pyrometry sections. One section 

in heat and power, aircraft engine research, was discontinued in 1948 when the work was taken over by the NACA laboratory at Cleveland. 

Weights and measures administration, for a time a section in metrology, became a separate Office of Weights and Measures in October 1947, and was later joined by an Office of Basic Instrumentation. All of these organization changes are shown in app. J. 

"Letter, EUC to Secretary of Commerce, Dec. 13, 1949, and letter, EUC to Director, 

Bureau of the Budget, Sept. 13, 1950 ("General Correspondence Files of the Director, 

1945—1955," Boxes 4 and 6). 

BuOrd 51—18, June 1, 1951; Hearings * * * 1952 (Apr. 10, 1951), pp. 497—502; 

interview with Dr. Condon, Oct. 27, 1963. 
446 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

for the radio laboratories, ground was leveled for the erection of new Bureau 

cryogenic laboratories.48 

TECHNOLOGICAL vs. BASIC RESEARCH 

In 1944 Harry S. Truman was nominated to the Vice-Presidency, suc- ceeding Henry A. Wallace who had held that office during the previous term. 

On the day after the inauguration Wallace replaced Jesse Jones as Secretary 

of Commerce.49 It was a brief tenure. Truman became President a month 

later, and in the fall of 1946 Wallace's differences with the President's policy 

toward the U.S.S.R. led to his resignation. 

Jesse Jones, as had his predecessors under Roosevelt, Daniel Roper 

and Harry Hopkins, found that "The President was never genuinely friendly 

to business, and there little the Secretary of Commerce could do for 

business and industry * * 50 Nevertheless, Wallace asked for the Commerce post, in exchange for his loss of place on the ticket. 

Wallace had reform in mind, for he was convinced that "not until 

businessmen were educated could any sort of economic justice be attained 

in this country." 51 A biographer has said: "As Secretary of Commerce, 

Wallace * * * settled down into relative obscurity for nearly a year. How. 

ever, during this period significant changes took place within the ornate 

walls of the Commerce Building. A strong friend of small business was now in power. Expansion of technical and other assistance for small firms 

from $300,000 to $4,500,000 per year was initiated." 52 He intended the 

Bureau to assist in the aid to business. 

In a prepared statement before the House Appropriations Subcommittee in January 1946, Wallace outlined his proposed reorganization of the 

Department. It proved rather a reemphasis of effort than a reorganization, 

The site was acquired in mid-December 1949 and construction began in the summer of 1951 (Department of Commerce records, NARG 40, file 83583; NBS BuOrd 52—7, 

Aug. 15, 1951). 

"For behind the scenes accounts of, the juggling of posts and men, see James A. Farley, 

Jim Farley's Story, pp. 371 if; Grace Tully, F.D.R.—My Boss, p. 188; Raymond Moley, 

27 Masters of Politics, (New York: Funk & Wagnafls, 1949) 'pp. 84ff. 

Jesse Jones, Fifty Billion Dollars, p. 257. Almost wholly taken up with the opera. 

tions of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation he also headed, Jones left Department 

of Commerce details to his Under Secretary, Wayne C. Taylor. Ibid., p. 538. 

"Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Boston: Houghton Muffin, 1947), p. 615. 

"Karl M. Schmidt, Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948 (Syracuse University 

Press, 1960), p. 7. For the fear that Wallace as Secretary would establish, through the 

National Bureau of Standards, Federal consumer standards in place of trademarks, see George E. Sokoisky article in "New York Sun," Feb. 27, 1945, copy in NBS Box 

503, IDA—ASA. 
TECHNOLOGICAL VS. BASIC RESEARCH 447 a new deal designed to promote foreign trade and provide special services 

to business in the fields of science, technology, management, and marketing. 

He intended to expand the Department's output of basic statistical information and provide detailed analyses on the economic outlook for the use of 

business, Government, and the public, and to this end the scientific and technical bureaus of his Department must be strengthened. What he had in mind 

for the National Bureau of Standards was not spelled out, except that it was 

to be responsible for "technological research and development on problems 

of direct and practical interest to industry." 

Before the same subcommittee 2 weeks later, Dr. Condon asked for 

increased funds for intensified activity by the Bureau "from an industrial 

and economic point of view" in the fields of metallurgy, high polymers, building materials, thermodynamics, rubber, hydraulics, atomic energy, electronics, 

and radio propagation. Their research was "no more than simple national 

wisdom." The four fields in which the Bureau planned to concentrate its 

greatest resources, however, were nuclear physics, building materials and 

structures, radio propagation, and rubber chemistry. They would require 

"research in fundamental science of a long-range and basic character" and "a 

great deal closer cooperation in fundamental research by the universities." 

Dr. Condon's remark, that his Assistant Directors would "see that 

appropriate research work is initiated in new fields * * * [and] that there 

is not too much effort expended on routine tests [at the expense of basic re- search]" did not entirely satisfy the subcommittee, the Bureau of the Budget, 

or senior members of the Bureau who viewed testing—with an appropriation of $1.5 million annually—as a primary and irreducible function of the 

Bureau.55 

Hearings * * * 1947, p. 5. Considering its importance to the Government, said 

Wallace, the program and appropriation for the Bureau were modest, no more than 

"comparable to the scientific program of a single large private corporation" (ibid., p. 8). 

Hearings * * * 1947, p. 178; NBS Annual Report 1946, p. 172. Discussed at length 

at the hearings but unreported elsewhere was an appropriation in the budget of $100,000, to provide specifications for consumer goods. Since the 1930's the Bureau's codes and 

specifications division had maintained a small section called "consumer contacts." 

Almost certainly at the prompting of Secretary Wallace, funds were inserted in the 1947 

budget to expand the section to 32 members in order to extend the work on Federal 

specifications and the factfinding tests of products for the Federal Trade Commission 

to the consuming public. As a beginning, the Bureau was to develop at once methods 

of testing and test machines for determining consumer standards and specifications in 

leather goods, to "provide simple means of finding out what we get for our money" 

(Hearings * * * 1947, pp. 205—206, 217—220). It was a short-lived project. Within 

months, along with most of the simplified practices and trade standards divisions of the 

Bureau, it was transferred to another agency of Commerce. Its chief, George N. 

Thompson, went to the Bureau's new building technology division. 

Hearings * * * 1947, p. 191; interview with Dr. McPherson, Dec. 5, 1961. 
448 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

Amid the general apprehension over the unsettled conditions of the 

postwar world, Condon anticipated what was later to become a commonplace, 

that any interruption in the flow of new knowledge, or even a slackening of 

its pace, posed a potential threat to national security. The war demonstrated 

the necessity of narrowing the Ieadtime between the discovery of new know!- 

edge and its application, and the Federal Government had come to recognize 

its responsibility for securing the basic research that made purposeful application possible. 

In a lighter moment early in the hearings in 1946, Congressman 

Rabaut said to Condon: "With this atomic age on our hands we must treat 

your Bureau with respect, as we do not want to get in wrong with anybody 

who has anything to do with it." 56 But neither Congress nor the public was quite ready yet to pay for the basic research of the atomic age. A year 

later when Dr. Condon presented his research program in greater detail, the 

mood of the subcommittee was economy. 

Dr. Condon's original request to the Department of Commerce for 1948 

funds totaled $25 million, almost four times the direct appropriation of the 

previous. year. The new Secretary of Commerce, W. Averell Harriman, 

had whittled it to $17.1, and the Bureau of the Budget had brought it down 

further to $10.6 by deleting, "without prejudice," the Bureau's proposed 

research in synthetic rubber, as well as research auxiliary to the atomic 

energy program (the latter in the amount of $2.5 million), by reducing 

initial construction funds for a new radio propagation laboratory in Washington by two.thirds ($1.9 to $0.6 million), and refusing most of the 

proposed cost of rehabilitating the Bureau plant (including $1.5 million 

for electrical modernization, $2 million for plumbing). Left more or less 

intact were the new programs planned in building materials, hydraulics, 

computers, X.ray research for medicine and industrial radiography, fundamentals of metallurgy, fundamental studies in the properties of chemical 

compounds, electronics, high polymers, and radio propagation.57 

The kind of industrial research that the Bureau had long carried on, 

said Dr. Condon, was no longer necessary, except in building. With 

industry booming, the civilian economy was running at the highest level 

in its history, about $200 billion a year, and more than 2,400 industrial 

laboratories were engaged in keeping that production going. As a conse- quence, the laboratories were making unprecedented demands on the Bureau 

Hearings, ibid. 

Hearings * * 1948 (Mar. 12, 1947), pp. 287—292. Including $1.1 million for equipment and facilities, the final appropriation came to $7.9 million, representing a slight 

increase over the previous year. 
TECHNOLOGICAL VS. BASIC RESEARCH 449 

for the fundamental instrumentation they needed and could not Some 

of the new industries, especially those based on electronics, required work on measurements that had never been done before. And the Bureau had 

to continue to supply basic information to many of the new small businesses 

that could not afford research laboratories. The funds for this research, on which the Bureau of the Budget had agreed, were approved, but not 

without a struggle.59 

Even before final approval, the Bureau began to free itself from con- siderable industrial-type research, as well as direct research for industry, by 

abandoning some of its former lines of investigations or shifting to more 

basic aspects. Research in the rare sugars, for example, turned to wider 

studies in carbohydrate chemistry and in radioactive carbohydrates. Much 

of the basic work in plastics, leather, paper, rubber, and other organic ma- terials became centered in the new science of high polymers. in optical 

glass, production was sharply curtailed and research shifted to the theory and 

constitution of glass in general. Because of the delay imposed by the Korean 

war, it was 1957 before all production of optical glass ceased and the plant was dismantled.6° 

Still another Bureau activity, its member participation in the work of 

the American Standards Association, diminished after 1948 when the as- sociation was incorporated under the laws of New York State. As a result, 

the Department of Commerce and other Federal agencies withdrew from 

active participation in the administrative affairs of the association, although 

members of the Bureau continued to serve on the council, boards, and technical committees of the association, as they do to the present day.61 

Hearings * * * 1947, p. 203; Hearings * * * 1948, p. 290; Hearings * * * 1950, 

p. 483. 

In final justification of Bureau funds, Dr. Condon found, at the request of the subcommittee, that the estimate of total appropriations for all Federal research and development in the 1948 budget came to $730 million, of which $10 million, including con- struction, equipment, and facilities, represented the Bureau's share (Hearings * * * 

1948, pp. 299—300). 

NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. 218, 230—231; Annual Report 1951, p. 36; NBS Consolidated Report on Projects, fiscal year 1958, Project 0902—40—4408; interview with 

Clarence H. Hahner, May 6, 1964. 

NBS Report 6227, "American Standards Association, Inc." (1958), pp. 11—12 and app. 

8. The propriety of NBS membership, on the premise that the Bureau was more con- sumer-directed than ASA, was first raised in memo, Soliciter, Department of Commerce, 

for Under Secretary of the Department, June 11, 194.3. NBS and Federal withdrawal was also urged in memo, EUC for Secretary of Commerce Harriman, Oct. 16, 1946, based on the doubtful legal grounds of the mixed membership and as misleading to the public 

(correspondence in NARG 40, Secretary of Commerce, file 75388/18). The formal 

resignation of the NBS and Department of Commerce from ASA was accepted in letter, 

Secretary ASA to Secretary of Commerce, July 29, 1948 ("General Correspondence Files 

of the Director, 1945—1955"). 
45O THE NEW' WORLD OF SCiENCE (1946-51) 

One whole division at the Bureau, commodity standards, a recent con- solidation of the trade standards and simplified practices division, was transferred with its staff of 30 out of the Bureau to the Office of Technical Services in the Department of Commerce in July 1950. Essentially nontechnical 

in nature, and with minor justification under Bureau legislation, the division 

had little relevance to the postwar mission of the Bureau, to provide standards of physical measurement.62 

Talk of reducing routine testing, as an impediment to the scientific 

work of the Bureau, met strenuous objections from both inside and outside 

the Bureau. Some lines, such as clinical thermometer testing, were sub. 

sequently discontinued, and the workload in testing electric lamps, cement 

and other large-scale Federal purchases was somewhat lightened by resorting to statistical analysis test procedures. But while some routine calibrating 

and testing decreased, that of materials and equipment and the calibration of 

instruments increased steadily through the 1950's and 1960's.63 To share the 

administrative burden on division and section chiefs, responsibility for all 

testing was subsequently centered in a new Associate Director for Testing. 

Plans to increase fundamental research and reduce technological re- search foundered on a simple economic fact. The military services and the 

Atomic Energy Commission had vast sums available for research in the new technologies, and the Bureau had the staff, facilities, and knowledge in t:hese 

fields. As the principal legacy of World War I had been new fields of in. 

dustrial research, so that of World War II brought to the Bureau the realms 

of electronics and nuclear energy. Both offered as much opportunity for 

pure research as for applied research and technical development. For that 

reason, the technology could not be refused. 

Thus in 1947, with many wartime programs still uncompleted, the 

Bureau reported military research still "a considerable portion" of the total 

work of the Bureau. By 1951, in the midst of a new emergency, the greater 

part of Bureau research was again concerned with national defense projects.64 

For this research the Bureau acquired a great array of new tools: an electron microscope, the first of its kind ever constructed, using energies up 

Letter, Secretary of Commerce Sawyer to EUC, May 26, 1950, and attached corre- spondence ("General Correspondence Files of the Director, 1945—1955," Box 4). 

a:, Tests, calibrations, and standard samples in 1946 had an estimated value of $1.2 

million. By 1960, test and calibration fees alone amounted to $2.7 million, and by 1963 to $3.4 million (NBS Annual Reports). 

" NBS Annual Report 1947, p. vii; Annual Report 1951, p. 1. "Three-fourths of the 

total effort * * * is directed toward meeting vital requirements of the defense program" (NBS BuMemo 52—11, Sept. 17, 1951). 
TECHNOLOGICAL• VS. BASIC RESEARCH 451 

to 1.4 million volts, for research in metallurgy and electron optics; 6.5 and a 

magnetic electron spectrometer, for the study of the beta- and gamma-ray 

spectra of radioactive isotopes and measurement of their disintegration 

schemes and nuclear energy levels.66 A mass spectrometer was obtained with 

the help of the Office of Naval Research, for precise measurement of nuclear 

masses. It was to be used initially for research in the components of synthetic rubbers.67 A 50-million-volt betatron was also acquired, for studies in 

protection and proper shielding against high-energy radiation; 68 and a 1.5- 

million-volt X-ray tube, for an investigation of the broad X-ray beams used in 

medical and industrial radiography.6" Still another new "tool" was the 

Bureau's ultrasonic laboratory for special studies of the properties of gases 

and liquids, employing sound waves of extremely high frequency.7° 

In the field of electronics, military and naval ordnance projects predominated, including advanced design work on nonrotating proximity fuzes; 

development of electronic and servomechanism controls for an advanced 

guided missile, the Kingfisher series; development of a proximity fuze for 

guided missiles; and refinement of the toss bombing device, the aircraft bomb 

director. Important to these projects was the research initiated in the basic 

elements of electronic computing machines, and the investigation of electronic 

components in a new electron tube laboratory set up at the Bureau. A 

secondary purpose of the laboratory was to apply its knowledge of electronic 

instrumentation and controls to measurement problems in the other divisions 

of the Bureau71 

Apart from the highly classified work on proximity fuzes for guided 

missiles, the research in electronics centered on electron tubes, printed circuits, and automatic computers. The Bureau designed special equipment 

NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. xv, 214—215. For the Bureau's new microsectioning procedure involving organic materials, in high polymer studies employing the electron 

microscope, see RP2020 (Newman, Borysko, and Swerdlow, 1949) and Hearings * * * 1950 (Feb. 23, 1950), p. 2169. 

NBS Annual Report 1946, p. 183. 

LC791, "The mass spectrometer" (1945); NBS Annual Report 1946, p. 193. 

"NBS Annual Report 1946, p. 184; Hearings * * * 1948, p. 356. With the installation 

of the first betratron in late 1949, the Bureau ordered a second unit, a 180-million-volt 

synchrotron (Hearings * * * 1951, p. 217; Science, 105, 230, 1947). Unlike the 

conventional X-ray machine used in the treatment of most cancer patients, the betatron is 

used against deepseated cancers, producing high-speed electrons that on striking an internal target produce X rays. Its electron beam can also be used directly to irradiate a tumor. The machines at the Bureau were for studies in basic radiation physics, not 

medical research or treatment of patients. 

° NBS Annual Report 1946, p. 184. 

'° NBS Annual Report 1948, p. 221. 

NBS Annual Report 1946, pp 201—203. 
'a 

452 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

for measuring the characteristics of the growing family of electron tubes to 

determine, among other things, the principles by which their life service might 

be extended.72 A new field of research was the semiconductors, crystalline 

materials of high purity, such as germanium and silicon. With their electrical conductivity between that of a metal and an insulator, and their unique 

ability to change their resistance characteristics, they opened new vistas in 

the development of communication equipment.73 They appeared first in the 

crystal diode developed during the war for radar, and subsequently in the 

crystal triode or transistor, as replacements for the vacuum tubes in amplifiers. 

The ubiquitous pocket transistor radio was less than a decade away. 

New advances were made in printed circuits. first devised for the 

proximity fuze, that substitute printed wiring, resistors, and coils for the 

conventional rigging in electronic devices. Along with subminiature tubes, 

semiconductors, and circuit design, the printed circuit established a whole 

72 NBS Annual Report 1948, p. 244; Annual Report 1949, p. 80. 72 NBS Annual Report 1949, P. 21; Annual Report 1951, p. 4. 

The four stages of an early printed electronic circuit: the plate, the circuit wiring, addition 

of the resistors, and final assembly with miniature tubes. 
TECHNOLOGICAL VS. BASIC RESEARCH 453 

new field of electronic miniaturization for which the Bureau was to provide 

useful engineering data.74 

Problems submitted to the Bureau by the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics 

included devising reasonably stable and long-lived electronic components 

capable of withstanding rapid changes in temperatures, and design of miniaturized amplifiers with printed circuits. Within a year the Bureau produced a radar-type amplifier with the same electrical performance but one-quarter 

the usual size, and a miniature battery-powered radio transceiver, for use as an air-sea rescue device. A miniature radio range receiver, a navigation 

aid for the Navy, which fitted into a sealed envelope 6 by 5 by 13/4 inches, had 

the range and power of a conventional 12-tube unit. These amplifiers and 

receivers were made possible in part by a Bureau-built rotary printer that 

applied printed circuits on either flat or cylindrical surfaces.75 A printed 

resistor, applied by a silk-screen process (later replaced by an adhesive-tape 

resistor), and a tiny ceramic capacitor, the latter devised at the request of the 

Signal Corps, contributed to still more rugged and efficient miniaturization.76 

Much of the work on electronic tubes, printed circuits, and miniaturization saw its most important application in the automatic electronic 

computing machine project set up at the Bureau for Army Ordnance early 

in 1946. Two decades earlier, about 1925, the present era of mechanical 

computation began when Dr. Vannevar Bush and associates at MIT constructed a large-scale computer run by electric motors. This and an improved model completed in 1942, both requiring hand computations as an 

adjunct to the machines, were extensively used during the war in the com- putation of artillery firing tables. The modern electronic computer had its 

genesis in the work of Dr. John W. Mauchly, physicist at the Moore School of 

Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. In 1942, convinced that 

the mechanical calculation of firing tables could be speeded up by the application of electronics, he began the study of such a machine. Four years later, 

with J. Presper Eckert, Jr., as designer, the Electronic Numerical Integrater 

and Automatic Computer (ENIAC) was completed, performing 5,000 additions a second, where mechanical calculators handled 10 a second.77 

C468, "Printed circuit techniques" (Bruneui and Curtis, 1947); M192, "New ad. 

vances in printed circuits" (1948), a symposium discussing their application to radio, 

radar, TV, guided missiles, airborne electronic equipment, computers, and industrial 

control equipment. 

"NBS Annual Report 1949, pp. 49, 59, 61; Annual Report 1951, pp. 69—70. 

'° NBS Annual Report 1951, pp. 2, 71; C530, "Printed circuit techniques: an adhesivetape resistor system" (B. L. Davis, 1952). 

Eckert, Mauchly, et al., "Description of ENIAC," Applied Mathematics Panel Report 

171.2R (NDRC, November 1945); Jeremy Bernstein, The Analytical Engine: Computers—Past, Present and Future (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 50, 54—55. 
454 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

Capable of handling large amounts of statistical data with revolutionary speed, thoroughness, and efficiency, the new machines permitted, among 

other things, the solution of equations hitherto, from the standpoint of time, 

impossible to solve, and were to take the guesswork out of problems previously 

undertaken by constructing costly experimental equipment, such as the wind 

tunnels used in aerodynamic studies. 

The computer project at the Bureau was first assigned to the machines 

development section of the applied mathematics division. An increasing 

amount of its component research, however, was carried out by another com- puter section, that under Dr. Chester H. Page and Samuel Alexander in Dr. 

Astin's electronics division. in the latter division, utilizing its research in 

specialized electron tubes, high-speed memory organs, transference means, 

input and output equipment (a system of electric typewriters and magnetic 

recording devices derived from standard teletype machines), and transcribef 

and converter elements, the first Bureau computer was built. A crucial 

breakthrough was the substitution of the new germanium crystal diodes for 

electron tubes in all switching and computing elements, with tubes used only 

for power amplification.77 

In 1947, a year after the Bureau began its research on computer 

components, the Bureau of the Census and the Office of Naval Research, with 

assistance from the Air Force, contracted with the Bureau for the construction 

of two full-scale computers at an estimated cost of $300,000 each. Their 

design was assigned to the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corp., the Raytheon Manufacturing Co., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts 

College. One was to be assembled in the electronics division in Washington, 

the other at the Bureau's Institute for Numerical Analysis, recently organized 

at the University of California at Los Angeles.78 

Presiding over the computer project, Dr. Condon saw the Bureau as "the centralized national computer facility" for the Government, the Washington unit serving the eastern half of the Nation, that at Los Angeles the 

NBS Annual Report 1946, p. 202; Annual Report 1948, pp. 240, 256; Annual Report 

1950, p. 81. 

The germanitim or silicon crystal as transistor, first developed by Bardeen, Brattain, 

and Shockley, physicists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, in 1948, conducts electrical 

current in much the same way as a vacuum tube. Unlike the tube, which boils off 

electrons flow as directed by an electrical field, the transistor operates without 

heating and there is nothing to burn out (Bernstein, The Analytical Engine, p. 68). 

Negotiations began with memo, Director NBS for Director of the Census, Apr. 26, 1946, 

sub: Design and construction of electronic tabulation equipment ("General Correspondence Files of the Director, 1945—1955") ; NBS Annual Report 1947, p. 187; Hearings * * * 1949, p. 523. 
455 

The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC), its cover doors removed, with the 

operator's table in the foreground. 

From left to right, the nine racks of the computer include the control unit, the arithrnetic unit, the time pulse generator, the clock pulse generator, the magnetic wire and 

magnetic tape input-output unit, controls and power supplies, and electronic circuitry 

for the punched tape input-output system. The small panels at the bottom of each rack 

hold "grasshopper" fuses to protect the circuits above them. 
456 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

western half. Centralizing in the Bureau the solution of complex mathematical problems confronting Federal agencies in aeronautics, atomic and nuclear 

physics, ballistics, and guided missiles, as well as analysis of massive data 

problems, would avoid duplicating computer facilities in other agencies and 

make maximum use of the Bureau facility, as was being done in radio 

propagation. 

The "central facility" idea was short lived. Other agencies wanted 

their own computers, and at the request of the Army Map Service and the 

Air Comptroller, the Bureau entered into additional contracts with Eckert 

and Mauchly.8° 

While awaiting design results, the Bureau began work on a small-scale 

unit, the NBS Interim Computer, with which to test components, train operators, and handle computational work in its laboratories. The successful 

operation of the unit led to its expansion, with Air Comptroller support, as a full-scale machine. In the autumn of 1949, 20 months after beginning 

construction, it emerged as the National Bureau of Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) •81 The fastest general purpose, automatically sequenced electronic com- puter then in operation, SEAC was dedicated on June 20, 1950. Failure of a single one of its more than 100,000 connections and components, even for a millionth of a second, would result in computer misf unction. Yet operating 

often on a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day week, SEAC performed for 4,000 hours in 

its first 9 months without a malfunction. Besides handling a number of 

classified problems for the military services and the Atomic Energy Commission, it carried out computations on electronic circuit design, optical lens 

calculations, statistical sorting and tabulating studies for Social Security 

Hearings * * * 1948, pp. 350—351. The idea persisted, in NBS Annual Report 1950, 

pp. 71—72, and Annual Report 1951, p. 67. 

'° Discussed in Hearings C * * 1956 (Apr. 18, 1955), p. 29. 

NBS Annual Report 1948, p. 239; Annual Report 1949, pp. 64—65; Hearings * * • 

1951 (Feb. 23, 1950), p. 2175; Hearings * * * 1952 (Apr. 10, 1951), pp. 502—504; 

interview with Dr. Edward W. Cannon, July 7, 1964. 

In 1950 there were no more than six or eight electronic computers in operation. By 

1960 over 10,000 of one type or another had been built. Eckert and Mauchly's Electronic Digital Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC), for the Ordnance Ballistics 

Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, was completed in 1950. Between 1951 and 1953 

Eckert and Mauchly, at Remington Rand, constructed six Universal Automatic Computers (UNIVAC), the development and assembly of the first of these commercial 

stored-program computers monitored by NBS for the Bureau of the Census. See Office 

of Naval Research report, "A survey of automatic digital computers" (Washington, 

D.C., 1953). 
4. 

-1 

Assembly of the chassis of the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAG). SWAC was designed and constructed by the 

Institute for Numerical Analysis staff to provide a tool for research in numerical analysis. Its relatively high speed resulted from 

its very rapid cathode-ray.tube type of memory. 
458 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946—Si) 

and Census, design of supersonic nozzles, and computed data on the crystallography of cement compounds and on the penetration of X rays.52 

SEAC's high computing speed made it possible to add or subtract pairs 

of 11-digit numbers 1,100 times a second and multiply or divide them 330 

times a second. It completed arithmetical operations of addition or subtraction alone in 50 microseconds, multiplication or division problems in 

2,500 microseconds. In a problem of pure mathematics, the machine was directed to compute the factors of any given number up to 100 billion. It 

rapidly determined that the number 99,999,999,977 has no factors and is 

therefore a prime number. To do this the machine had to divide 99,999,- 

999,977 by 80,000 different divisors, and solved in 30 minutes a problem that 

would take a man 2 months working 8 hours a day with a desk calculator.83 

Dedicated on August 17, 1950, but not fully operative until early in 

1952 was the Bureau's second machine, the Western Automatic Computer 

(SWAC), at the Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los Angeles. It was to 

handle special problei-is of the aircraft industry on the west coast for the 

Navy Department, as well as engineering, physics, and mathematical calculations required by the Bureau institute and by other Federal agencies 

in the area.84 

In the course of work on input and output mechanisms for the first 

Bureau computer, Jacob Rabinow of the electronic division's ordnance development laboratory invented a unique type of electromagnetic clutch. 

Widely heralded as a new physical principle, the clutch was based on the 

discovery that frictional forces between solid surfaces and certain types of 

fluid media (in this case, an oil suspension of iron powder) can be controlled 

Annual Report 1951, pp. 2, 75—76. On the use of SEAC to make certain of the calculations for the design of the H-bomb, 

Edward Teller in "The work of many people," Science, 121, 273 (1955), wrote: "With 

the help of this facility [a * * * very efficient machinel, initial details of the plans were ironed out in a few weeks rather than in tedious months." 

NBS Annual Report 1950, pp. 80—81; S. N. Alexander, "The NBSEAC," and Ralph J. 

Slutz, "Engineering experience with the SEAC," Proc. AIEE—IRE Computer Conference, 

February 1952, pp. 84, 90. 

A second SEAC, DYSEAC, intended for Bureau research alone, was completed in July 

1953 but subsequently went to the Signal Corps. See NBS Report 1951, "System specifications for DYSEAC" (Alan L. Leiner, 1952), and C551, "Computer development 

(SEAC and DYSEAC) at the NBS" (Alexander, Leiner, Slutz, Ct al., 1955). Other 

machines based on SEAC were FLAC for the Air Force Missile Test Center at Cocoa, Fla., 

and MIDAC for the University of Michigan. 

NBS Annual Report 1950, pp. 1, 2, 80; Annual Report 1952, p. 2. 

SEAC, patterned after EDVAC, employed an acoustic delay line or serial memory. 

SWAC, patterned after a British computer, had an electrostatic or parallel memory. 

The two computers were about equally complex, but SEAC had a 512-word memory to SWAC's 256-word memory. Interview Dr. E. W. Cannon, July 7, 1964. 
The of the magnetic fluid clutch is based on creating a magnetic field that causes iron particles suspended in oil to become highly viscous and grab together into 

an almost solid mass. in the magnetic clutch this oil.and-iron fluid is contained between steel plates. The 

plates, which operate independently in the absence of electric current, lock together 

when the current flows into the fluid. 

The model car, above, demonstrates the possible use of the principle in automotive 

vehicles, where two of the magnetic clutches, with suitable gearing, provide the main 

power transmission. 

459 
460 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

by a magnetic field. The principle of Rabinow's magnetic fluid clutch had 

application not only in computers but, with modifications. in servomecha. 

nisms, automatic machines, and possibly even in automobile transmissions.85 

The patent for the clutch, in accordance with Bureau policy, was assigned to 

"the public interest." So great was that interest that within a year almost 

2,000 industrial engineers visited the Bureau to get test data on the 

invention 

Another device that came out of the electronics division about the 

same time was the NBS electronic currency counter, a sensing instrument 

that automatically counted worn paper bills at the rate of 30,000 per hour. 

The device instantly rejected packets of bills returned by banks to the Treasury 

for burning that contained more or less than the 100 per packet required by 

regulations. Since 6 tons of currency are redeemed daily—about $40 million 

worth, mostly in $1 bills—it was estimated that use of the electronic counter, 

NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. vii, 240; Annual Report 1950, p. 78. For the Bureau's 

high-speed piezoelectric crystal clutch, a nonmagnetic type, also used in computers, see Annual Report 1951, p. 74. 

"Hearings * * * 1950 (Mar. 9, 1949), p. 490; correspondence with Jacob Rabinow, 

M'iv 5, 1964. 

Dr. Condon of the Bureau and Secretary of the Treasury John F. Snider, right, demonstrate the NBS electronic currency counter with stacks of worn-out $1 bills. 

The assembly on top of the cabinet consists of the turntable and feeding mechanisms 

and the phototube-light-mirror system. The cabinet houses a binary counter, control 

circuits, and an air compressor. 
TECHNOLOGICAL VS. BASIC RESEARCH 461 

eliminating hand counting, would save the Government almost a quarter of a million dollars annually.87 

When planning for the computers first began, the Bureau, with Office 

of Naval Research and War Department support, established its National 

Applied Mathematics Laboratories, in order to centralize mathematical re- search in the Government and begin programming studies for the computers.88 

The laboratories comprised the Institute for Numerical Analysis, at Los 

Angeles; and in Washington, a computation laboratory, set up with the group 

brought from the Mathematical Tables Project in New York; a statistical 

engineering laboratory; and an electronic computing machine development 

laboratory. 

The numerical analysis group, in addition to its preliminary studies 

for SWAC, undertook solution of linear equations in many unknowns and 

the representation of complicated functions in terms of simple, easily com- putable functions. The computation section, besides performing calculations requested by Federal agencies, continued its compilation of highly specialized mathematical tables, particularly those essential to the solution of 

problems in atomic energy, aerodynamics, radio and radar navigation, and 

military ordnance.8° 

Allied to the numerical analysis section was the statistical engineering 

unit, concerned with the application of modern statistical inference to com- plex engineering experiments, to sampling problems, and analysis of data 

arising in physical experiments.90 The computer laboratory sought better 

7NBS Annual Report 1950, pp. 2, 4, 73; Hearings * * 1952 (Apr. 10, 1951), pp. 

462-463. 

NBS Annual Report 1948, p. 256. See John H. Curtiss, "The NAML: a Prospectus" 

(February 1947), intended, as Dr. Condon said in the foreword, as "a strong, easily 

accessible Federal applied mathematics center." 

Described in LC777, "Mathematical tables" (1945), superseded by LC884 (1947); 

NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. 237—238. 00 NBS Annual Report 1947, pp. xii, 187—188. Early tasks set the statistical engineering 

section included the preparation of commercial sampling plans for inclusion in Federal 

specifications and commodity standards. One, made for the Mail Order Association of 

America, was a study of data gathered by the Bureau of Home Economics, Department 

of Agriculture, on body measurements of teenage girls. Flip-and-stature and hip-andmaximum chest girth measurements of 70,000 schoolgirls between the ages of 4 and 17 

years were analyzed and diagramed to provide statistically efficient coverage from which 

garments, patterns, and forms could be sized to assure an accurate fit for a large proportion of the teenage population. A year later the Bureau issued a new commercial standard covering model forms for girls' apparel (NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. 238—239; 

Annual Report 1950, p 87). 

Studies in the field of probability methods centered on stochastic (random) processes, 

employing random samples of an odd number of observations and a time element. 

Applying this statistical technique to sample testing of clinical thermometers permitted 
462 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

techniques for numerical computation and their adaptation to machines, as well as better techniques for training mathematicians in the application of 

numerical methods.ol 

The new age of mathematics, electronics, nuclear physics, tracer re- search, radio propagation, and high polymer research challenged the Bureau 

to provide a host of new fundamental physical standards, physical constants, 

and standard samples. The Bureau also pursued its work on standards in 

more familiar areas, some whose adoption had waited oniy for the end of the 

war. Thus 1948, the year that saw international adoption of absolute values 

for the electrical units, new photometric units, and adoption of a revised 

International Temperature Scale,92 also witnessed, after 30 years of eflort, 

the first real agreement on unification of the screw thread standards of Great 

Britain, Canada, and the United States. Despite Lend-Lease and the common 

border to the north, the screw threads produced in these countries all during 

the war differed sufficiently to prevent their interchangeability, causing severe 

inconvenience and great economic loss. After 3 years of study, an accord 

of unification of the American and British standard systems was signed at 

the Bureau late in 1948 by representatives of the American Standards Association and their British and Canadian counterparts.93 

The year 1948 also marked the near realization of an atomic basis 

for the standard of length. Two decades earlier, the Seventh International 

Conference on Weights and Measures had agreed to seek a definition of the 

meter in terms of light waves.94 Great interest was, therefore, aroused in 

the increased accuracy recently found possible with a new light wave, that 

of an isotopic mercury in vapor form. The sharp spectral line of this isotope 

of mass 198 (Hg'°5) was first observed in 1942 in the Radiation Laboratory 

at the University of California. in 1945 Dr. Meggers obtained a small 

quantity of the mercury isotope, distilled from proof gold exposed to neutrons 

in a chain-reacting pile, from the atomic pile at Oak Ridge.°5 

in precision, reproducibility, and convenience, Meggers found the 

wavelength of the green radiation from the mercury isotope far superior to 

either the standard meter or the wavelength of the red line of cadmium. 

inspection testing of five times as many units in a given time by the same staff. Cement 

testing was put on a similar statistical basis (Annual Report 1948, pp. 238, 251; Annual 

Report 1949, p. 57). 

91 NBS Annual Report 1951, p. 67. 

NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. 201—203; Annual Report 1949, p. 14. For the earlier 

work, see ch. V, p. 246. 98 NBS Annual Report 1949, p. 10; Annual Report 1951, p. 101; Fortune, 38, 86 (1948). 

See ch. VI, pp. 335—336. 

No attempt at the reverse process, changing mercury to gold, as the alchemists of the 

Middle Ages and as a group sponsored by Scientific American in the 1920's tried, was considered. See Sci. Am. 132, 80 (1925), and issues of December 1924 and March 1925. 
TECHNOLOGICAL VS. BASiC RESEARCH 463 

He announced it the ultimate in a length standard.96 Three years later the 

tentative standard was made available to science and industry in the form of 

the NBS-Meggers Mercury 198 Lamp. 

The 13 Meggers lamps initially distributed in 1951 were capable of 

calibration to a precision of 1 part in 100 million, as opposed to the 1 part 

in 10 million possible with the standard meter. With further refinement— 

in particular, the use of an atomic beam of Hg195 instead of the vapor, to 

narrow the line and overcome the slight effect of temperature on the Meg. 

gers lamp—the Bureau looked forward to extending that accuracy to one part 

in a 'billion.97 

Funds for a program to try the atomic beam method were not then 

available and it was 1959 before the work was completed. Meanwhile, the 

Bureau urged adoption of the mercury 198 lamp as the international standard, considering it a simple and excellent working standard for length 

measurements. Although the Russian standards laboratories favored the 

cadmium lamp, the other laboratories abroad settled on the krypton 86 lamp, 

proposed. originally by the Physikalisch.Technische Bundesanstalt (the West 

Meggers, in J. Opt. Soc. Am. 38, 7 (1948), and Sci. Mo. 68, 3 (1949). 

The standard meter, etched on a platinum-iridium bar maintained at the International 

Bureau, had been the world's standard of length since 1889 (see ch. I, p. 30). The 

cadmium line, first proposed by Michelson in 1893, had never been adopted. Though 

widely used, its structure limited the precision attainable. Time, however, and superior 

radiations witnessed notable improvements in the measurement of light waves. Wavelengths of light are still measured with a Michelson-type interferometer. By 

splitting a beam of light, the interferometer permits its speed and wavelength to be 

measured with extraordinary accuracy. Each normal element or isotope of an atomic 

element, when made incandescent with high-frequency radio waves, emits a light with a characteristic and unchanging wavelength of its own. The wavelengths are measured 

in terms of the angstrom, named for A. J. Angstrom who introduced the scale of wave- lengths in 1868, his unit representing the ten-millionth part of a millimeter or meter. 

The light waves from some elements and isotopes can be measured more accurately 

than others, among them the red line of cadmium vapor, the orange line of krypton 

gas, the green light of mercury vapor, and, sharper than these, the green light of the 

unidirectional mercury atomic beam. Under excitation, the radiation of the atoms of 

these elements or isotopes is seen as measurable fringes of light between the parallel 

metallic-coated plates of the interferometer. 

In establishing a standard of length, a gage block, meter bar or similar known quantity 

is measured directly against the wavelength seen in the interferometer, the spectroscopist 

measuring the half-width of the wave under observation and from that deriving precise 

values, in terms of angstroms, for the length standard. See NBS M248 (1962), pp. 9—11. °' NBS Annual Report 1947, p. 197; RP2091, "Lamps and wavelengths of mercury 198" 

(Meggers and Westfall, 1950); NBS Annual Report 1951, pp. 6, 29. 
464 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

German successor to the PTR), and in October 1960 the krypton lamp was adopted as a new international standard of length.98 

Other developments in the postwar period, discussed later in the 

section on nuclear physics, included a standard of time, determined by an atomic clock; a primary neutron standard; and a fundamental nuclear con- stant, the gyromagnetic ratio of the proton. 

Much new work was done in the field of physical constants. The 

Bureau made available comprehensive data on the infrared 

spectra of chemical compounds for use in research analysis. It compiled 

tables of selected values of chemical thermodynamic properties for the simple 

sulfur compounds and the compounds found in liquefied petroleum gases. 

R. L. Barger and K. G. Kessler, and atomic-beam-emitted Hg198 wavelengths," 

J. Opt. Soc. Am. 51, 827 (1961). - In possible extenuation of the European adoption of the krypton lamp was the fact that 

at that time only the United States had reactors to supply mercury 198 (interview with 

Dr. Condon, Oct. 29, 1963). 

Objective comparisons made in neutral laboratories reportedly agreed in general that 

krypton provided the highest precision. Despite the krypton lamp standard, metrology 

and spectroscopy laboratories both here and abroad use the Meggers lamp for its com- bination of accuracy and simplicity. Laser sources may yet supersede the atomic beam 

principle as the ultimate in sharpness in a spectral line standard. Interviews with Dr. 

Meggers, Mar. 13, 1962, and July 7, 1964; A. G. McNish, "Lasers for length measure- ment," Science, 146, 177 (1964). 

Dr. lie ggers observing the spectral line of the mercury isotope of mass 198, a potential 

basis for an atomic standard of length. 
TECHNOLOGICAL VS. BASIC RESEARCH 465 

And science and industry also needed the made by the Bureau 

of the dielectric constants of liquids, both inorganic and organic.99 

Equally extensive work was done in standard samples, the array of 

materials maintained by the Bureau and certified as to their chemical com- position or certain physical or chemical properties. Begun in 1905 with 

the preparation of four types of cast iron, by 1911 the Bureau stock com- prised 37 samples of steels, brasses, ores, limestone, and sugars, and 100 

standard combustion samples used to standardize In 1951 

the Bureau listed more than 500 distinct materials, of which 225 were certified 

for chemical composition and some 90 of these prepared specifically for 

spectrographic analysis. Others certified such properties as acidity, viscosity, 

melting point, density, index of refraction, and heat of combustion. Over 

25,000 samples were prepared and distributed that year, for the use of Federal 

agencies and industry in checking tests, controlling manufacturing operations, 

and settling disputes between producers and consumers.101 

Among the newest samples were a tin-bearing steel, a tungsten steel, 

and two nickel-chromium.molybdenum steels. An additional 32 standard 

samples of hydrocarbons brought the total of these compounds to 92, and 15 new standards for color or tint made 28 color standards available. Other 

samples included radioactive iodine and phosphorus for use in tracer microg. 

raphy, radium gamma.ray standards, radioactive carbon and radon standards, 

and a series of pH standards. 

Work on the pH samples had begun back in 1940 at the urging of the 

National Canners Association, of dairymen, dry cleaners, textile manufac. 

turers and other groups. The control of acidity was also a problem in 

manufacturing pharmaceuticals, paper, leather, dyes, sugar refining, and 

biological materials. Lack of a universally accepted definition of the pH 

scale, or hydrogen ion concentration, by which the degree of acidity was measured, resulted in frequent confusion and disagreement.'°2 After almost 

8 years of study and consultation with industry, the Bureau established four standardized substances, representing pH 2, 3.5, 10, and 

NBS Annual Report 1950, p. 50; Annual Report 1951, p. 42; R. D. Huntoon and 

A. G. McNish, "Present status of research on the physical constants * * s," Nuovo 

Cimento (Rome), 6, 146 (1957). 

See ch. II, p. 93; NBS Annual Report 1911, P. 80. 101 Harry A. Bright, "Standard samples program of the NBS," Anal. Chem. 23, 1544 

(1951); C398 "Standard samples" (1932) and Supplement (1946); NBS Annual Report 

1951, p. 85; C552 "Standard samples" (1954), second ed. (1957); James I. Hoffman, 

"The evolution of certified reference materials," Anal. Chem. 31, 1934 (1959). '°' Hearings * * 1940 (Apr. 21, 1939), pp. 162, 379; Hearings * * * 1946 (Dec. 9, 

1939), pp. 136—139; RP1495 "Provisional pH values for certain standard buffer solutions" (R. G. Bates, W. J. Hamer, et al., 1942); LC993, "Standardization of pH meas- urements" (1950). 
466 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

11.7, as the basis for a new pH scale. With certified samples of these substances, laboratories were at last provided with means for checking their own scales and maintaining uniformity of procedure.103 

A series of important postwar projects began shortly after an Army 

plane, the XS—1, exceeded the speed of sound (760 miles per hour at sea level) for the first time on October 14, 1947. At the request of the National 

Advisory Committee on Aeronautics and the Navy Department, search was made for engineering and operational data on air turbulence and its effects 

at supersonic speeds. 

The inauguration of supersonic flight also led to new work at the 

Bureau in high temperature ceramics and the development of a new high 

temperature ceramic coating, for the turbine blades of jet engines and the 

liners of rocket motors. Significant studies were conducted on combustion 

at high altitudes in jet, turbojet, and ramjet engines and thrust augmenters. 

With special instruments devised for the tests, new measurements were made on rubber and metal reactions at extremely high and low temperatures. But 

much remained to be done. Jet propulsion and supersonic flight called for 

almost total revision of data on fuels and the extension of many measurements to higher temperatures, pressures, and velocities.'04 

At the other extreme was a new phase of the Bureau's low temperature 

work, begun with the acquisition of an improved helium liquefier in 

for a program of basic research in superconductivity.'05 

The phenomenon of superconductivity—the disappearance in certain 

materials of resistance to an electrical current at very low temperatures— 

seemed a particularly challenging field in low-temperature physics, its spectacular effects giving promise of a basic insight into some of the fundamental 

properties of matter. Several lines of investigation were started, including 

studies of the anomalous properties of liquid helium II, an analogue of 

103 NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. 219—220: Annual Report 1950, pp. 4-6--47. 

An interesting standard sample was the 15 gallons of very pure isooctane (2,2,4-trimethylpentane) and normal heptane prepared by the Bureau in the late 1940's and put up in 

ampoules for the American Petroleum Institute as ultimate primary standards for the 

octane rating of gasolines sold throughout the country. Subsequently the Phillips 

Petroleum Co. prepared good batches of both isooctane and heptane as working standards, but the Bureau ampoules, known as "the gold-plated standards," are still maintained at the API research laboratory at Carnegie Institute of Technology to settle 

disputes. Interview with Thomas Mears, Sept. 15, 1964. 

NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. 221, 223; Annual Report 1949, pp. 15—16, 18, 49; Annual 

Report 1950, pp. 8, 58, 64, 66; Annual Report 1951, pp. 24, 43. See also LC832, 

"Bibliography on gas turbines, jet propulsion, and rocket power plants" (1946) 

LC872, "Gas turbines and jet propulsion" (1947); C482 (1949), superseded by C509 

(1951), on the same subjects. 

'o' For earlier note on superconductivity, see ch. V, p. 247. 
NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIO PROPAGATION 467 

helium I, its normal liquid form. Liquid helium II, cooled to 2.19 °K or 

lower, acquires properties so unique that it is often described as a fourth 

state of matter.106 

The studies in superconductivity led to the almost simultaneous discovery at the Bureau and at Rutgers University of a new and wholly un- expected relationship, called the isotope effect in superconductivity. A con- nection was observed between loss of electrical resistance at very low tempera. 

tures and the mass of the atomic nucleus. The pure mercury isotope Hg'98, 

it was found, becomes superconducting at a temperature about 0.02 °K 

higher than natural mercury. From the discovery that heavier mercury 

isotopes react at lower temperatures than the lighter ones, it was inferred that 

the must exert an important effect on the superconducting properties 

of the metal.107 The finding appeared to offer a key to a basic understanding of how superconductivity comes about. 

Still other lines of research in cryogenics were to be explored after a new laboratory was erected in Boulder, Colo, in 195L 

NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIO PROPAGATION 

The postwar research program of the Bureau's atomic physics division 

ranged widely, from investigations of intense neutron sources and of artificial radioactive isotopes to safety precautions at atomic plants and measurement techniques. The wartime studies in radiation hazards, atomic metallurgy, and atomic energy levels continued when their administration was transferred from the Manhattan District to the Atomic Energy Commission. 

The AEC also undertook support of a number of studies at the Bureau in 

atomic and molecular spectra, radiometry, electron optics, mass spectrornetry, 

X rays, radioactivity, and determination of atomic and nuclear 

An early achievement was construction of a national primary neutron 

standard, to serve as a reference unit of neutron intensity for the quantitative 

measurement of the strength of neutron sources and fluxes. In the absence 

of the standard, such measurements had previously been possible with an accuracy of only about 20 percent. The new standard, consisting of a beryllium sphere with a radium bromide center, made possible intercomparison of neutron measurements in other laboratories and later proved in106 On the Kelvin scale of absolute temperatures, zero is equivalent to C or —459.7° F. 

E. Maxwell, "Isotopic effect in the superconductivity of mercury," Phys. Rev. 78, 

477 (1950); NBS Annual Report 1950, pp. 7—8, 32—33; Annual Report 1951, pp. 16, 26. 

NBS Annual Report 1948, p. 216; Annual Report 1951, p. 36. 
468 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

valuable both in the operation of nuclear reactors and in neutron irradiation 

research.'°9 

Accurate determination was first made at the Bureau of a fundamental 

nuclear constant, the gyromagnetic ratio of the proton, in absolute units, 

which previously had been made in terms of relative values of other physical 

constants. An important contribution to the knowledge of nuclear phenomena, it provided a simple and convenient standard for measuring the absolute 

value of magnetic fields, knowledge necessary in the use of such scientific 

apparatus as cyclotrons, mass spectrographs, and beta-ray spectrometers, and 

in such industrial equipment as servomechanisms and electromagnets.11° 

Refinement of application of this constant led to a more precise knowledge 

of such other important atomic constants as the magnetic moment of the 

L. F. Curtiss and A. Carson, "Reproducibility of photoneutron standards," Phys. 

Rev. 76, 1412 (1949); NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. ix, 213. A refinement of the 

standard, based on a new determination of its emission rate, was reported in NBS 

Annual Report 1956, p. 36. "' NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. ix, 214. 

The NBS standard of neutron intensity, a solid beryllium sphere, 4 centimeters in diameter, enclosing a capsule of platinum-iridium containing a grain of radium bromide 

compressed to maximum density. 

Neutrons are emitted in the sphere by the action of the gamma rays from the radium 

at a constant rate of 1.1 million per second. 

The establishment of a national neutron standard was made imperative by the 

increasing importance of neutrons as bombarding particles in physical and biological 

research. 
NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIO PROPAGATION 469 

proton, the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron, and the first precise determination of the proton moment in absolute units.11' 

A new instrument, the omegatron, also came out of the atomic physics 

division. Basically a miniature cyclotron about the size of a pack of cigarettes, the omegatron made possible determination of the values of several 

important atomic constants with much higher precision than heretofore. In 

addition, the faraday, previously determined solely by electrochemical 

measurements, was for the first time evaluated directly by physical methods, 

the preliminary value obtained representing a slight but significant degree of 

greater precision over that obtained with either the silver or iodine voltameter. The omegatron also facilitated sharper determination of the magnetic 

moment of the hydrogen 

The formulation within a year or two of three proposed basic standards—length, determined by the green line of mercury 198; the gyromagnetic 

ratio of the proton, a constant to which the standard of mass might be re- ferred; and time, in the constant natural frequency of the Bureau's atomic 

clock (see below, pp. 476—477)—led some at the Bureau to hope that "a com- plete set of primary atomic standards" might not be far ofT. They saw an increasing number of primary references for physical measurements—the 

independent and arbitrarily defined units of the last century—replaced by a set of working definitions comprising an atomic meter, atomic second, atomic 

ampere, atomic newton, atomic coulomb, and atomic kilogram."3 

The year 1946 saw the inception of Bureau research in tracer 

raphy, that is, the tracking of the movement of radioactive atoms through 

organic systems, and later through inorganic systems as well. With radioactive isotopes made available by the Atomic Energy Commission (iodine 131, 

cobalt 60, phosphorus 32, sodium 22), tracers rapidly became an important 

tool of research in chemistry, biology, medicine, and industry. 

A comparison check made by the Bureau disclosed discrepanices in 

medical and other research laboratories of several hundred percent in the 

determinations of amounts of radioactive material in samples of substances 

being used for medical treatment. The Bureau at once began work on standards for quantitative measurement of each of the tracer elements. Before 

H. A. Thomas, R. L. Driscoll, and J. A. Hipple, "Measurement of the proton move- ment in absolute units," Phys. Rev. 75, 902 (1949), and Phys. Rev. 78, 787 (1950); 

Driscoll, Thomas, and Hipple, "The absolute value of the gyromagnetic ratio of the 

proton," Phys. Rev. 79, 339 (1950) ; NBS Annual Report 1949, pp. 19—20; Annual Report 

1951, p. 29. 112 J• A. Hipple, H. Sommer, and H. A. Thomas, "A precise method of determining the 

faraday by magnetic resonance," Phys. Rev. 1877 (1949); NBS Annual Report 

1950, pp. 6, 34. " R. D. Huntoon and U. Fano, "Atomic definition of primary standards," Nature, 166 

167 (1950). 
470 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

long, standard samples of these isotopic elements were made available, as- suring uniformity in the tracers in use.114 

One of the first tracers produced for industrial research was chromium 51, a quantity of which the Bureau metallurgists acquired for study 

from the AEC. Preliminary work with this isotope promised to shed new light on the mechanism of electrodeposition, by identifying the type of chronhium ions actually reduced to Perhaps the widest publicity on the new tracers, making them generally known to the public, was that given to 

carbon 14, the radioactive atom found in normal carbon 12. 

As a constituent of the atmosphere—about one in a millon carbon 

atoms is radioactive—C14 is present in every living or once living thing. 

Made only during the life-cycle, production of C14 ceases at death and begins 

its slow but measurable decay, disintegrating at a constant rate. With a "half-life" on the order of 5,700 years, the time required for a given quantity of C'4 to decay to one-half its original amount, the measurement of the 

remaining radiocarbon in bone, horn, shells, seeds, wood, charcoal, peat, 

or any organic matter in history, makes it possible to establish a method of 

absolute dating. By amplifying the exceedingly faint radioactive pulse or 

discharge with an ultrasensitive Geiger counter and measuring it against a calibrated scale, the age of the substance, up to 20,000 to 30,000 years, can 

be determined with considerable precision.116 

Bureau interest in C'4 was less in its proficiency as a kind of "atomic 

clock" than as a tracer in carbohydrate research. The Bureau turned after 

the war from sugar research to fundamental work in carbohydrates in general, especially in the molecular structure of sugars and associated com- pounds. By 1951, under AEC sponsorship, glucose, mannose, galactose, and 

lactose were prepared for the first time with an atom of C'4 in their carbon 

chain for chemical and biological research. 

How tracer research proceeded was seen not long after in a Bureau investigation for the Army Surgeon General's Office. Before the medical laboratories of the Surgeon General could determine the possibility of using the 

commercial sugar compound, Dextran, as a blood plasma extender or even plasma substitute it had to be tagged, in order to track it through its physiological life cycle. The Bureau found a way to label the carbonyl group in 

the compound and patented the method. The technique of inserting C'4 in 

114 NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. ix, 211; Annual Report 1949, p. 22. 

F. Ogburn and A. Brenner, "Experiments in chromium electro-deposition with radioactive chromium," J. Electrochem. Soc. 96, 347 (1949) ; NBS Annual Report 1949, p. 31. 

NBS Annual Report 1949, pp. 22—23; Frederick E. Zeuner, Dating the Past: an Introduction to Geochronology (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 341, reports the pioneer 

work of Willard F. Libby of the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Institute at Chicago who worked 

out the theory and technique of radiocarbon dating in 1947. See also L. J. Briggs and 

K. F. Weaver, "How old is it?" Nat!. Geo. 114,235 (1958). 
NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIO PROPAGATION 471 a sugar compound was subsequently applied also to Inulin, a levulose polysaccharide used in the study of kidney functions.117 

Elsewhere at the Bureau, after almost 5 years' work, the first volume of 

"Atomic Energy Levels" was completed in 1949. Designed for the use of 

workers in nuclear and atomic physics, astrophysics, chemistry, and industry, it was a compendium of all energy states for the first 23 elements, 

from hydrogen to vanadium, as derived from analyses of their optical spectra. 

Similar data for the next 19 elements, chromium through niobium (No. 41), 

comprised the second volume in 1952, and from molybdenum to plutonium 

(No. 94), a third volume in 1958.118 

Another compilation made with AEC support was that of the experimental values of nuclear physical constants and properties, greatly needed 

by nuclear physicists, reactor engineers, and industrial and medical users of 

radioactive tracer materials. The first edition of "Nuclear Data," containing 

tables of experimental values found for the half.lives of radioactive materials, 

radiation energies, relative isotopic abundances, nuclear moments, cross 

sections, and nuclear decay systems, was issued in September 1950. A supplement appeared in April 1951 and two more late that year and early the 

next."9 

Yet another AEC project at the Bureau was the sponsorship of a pro. 

gram of measurement of some previously undetermined properties of hydrogen. Using the helium liquefier acquired for its program in superconductivity, the Bureau made a series of studies over a period of 8 years focused on three isotopic modificiations of hydrogen, the normal hydrogen molecule, 

(H2), hydrogen deuteride (HD), and deuterium (D,), under a wide range 

of pressures. The report by Woolley, Scott, and Brickwedde on the thermal 

properties of hydrogen became a classic and established the Bureau as the 

Federal expert on cryogenic engineering.'20 

" NBS Annual Report 1948, p. 218; Isbell in Science, 113, 532 (1951); Hearings * * * 

1953 (Jan. 18, 1952), p. 441; Chem. Eng. News 30, 1112 (1952); RP2886, "Carbon-14 

carboxy-labeled polysaccharides" (J. D. Moyer and H. S. Isbell, 1958). 

NBS Annual Report 1950, p. 44; C467, compiled by Charlotte E. Moore. 

'10NBS Annual Report 1951, PP. 35—36; C499, compiled by Katharine Way, Lilla Fano, 

et al. 

"°RP1932, "Compilation of thermal properties of hydrogen in its various isotopic and 

ortho-para modifications" (1948); NBS Annual Report 1948, p. 207. Subsequent re- search by the cryogenic group made at the request of the AEC early in 1951 included the 

measurement of the vapor pressures, dew points, and critical constants of hydrogen, 

deuterium, and hydrogen deuteride (NBS Annual Report 1951, p. 27). 

Bureau interest in cryogenics dates back to the turn of the century, when a plant for 

making and maintaining liquid and solid hydrogen, the invention in 1898 of Prof., later 

Sir, James Dewar, British physicist, was exhibited at the St. Louis Fair in 1903 and purchased by the Bureau (see ch. II, pp. 83—84). In 1923 Clarence W. Kanolt of the 
472 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

The Bureau had long since outgrown the facilities for cryogenic re- search in its small iow temperature laboratory in Washington when in April 

1951, with the cooperation and financial support of the AEC, ground was broken at Boulder, Cob., for the construction of the world's largest liquid 

hydrogen plant and cryogenic laboratory. The plant at Boulder was com- pleted that summer and the staff to man the plant and laboratory buildings 

moved in. The hydrogen liquefiers, the units producing liquid nitrogen to 

precool the hydrogen, and the purifiers, all in duplicate to insure continuous 

operation, were designed and their construction supervised by the Bureau. 

Both the plants and laboratories incorporated elaborate safety and antiexplosion features to minimize the hazards of working with liquid hydrogen 

in large quantities.'2' 

Engineering research and production at Boulder accelerated when in 

1956 the Air Force became interested in liquid hydrogen as an aircraft and 

rocket fuel.122 Large-scale operations were established after 1957, when the 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began negotiations for all the liquid hydrogen the Boulder plant could supply, as a missile 

and satellite fuel. It followed the announcement by the U.S.S.R. in August 

1957 of its first successful test of an intercontinental ballistics missile 

(ICBM). Two months later Russia's 184-pound satellite, Sputnik I, was launched and began orbiting the earth. A new race, to span continents and 

send men and machines into space, was on. The cryogenic plant at Boulder shared the 220-acre tract with the 

Central Radio Propagation Laboratory (CRPL), the new Bureau division 

evolved from the wartime Interservice Radio Propagation Laboratory 

(IRPL) that had operated out of the Far West building at the Bureau.'23 

Established on May 1, 1946, under Bureau operation and administration, 

CRPL came under the direction of an executive council representing the 

Army, Air Force, Navy, Federal Communications Commission, Civil Aeronautics Administration, Coast Guard, the Bureau itself, the Weather Bureau, 

Bureau devised a standard and precise method of producing liquid and solid hydrogen at a temperature 25° above —4597° F or absolute zero (Sci. Am. 129, 106, 1923). In 1931, 

with the same apparatus, Dickinson and Brickwedde, by precooling with solid hydrogen, 

produced liquified helium for the first time in this country, at a temperature of —456° F. 

(Science News, 73, 12, 1931; Time, 17, 58, 1931; NBS Annual Report 1931, p. 8). 

i!j NBS Annual Report 1952, p. 14. 112 Russell B. Scott, "Liquid hydrogen for chemical and nuclear rockets," Discovery, 21, 

74 (1960). 

While the cryogenic plant began operations at Boulder in the fall of 1951, not until 

completion of CRPL were the Boulder Laboratories formally dedicated, on Sept. 8, 1954. 
'.-. 

The NBS Boulder Laboratories in Colorado, housing the radio propagation, radio astronomy, and radio standards laboratories. In the background, 

on the first rise of the foothills of the Rockies, are the Bureau's cryogenic laboratories. 
474 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-5i) 

and commercial radio, as the central agency of the Nation for basic research 

in the propagation of radio waves.124 

Besides continuing operation of the worldwide chain of stations—the 

total number was 58, of which 14 were directly operated or supported by the 

Bureau—to provide prediction services for long-distance radio, CRPL took 

over the research functions of the radio section of the Bureau's electrical 

division. It at once undertook extension of the research in lower frequencies 

into the ultrahigh frequency and microwave region (3000 megacycles or 

more) for the new fields of television, of frequency modulation (FM) broadcasting, and military and commercial radar. 

Severely limiting the range and minimum usable signals in FM broad. 

casting, television, and other very-high-frequency services, the Bureau found, was the noise associated with cosmic and solar radio waves reaching earth 

from outer space. To study these phenomena, the Bureau instituted a pro. 

gram in radio astronomy, setting up at Boulder two solar radiometers with 

mirrors 25 feet in diameter, operating at different frequencies, to track the 

sun and observe its outbursts of radio energy.125 

While outer space phenomena produced measurable limitations on very:high.frequency transmission, the major influences on propagation at 

microwave frequencies proved to 'be nearer to earth. Studies in tropospheric 

meteorology and terrain geometry—that is, the effects of rain and trees and 

hills—first begun several decades earlier for ordinary radio transmission, were resumed in order to learn the causes of attenuation of very short microwaves, particularly those used in radio relay operations.126 Both the radio 

astronomy program and that on the troposphere became long-range projects. 

An innovation in the radio services of the Bureau, begun on October 3, 

1945, shortly before setting up CRPL, was the shortwave broadcast of standard time signals each 5 minutes around the clock. It augmented the standard 

radio frequencies, standard time intervals or pulses, standard audio frequenHearings * * 1948 (Mar. 12, 1947), p. 339. Establishment of CRPL was authorized 

in letter, Secretary of Commerce Wallace to Secretary of the Treasury, Jan. 9, 1946 (copy 

in NBS Historical File), and activated as a division of the Bureau by memo, Director, 

for Division and Section Chiefs, NBS, Apr. 19, 194.6 ("General Correspondence Files 

of the Director, 1945—1955"). 

NBS Annual Report 1948, p. 247. The new branch of science, radio astronomy, had 

its beginnings in 1932 when Karl G. Jansky of the Bell Telephone Laboratories described 

the reception of extraterrestrial radio waves and from their diurnal variation in direction 

tentatively identified their source in the Milky Way. See Proc. IRE, 20, 1920 (1932) 

Nature, 132, 66 (1933). Grote Reber, both before and after he came to the Bureau 

in the 1940's, and the Bureau's chief of radio research, Dellinger, were to extend these 

observations. See F. T. Haddock, "Introduction to radio astronomy," Proc. IRE, 46, 3 (1958). 

NBS Annual Report 1949, p. 71. 
NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIO PROPAGATiON 475 

cies, and standard musical pitch (middle A at 440 cycles per second), which 

the Bureau radio station, WWV, had broadcast since 1935.127 As supplementary to the time signals of the Naval Observatory, the signals are widely 

used by such industries as mining, shipping, railroads, power, air transport, 

and communications, among many others.'28 

Within a year after beginning its new time signal service, improved 

standards resulted in achieving a maximum change of 0.001 second per 24 

hours and deviations of as little as 0.009 to a maximum of 0.031 second 

from corrected Naval Observatory time.129 Extending reception of the 

frequency and time signals of WWV, on November 22, 1948, the Bureau 

established a new experimental broadcast station, WWVH, on the island of 

Maui in Hawaii. Soon after it began operations, reports confirmed the 

expected success of the station in reaching with consistency a far greater 

range of areas in the Arctic and the Pacific than had been possible from 

Maryland.13° 

CRPL's extension of the primary frequency standard to 40,000 megacycles in 1948 helped to open research in a field of physical science first 

explored during the war, that of microwave spectroseopy. Of immediate 

importance to the Bureau work on guided missiles, the new methods devised 

for measuring electrical quantities at microwave frequencies made possible 

the use of sharp microwave beams on systems where high resolution was needed, as in short-range target-seeking rockets and missiles.'3' 

'2TNBS Annual Report 1946, p. 206; NBS TNB 31, 21 (1947); Radio News, 38, 118 

(1947). 

Long concerned with time as a factor in all measurement, and with clocks, watches, 

and sundials (on which it issued many Letter Circulars), the Bureau began testing timepieces shortly after its founding. See C51 (1914) and the current C432 (1941) on the 

testing of. timepieces. 

The propagation of standard time signals has been by tradition the prerogative of the 

Naval Observatory at Washington. The Bureau has also had an interest in standard 

timekeeping, dating back to World War I. Under an act of March 19, 1918, authorizing 

the establishment of daylight saving time and standard time zones in the United States, 

Congress appointed the Interstate Commerce Commission to define the limits of each time zone for the Nation. As a matter involving "standards," the ICC requested the Bureau 

to prepare the map from data that ICC supplied. The map was first published in 1925, 

in an NBS circular on standard times throughout the world (C280, currently C496, 1950), 

and a "standard time conversion chart" appeared in 1928 (M84). In 1930, over objections from the Department of Commerce that such a map was no function of the department, the Bureau replied that it was part of its information service to the Nation's commerce. It appeared in a separate publication that year as Mill, currently M190, 

1948. See Department of Commerce correspondence of August—September 1930 in 

NARG 40, Box 120, 67009/93. 120 NBS Annual Report 1947, p. 223. 

"°NBS Annual Report 1949, p. 81. 130 NBS Annual Report 1948, p. xiv. 
476 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

The Bureau atomic clock program sought to provide a spectroscopic standard 

capable of being used as a new atomic standard of time and frequency to replace 

the mean solar day and so change the arbitrary units of time to atomic ones. With 

such a clock, new precise values might be found for the velocity of light; new measurements of the rotation of the earth would provide a new tool for geophysicists; 

and new measurements of the mean sidereal year might test whether Newtonian and 

atomic time are the same, yielding important results for the theory of relativity and 

for cosmology. 

The new microwave measurement technique, by overcoming the limitations of conventional optical and infrared equipment, also promised to 

extend spectroscopic analysis methods to high polymer research, that is, to 

the investigation of organic substances such as paper, leather, and plastics 

which are made up of very large molecules.'32 An immediate and dramatic 

application of the microwave technique, however, was in the Bureau's con- struction of an atomic clock. 

Annual Report 1948, pp. xiv, 249. 

Dr. Condon and Dr. Harold Lyons with the first atomic beam clock. It operated with an ammonia-regulated quartz crystal and ran with a constancy of one part in 20 

million. 
HIGH POLYMERS AND BUILDING RESEARCH 477 

Some of the first microwave measurements of the spectrum lines of 

ammonia gas against the NBS primary frequency standard suggested that 

they might serve as an invariable secondary frequency standard. A year 

later, in 1949, the Bureau devised means for utilizing the vibrations of atoms 

in the ammonia molecule, derived from the microwave region of ammonia 

gas, to control an oscillator with which to drive a clock. 

The result was the first atomic clock ever built. While its magnitude 

of accuracy was only a little better than that of the 24-hour rotation of the 

earth, and not as good as time based on the annual rotation of the earth 

around the sun, a breakthrough had been achieved. With further refinement, 

using the cesium rather than ammonia atom, and with precise control of the 

radio frequency, much higher accuracy became possible. A time accuracy of 

at least 1 part in 10 billion, representing an error of 1 second in 300 years, was thus achieved, without reference to the earth's rotation or the planetary 

motions.'33 Such timing is not possible with the 2,000-year-old solar time 

system. And on an earth gradually slowing down, millionths of a second 

become vital in projecting such feats as timing rocket launches to meet in 

orbit hundreds of miles above the earth where a space platform might be 

assembled. 

Of special importance to astronomy, both the clock and the method of 

construction represented new tools of research in technical fields where precise measurement of time and frequency are crucial, from long-range radio 

navigation systems and tracking of satellites to basic research in microwave 

spectroscopy and in molecular structures.134 

HIGH POLYMERS AND BUILDING RESEARCH 

In 1944 Dr. Robert Simha, an Austrian chemist teaching at Howard 

University in Washington, came to the Bureau to give a series of lectures in 

a new field of science, that of the high polymers. The word "polymers" or 

"high polymers" was then less than 5 years old, and the study of the molecular 

H. Lyons, "Microwave spectroscopy frequency and time standards," Elec. Eng. 68, 

251 (1949); NBS Annual Report 1951, pp. 13—14; H. Lyons, "Atomic clocks," Sci. Am. 

196, 71 (1957). The achievement represented an outgrowth of work started at Westinghouse by Dr. Condon. See William E. Good, "The inversion spectrum of ammonia," 

Phys. Rev. 69, 539 (1946). 

With continued refinement of the cesium atomic beam apparatus, the accuracy of time 

measurements increased to 1 part in 100 billion, or 200 times greater than that achieved 

by astronomical means. Subsequent use of atomic hydrogen masers promised to increase 

the order of accuracy still further. Meanwhile, on Oct. 8, 1964, the 12th General Conference of Weights and Measures, meeting in Paris, authorized a temporary atomic defi. 

nition of the second, derived from the cesium clock, as the international unit of time. 

NBS TNB 48, 209 (1964). 
478 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

properties of these systems little older. The science deals with the chainlike 

molecules of relatively very high molecular weight that make up substances as different as rubber, textiles, paper, leather, and plastics, all of which owe their strength, elasticity, durability and plasticity to the long chainlike structure of their molecules. Dr. Simha's lecture-seminars led the Bureau to invite 

him to join the staff, and he remained for 2 years organizing high polymer 

research at the Bureau.135 

The growth of the synthetic rubber and plastics industries in this 

country during the war raised the problem of new standards based on accu- rate determination of the structures and properties of polymer substances. 

Awareness of the problem was accentuated by the discovery of German advances made in plastics and textiles, learned from the search of their labora. 

tories in the last months of the war in Europe.'36 Particularly pressing was the need for more basic research in the rubber industry, both in natural 

rubber, flowing freely once again, and in synthetic rubber, as insurance "in 

the event of any future emergency." 137 Apart from the Bureau program, rubber research in industry and in 

the universities on behalf of the Federal Government was then running over 

R. Sirnha, "Preliminary Proposal for a Plan of Research on Molecular Properties of 

High Polymers," Aug. 1, 1945 (NBS Historical File); Science, 104, 572 (1946). 

important in the history of the Bureau have been the guest lecturers from industry and 

the universities who have become temporary consultants or staff members in order to initiate new lines of research or even whole new programs at the Bureau. In many 

instances they have subsequently sent their graduate students or laboratory assistants 

to join the Bureau staff. 

The guest lecturer policy was introduced by Dr. Stratton, who even after leaving the 

Bureau continued to invite leading scientists, among them Niels Bohr, to lecture there. 

In 1923 Prof. Arnold Sommerfeld of the institute of Theoretical Physics in Munich, 

early pioneer in the quantum theory and quantum interpretation of spectra, spent 2 

weeks at the Bureau as consultant and lecturer. The practice continued in the 1930's 

when, among others, Wojciech Swietoslawski and his pupil Mieczyslaw Wojciechowski 

of the Polytechnic Institute of Warsaw brought the technique of ebulliometry to the 

Bureau (ch. VI, see p. 343), and Prof. John D. Ferry of the University of Wisconsin came 

to lecture on rheology, the science of the flow and deformation of materials. 

Dr. Herman F. Mark, who fled Nazi Germany and started polymer science in this country, came as a consultant to the Bureau in 1941—42. Another lecturer on high polymers, 

Dr. Paul J. Flory of Stanford University, later sent his prize student, Dr. Leo Mandelkern, 

who did some of the first work in this country on the crystallization of polymers. Simi. 

larly, Dr. Herbert P. Broida came to the Bureau in 1949 to work in flame spectroscopy, 

and stayed to direct a research program on free radicals. The policy continues to the 

present day. Interviews with Dr. Lawrence A. Wood, June 30, 1964; Dr. Meggers, July 7, 

1964; and Dr. Samuel G. Weissberg, Sept. 8, 1964. On the free radicals program, see NBS AdminBul 56—66, Oct. 29, 1956. 116 NBS Annual Report 1946, pp. 190—192. 

NBS Annual Report 1947, p. xv; LC871, "Bibliography of recent research in the 

field of high polymers" (Simha, 1947) ; LC922, ibid., 1948; C498, ibid., 1950. 
HiGH POLYMERS AND BUILDING RESEARCH 479 

$5 million a year. As Federal activity in this field was in danger of being 

stopped through termination of the war agency which handled it, Dr. Condon 

proposed that the Bureau assume direction over the major programs in 

progress and, "as in the fields of mathematics and radio propagation," become "the centralizing and coordinating agency" in rubber research for the 

Government.138 Instead, the whole of the Federal research program was curtailed as operations in its synthetic plants were cut back and a number of 

the plants were put in standby status. Bureau research in rubber continued as part of the investigation of high polymer substances. 

The investigation centered on the constants and properties of the 

high polymer compounds that are formed chemically in nature by the process 

known as polymerization. Using X.ray diffraction, infrared spectroscopy, 

and electron microscopy, along with standard chemical, opticai, and thermodynamic techniques, the Bureau sought better knowledge of the fundamental 

properties of both natural and synthetic polymers. On the basis of early 

results, the Bureau explored the incorporation of rubber into sole leather to 

improve wearing qualities, obtained new tire and tube evaluations, standard. 

ized fading tests in textiles, and improved leather hides by impregnating 

them with resins or rubber. Related studies were concerned with the nature 

of adhesion in polymers, with adhesives among the synthetic resins, and the use of resins in the fabrication of aircraft, housing, and containers.139 

Research into the molecular dimensions of the polymers provided 

the standards necessary for the utilization of Dextran as a blood-plasma 

substitute and the control tests for its manufacture and maintenance in 

storage.'4° For the Office of Rubber Reserve, important studies were made 

in the degradation of rubbers and on the rheological (flow and deformation) 

properties of various rubbers and rubber solutions.14' And in 1950, with 

the procedures it had devised for measuring molecular weights by osmotic 

pressure, viscosity, and light scattering (ultracentrifuge) techniques, the 

Bureau started its standard sample program of high polymers.'42 

When an examination of the high-polymer characteristics of paper 

and paper materials offered no immediate solution to a filter problem, the 

Bureau, with the cooperation of the Naval Research Laboratory, produced 

from commercial "glass wool" a new kind of paper composed entirely of 

glass fibers. Originally sought for use in gas mask filters, its excellent in- * * * 1948 (Mar. 12, 1947), p. 322; NBS Annual Report 1947, p. xv. " NBS Annual Report 1947, p. 209; Annual Report 1948, pp. 224—225. 

NBS Report 1713 (Weissberg and Isbell, June 13, 1952). Although the current 

availability of whole blood from donors reduced the necessity of Dextran except in an emergency, 10 million pints were made and stored against that contingency. 

NBS Annual Report 1951, p. 51; Annual Report 1952, p. 34; Annual Report 1953—54, 

p. 51. " See RP2257 (Weissberg, Simha, and Rothman, 1951). 
480 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

sulating properties and high resistance to heat readily suggested that glass 

paper might have extensive use in electronic and other electrical equipment.'43 

An area of research that had become scattered over many divisions 

at the Bureau was reorganized in 1947 to form a new division, that of building technology. For the first time a unified approach was made to the 

problems of the construction industry as the Bureau coordhiated its investigations of properties of building materials, studies in structural strength, fire 

resistance, acoustics and sound insulation, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and building and electrical equipment.'44 

As after every war, the construction industry turned its attention first 

to conventional housing, of which there was an estimated shortage of 5 mu- lion units.145 The Bureau made home construction its immediate target. 

With building materials approaching the cost of labor, the Bureau aimed at new structural designs based on engineering principles tested in the war- time construction of ships and planes—something of an innovation itself— 

and on maximum use of nonconventional building materials that provided 

structural strength with the minimum of materials and labor. Bureau re- ports went out to the industry on the properties of materials unknown a decade before, such as some of the new plastics, laminated woods, lightweight 

concretes, and slag aggregates. New and better masonry paints and asphalts 

were also reported.'46 

In order to formulate standards of heating, the Bureau built a test 

bungalow 25 feet square with an 8-foot ceiling. One after another, com- mercial heating devices including stoves, furnaces, and panel heating were installed and the detailed data gathered on temperature gradients attained 

inside were correlated with outside temperatures.'4' A long series of fire 

tests of building structures and materials were carried out in search of better 

means of reducing the direct annual ioss from fire, currently estimated at 

8,000 lives and $700 million in property damage'45 

The next decade witnessed a steady rise in private and public housing, 

in construction of office buildings and Federal buildings. Aided by the new 

Swedish-invented hydraulic self-lifting Linden crane, high-rise apartment 

houses went up as fast, and in some cities, faster than homes. Bureau re- search figured to some extent in much of the high-rise construction, but could 

NBS Annual Report 1951, p. 48; M. J. O'Leary, B. W. Scribner, et al., "Manufacture 

of paper from glass fibers," Tappi, 35, 289 (1952). 

NBS Annual Report 1947, pp. xiii—xiv. 

Hearings * * * 1947 (Jan. 29, 1946), p. 203. 

"° BMS1O7, "Building code requirements for new dwelling construction * * 'i" (Thomp. 

son, 1947) ; BMS1O9, "Strength of houses: application of engineering principles to 

structural design" (Whittemore et aL, 1948). 

NBS Annual Report 1947, pp. 202—203, 208; Hearings " * * 1950, p. 492. 

NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. 234—235. 
HIGH POLYMERS AND BUILDING RESEARCH 481, 

take no blame for a major flaw in many of the new buildings, their woeful 

failure in soundprooflng. As it only added to the comfort of tenants, acceptance of Bureau studies in the acoustic properties of materials had little appeal. 

But as they saved time or money or material, Bureau reports on asphalt 

stabilizers, vapor-barrier materials, thermal conduction, and heat transfer 

found ready acceptance in the industry.149 

As a service to new homeowners and old, the Bureau revised and 

reissued its publication, "Care and repair of the house." On its first appear. 

ance in 1931, "Care" went through 12 printings, selling 175,000 copies at 

20 cents each.15° In the 5 years after 1949 that the 209-page revision, Circular 489, was available to the public it sold 253,000 additional copies, at 

50 cents each. Undergoing a second revision in 1955, the Bureau's bestNBS Annual Report 1949, p. 36; Annual Report 1951, p. 61. 

See ch. V, pp. 251—253. 

In this test of house wall fire resistance, the fire took 27 minutes to come through the 

Douglas fir siding as gas flames were applied to the other side. An instrument on the pole measures the bulge of the wall. (Picture by courtesy of the National Geographic Society.) 
482 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

seller was suddenly withdrawn from further publication, with the official 

explanation that it was both an inappropriate publication for a scientific 

agency of the Government and was competitive with private industry.151 

Bureau services such as "Care" represented, whether to homeowners 

or to the public in general, have sometimes been unwelcome to private industry, as well as to the friends of industry on Capitol Hill. One such public 

effort in the postwar period came close to spelling disaster for the Bureau. 

Ever since its founding, the Bureau, alone or in conjunction with the 

Federal Trade Commission or some other watchdog agency, has from time to 

time impinged on one aspect or another of rugged individualism or the principle of laissez faire. It was the Bureau that led the first crusade against 

fraudulent weights and measures in the marketplace, against faulty railroad 

scales, mine scales, and truck scales. It aroused the ire of the public utilities 

by pointing out the hazards of electrolysis, of poor gas appliances, and by 

insisting on electrical safety codes. 

It angered the building industry with many of its codes and specifications and some of its assessments of building materials. It repeatedly warned 

the public against so-called gas-savers on kitchen stoves, against gasoline 

additives, gasoline "dopes," destructive antifreeze solutions, and useless antileak compounds. It exposed the fraud in proprietary radium and radioactive 

nostrums. It reported the inferiority of reclaimed rubber for automobile 

tires. Its research on photographic emulsions was stopped. Attempts were 

made to suppress a number of its reports, including those on the quality 

of heating and illuminating gas, on gypsum and certain other building materials, and on chemical glassware. And from time to time the Department 

of Commerce itself considered it necessary to suppress Bureau releases, as it did one in 1926 describing the quality of dental amalgams. 

Every Director of the Bureau has come under fire from business interests or industry, entrepreneurs, or legislators as a result of some Bureau 

investigation or other. Dr. Condon had been at the Bureau only a matter 

of months when the "Aquella" incident occurred. 

In January 1946 a popular tnagazine published the story of a fabulous new paint formula for waterproofing masonry, with the claim that it had 

been tested by the National Bureau of Standards and won an unqualified 

"Excellent" rating.'52 It was being made at home and sold from door to 

door by a family of French refugees who had arrived in New York in 1941 

with no possessions but the secret formula for their paint. They claimed that 

their waterproof paint called "Aquella" had been used throughout the 

Maginot Line. 

"New York Times," May 15, 1955, P. 68; correspondence with Vincent B. Phelan, 

March 9—May 27, 1963 (NBS Historical File). 

152 Kurt Steel, "Water, stay away from my wall," Reader's Digest, 48, 45 (1946). 
HIGH POLYMERS AND BUiLDING RESEARCH 483 

The story with its testimonials drew thousands of inquiries about 

"Aquella" and hundreds of requests seeking licenses for "Aquella" agencies. 

On the strength of the mail, the family obtained capital and began selling 

manufacturing rights to distributors. 

The Better Business Bureau of New York asked the Bureau to test 

the waterproofing paint. The Bureau already had. At the request of the 

military services it had obtained samples and reported its findings in December 1942. Six months later it had made a second report. The new tests 

confirmed the earlier ones. Judged "excellent" immediately after applica. 

tion, "Aquella" on the outer face of masonry after 10 months offered no more 

than "good" protection against water seepage. The inner face rated "poor." 

"Aquella," at $3 to $4 a quart was judged a fair waterproof paint but no better than a Bureau recipe made with 10 cents' worth of material. The 

Bureau also learned that "Aquella" had been used in the Maginot Line, but 

only for decorative purposes, as a blue calcimine. 

Newspaper accounts of the Bureau reports, following publication of 

the magazine story, resulted in almost 20,000 inquiries about the Bureau 

tests. They were answered with a mimeographed letter summarizing the 

findings on "Aquella." The mail also brought numerous protests of Govçrnment interference with private enterprise, notably the intercession of Gov. 

Ellis Arnall of Georgia with Secretary Wallace on behalf of prospective 

"Aquella" distributors in his State. Wallace "recalled and retracted" the 

Bureau's mimeographed letter.153 

No such simple détente marked the results of Bureau tests of a battery 

additive called "Protecto-Charge," later known as AD—X2. Its history went 

back to the years immediately after World War I when the resurgence of the 

automobile industry brought on the market a freshet of battery additives, 

substances whose makers claimed would restore vitality to dying batteries. 

Through the next three decades the Bureau, at the request of the Federal 

Trade Commission, the Post Office Department, and various Government 

agencies with fleets of cars and trucks, tested these additives as they appeared on the market. By the early thirties almost a hundred of the preparations 

had come to the Bureau, but whether based on epsom salts or .other substances, 

none showed any notable effect on either battery life or performance.154 

'53"NBS Report of water permeability tests on coating of 'Aquella' paint applied to masonry walls," Dec. 8, 1942; ibid., June 4, 1943; mimeo letter, "Summary of waterpermeability tests of 'Aquella' * * *, Aug. 9, 1946; report on "Aquefla," Consumers' 

Res. Bull. 17, 20 (May 1946); letter, H. A. Wallace to President, Prima Products, Inc., 

New York City, June 3, 1946 ("General Correspondence Files of the Director, 1945— 

1955"); interview with Dr. E. U. Condon, Oct. 29, 1963. 154 See ch. V, p. 281. The correspondence on battery additives in the early thirties 

is in NBS Box 369, TE. 
484 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

The appearance of new gasoline "dopes," antifreeze compounds, and 

battery additives continued through the forties. Routine tests to determine 

the validity of their advertised claims turned up nothing new.'55 Then in 

the spring of 1948, Jess M. Ritchie, whose firm, Pioneers, Inc., of Oakland, 

Calif., made the battery additive AD—X2, wrote to the Bureau asking for 

special tests of his product, on the grounds that it was an exception to the 

negative findings of the Bureau's Letter Circular 302 on battery additives, 

published in 1931, but still current and available to the public.'56 Since the 

Bureau does not make tests for private individuals or firms, it refused. 

In January 1949, in connection with a current program of research on the properties of batteries, the Bureau undertook a reinvestigation of 

battery additives, in preparation for a revision of the 20.year-old LC302. 

Among the additives tested, but as in all such cases unidentified except by a number, was AD—X2, samples of which had been recently received from the 

Better Business Bureau of Oakland. Essentially compounded of common 

epsom and glauber salts (magnesium and sodium sulfates), AD—X2 was found by the Bureau to have no special merits. Where these salts ordinarily 

sell for about 22 cents a pound, when packaged as a proprietary battery 

additive, at $3 per packet, they came to almost $20 a pound. 

Dr. George W. Vinal of the electrochemistry section, coauthor with 

Paul L. Howard of the Bureau circular in preparation, reported the test 

results on AD—X2 to the Better Business Bureau in Oakland in April 1950, 

identifying AD—X2 by name. This was admittedly a deviation from the 

usual practice, but was intended as a reply to proponents of AD—X2 that prior 

statements of the Bureau on battery additives did not apply to that particular 

product.157 Four months later the national office made the report public. 

Pioneers, Inc., directed its distributors to write to their Congressmen 

in protest.'58 Before the end of 1951, 28 Senators and 1 Congressman had 

sent queries to the Bureau on behalf of AD—X2. The issue smoldered for 

more than a year, arousing public interest for the first time when in December 

1952 a national magazine reported that laboratory tests of AD—X2 made at 

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were at variance with those of 

NBS Annual Report 1947, p. 221; Annual Report 1948, p. 251. 

Particularly objectionable to Pioneers, Inc., was the fact that the National Better 

Business Bureau had reprinted LC302 in its own circular of June 19, 1931, as the 

authoritative statement on the subject. 

[Senate] Hearings before the Select Committee on Small Business * * on investigation of Battery Additive AD—X2, 83d Cong, 1st sess., March 31—June 26, 1953, p. 220. 

The findings on AD—X2, unidentified as such, were also reported in the reissue of LC302 

in 1949 and in C504, "Battery additives" (Jan. 10, 1951), the latter including confirming 

tests of AD—X2 made for the Federal Trade Commission in March 1950. The NBBB 

letter is reprinted in Senate Hearings, above, p. 549. 
HIGH POLYMERS AND BUILDING RESEARCH 485 

the National Bureau of Standards. The issue ignited soon after the Eisenhower administration took office in 1953. 

In the controversy over AD—X2 that erupted in the Department of 

Commerce, the Director of the Bureau was temporarily relieved of his post.159 

Under press attack for an act of dismissal without a hearing, and con- fronted with the reaction of scientists and scientific organizations, Secretary 

Weeks rescinded his dismissal order pending a congressional hearing and 

called upon the National Academy of Sciences to appoint a committee 

"to evaluate the present functions and operations of the Bureau of Standards 

In the Eisenhower administration, Sinclair Weeks, a manufacturer from Newton, Mass., 

became Secretary of Commerce. The new Secretary appointed Craig R. Sheaffer, president of the Sheaffer Pen Co. in Fort Madison, Iowa, his Assistant Secretary for Domestic 

Affairs. 

Both the Secretary and his assistant were concerned over Federal agencies that in their 

view often hampered the efforts of small business to get ahead. Both seem to have 

thought the Bureau was one of those agencies. The Federal Trade Commission not long 

before had forced the Sheaffer company to discontinue advertising its ballpoint pen as a lifetime pen. (Senate Hearings, above, pp. 272, 511). He now found the Bureau, 

long closely associated with the FTC, under his immediate supervision. 

More than a year prior to the Eisenhower election, in August 1951, Dr. Condon, who was Director when Circular 504 on battery additives appeared, resigned from the Bureau to become director of research for the Corning Glass Works. Dr. Allen V. Astin, electronic and ordnance physicist and a guiding hand in the development of the Bureau's 

proximity fuze, became Acting Director until his appointment as Director was confirmed 

by the Senate on May 30, 1952 (see Hearings * * * 1954, Jan. 11, 1954, p. 76). 

During that period, Pioneers, Inc., its distributors, and supporters continued pressure on the Bureau to reverse its findings on AD—X2. At the request of the Post Office Department in September 1951, the Bureau retested AD—X2. Six months later it was again 

teste.d for the House and Senate Committees on Small Business, and again, almost a year 

after, much more extensively, for the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee. 

On Feb. 24, 1953, the new Postmaster General, Arthur E. Summerfield, as a con- sequence of the latest Bureau findings, put AD—X2 on the mail fraud list. Six days 

later, the fraud order was suspended. Assistant Secretary Sheaffer instructed Dr. Astin 

to impound all copies of Circular 504 and all other reports, pamphlets, and data on battery additives, including AD—X2. 

On Mar. 24, 1953, Secretary Weeks forced the resignation of Dr. Astin "for a number 

of reasons," none of which was specified, except that "the National Bureau of Standards 

has not been sufficiently objective because they discount entirely the play of the market 

place" ("Washington Post," Apr. 1, 1953, p. 1). 

The action raised a basic question: whether Government through its regulatory and 

scientific agencies was to judge the merits of new products offered to the public, or whether this function was to be left to the test of the market place. The integrity of the 

Government's primary scientific research body had been impugned. The Bureau was being subjected to pressure, and to reorganization in accordance with an outside concept 

of scientific objectivity. The attack on the Bureau implied a radical reversal in the 

role of Government as the regulator of commerce. 
486 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

The Washington, D.C., newspaper cartoonists capture the fervor of the AD—X2 case. (1953 © cartoon by Herblock in the "Washington Post": other cartoons by courtesy 

of Berryman and Crocket, "Washington Evening Star.") 

in relation to the present national needs." 160 (The report of this com- mittee is considered in the envoi of the present history.) A second committee 

of the National Academy of Sciences was appointed specifically to appraise 

the work of the Bureau on AD—X2. 

A Department of Commerce press release on August 23, 1953, announced the resumption of his duties by the Director of the Bureau. It also 

disclosed that on the basis of Senate hearings, the merits of AD—X2 remained 

controversial but "there [was] insufficient proof of an actual intent * * * to 

deceive." 161 On November 13 the committee of 10 scientists named by Dr. Detlev 

\V. Bronk. president of the National Academy of Sciences. to study the 

claims made for AD—X2, reported that the MIT tests "were not well designed 

for old batteries differing markedly in the characteristics of the cells." The 

committee found the Bureau staff fully competent, the quality of its work 

160 "Washington Post," Apr. 18, 1953, p. 1. The Director of the Bureau had recommended 

early in March that the call upon the Academy and his Visiting Committee to the Bureau to review Bureau operations, including its testing of battery additives. 

Sce "Washington Post," Apr. 2, 1953, p. 1. The press release also announced the transfer of direct supervision of 

NBS from the Assistant Secretary for Domestic Affairs to the Assistant Secretary for 

Administration. Soon after, Mr. Sheaffer resigned and returned to his business. 

The Senate Hearings * * * * * * Battery Additive AD—X2 comprised 511 pages of 

testimony and exhibits and 274 pages of appendices. 

'fry II Mm, And 

ZA',WWI7' 

I66CD 606W 
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY 487 on storage batteries "excellent * * * without reservations," and supported 

"the position of the Bureau of Standards that the material is without 

merit." 162 GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY 

Dr. Condon could have had no inkling of the tempest to be visited upon 

the Bureau when he approved the letter circular and formal circular on AD—X2. They were routine test reports, as had been that on "Aquella" and 

hundreds of other commercial products since the founding of the Bureau. Of 

greater concern to him were the new lines of research he had set going, the 

reorganization of the Bureau laboratories, the establishment of new facilities 

at Corona and Boulder, and, not least, the preparation of a new and comprehensive handbook on physics, to be written by the Bureau staff. The hand. 

book, with worldwide distribution, would not only be scientifically important and prestigious but would set a capstone on 50 years of modern 

physics. 

Precedent for the encyclopedic work planned by Dr. Condon was the 

Dictionary of Applied Physics, the five-volume work edited by Sir Richard 

T. Glazebrook, first director of the National Physical Laboratory in England 

and published in 1922_23.163 The idea of the handbook was preceded in 

March 1946 by plans for another comprehensive work, a Bureau proposal to 

the Commerce Science Committee to prepare 50 or more publications designed 

especially to aid small business. Bureau circulars, letter circulars, and other 

publications in print were to be revised and new ones prepared by recognized 

authorities at the Bureau, describing products, methods of manufacture, and 

processes developed in this country and abroad during the war that might 

serve as a basis of new enterprises. At the time, the estimated cost of the 

project, $250,000, was considered by Congress to outweigh the merits of the 

enterprise.'64 

Report of the Committee on Battery Additives of the National Academy of Sciences, 

Oct. 30, 1953, pp. 1, 31, 33—34 (NBS Historical File); "Washington Post," Nov. 14, 1953, 

p. 1; Hearings * * * 1955 (Jan. 11, 1954), pp. 105—107. 

The AD—X2 affair is presented as a case history in public administration and policy 

formation, for teaching purposes, in Samuel A. Lawrence's The Battery Additive Con. 

troversy, Study No. 68 (University of Alabama Press, 1962). 

NBS contributors to the Glazebrook dictionary included Silsbee on superconductivity, 

McCollum on electrolysis, Coblentz on radiation and radiometry, Gibson on spectrophotometry, and Meggers on the measurement of wavelengths. 

'i" The 13-page outline, "Proposed technological services to business, industry, and the 

public, in collaboration with the Office of Declassification and Technical Services," 

Mar. 1, 1946, is in NBS Historical File. 
488 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

The outline for the first project, the "NBS Handbook of Physical 

Measurements," as it was originally entitled, appeared in a 117-page mimeographed study in December 1946. It called for eight volumes, on metrology, 

mechanics, heat, electricity, optics, atomic and chemical physics, and physical 

chemistry, each volume and its chapters and sections assigned to Bureau 

authorities in the field. In March 1947, Dr. Condon asked the House Appropriations Subcommittee for $30,000 to initiate the project.165 No demur was made and the work was launched. 

Progress on the handbook was slow. Besides their reorganization 

and some shifting around of laboratories, the divisions were clearing up 

backlogs of paper work, completing reports on wartime research, and plan. 

fling new programs of research. Since the handbook was to be a formal 

Bureau publication, Dr. Condon directed that it might be done on Bureau 

time. The working day simply wasn't long enough, and the only writing 

accomplished was that done on nights and weekends, on individual initiative. 

Four years later, when Dr. Condon left the Bureau, some 10 or 12 

chapters out of the 57 projected had been completed. No longer to be a 

Bureau enterprise, the handbook was modified in scope and the aid of authorities in industry and the universities was enlisted. A progress report and new outline late in 1952 described a more extensive work. It was to comprise 88 

chapters, of which 40 were completed or in the first draft form. The 

published book, Condon and Odishaw's Handbook of Physics, appeared in 

1958. Of the contributors to "what every physicist should know," as the 

editor described the volume, 13 were members of the Bureau staff.166 Dr. 

Condon himself wrote 17 of the final 90 chapters in the 1,459-page handbook •157 An accomplishment of importance to the Bureau that Dr. Condon saw achieved in somewhat less time than the handbook was amendment of 

the Bureau's organic act of 1901. Even before Congressman Stefan raised 

the question in 1947 of the Bureau's spending millions of dollars "on the 

basis of a two.page law," Dr. Condon had already initiated final preparation 

of the draft legislation for submission to Congress in order, as he said, to 

"remove some of Ithe] ambiguities and try to state more explicitly and in 

* ' ° 1948 (Mar. 12, 1947), p. 367. 160 In addition to their articles and books published under Government imprint, members 

of the Bureau staff have produced almost a hundred books and textbooks, including two 

autobiographies. See app. N. " New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. The progress report of 1952, with instructions for 

authors and a sample section, is in NBS Historical File. 

Some of the material prepared by Bureau members for the handbook subsequently appeared as NBS publications: C476, "Measurements of radioactivity" (Curtiss, 1949) 

C478, "Colorimetry" (Judd, 1950); C484, "Spectrophotometry" (Gibson, 1949); C544, 

'Formulas for computing capacitance and inductance" (Snow, 1954). 
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY 489 

more up to date language what the exact functions of the Bureau of Standards 

are." 168 The reformulation of functions that the Science Advisory Board re- commended in 1934, to cut the depression suit of the Bureau to its cloth, 

had been filed at the time and all but forgotten.169 The burst of scientific ac- complishment in World War II had since changed the course of Bureau re- search. Its orientation was to science rather than, as in the original act and in 

1934, to industry. 

The new statement of Bureau functions, as an amendment to the 

organic act, became official with the enactment of Public Law 619 in 1950. 

The restatement included a significant change in direction. In the original 

act, the basic authority for the functions of the Bureau resided in the Bureau 

itself. Relieving it of this sometimes onerous responsibility, the amendment 

transferred the authority to the Secretary of The amendment 

consolidated the broad range of special Bureau activities that had been 

granted piecemeal in appropriation legislation through the years. Finally, 

it made specific in the scientific research and testing activities of the Bureau 

its responsibilities in the new fields of science opened in the past decade. 

As in the organic act, the Bureau still had six basic functions, but 

they included nothing quite like Dr. Stratton's wonderful catchall, "the 

solution of problems which arise in connection with standards." 171 It was 

the Secretary of Commerce, rather than the Bureau, that was responsible for: 

The custody, maintenance, and development of the national standards of measurement, and the provision of means and methods for 

making measurements consistent with those standards, including 

the comparison of standards used in scientific investigations, engineering, manufacturing, commerce, and educational institutions 

with the standards adopted or recognized by the Government. 

168 Hearings * * * 1948 (Mar. 12, 1947), p. 352; Hearings * * * 1951 (Feb. 23, 

1950), p.2179. 

Secretary of Commerce Wallace recommended amendment of the organic act to Congress in 1945, in order to incorporate authority for such Bureau activities as were covered only by supplemental legislation, Executive orders, and customary procedures. 

The drafting of the amendment was almost entirely the work of Dr. Crittenden. See 

Report of the Visiting Committee, Oct. 31, 1945, and attached correspondence ("General 

Correspondence Files of the Director, 1945—1955," Box 6); interview with Dr. Condon, 

Oct. 28, 1963. 

See ch. VI, p. 323n. 170 For the general reorganization of executive departments, in line with the recom- mendations of the Hoover Commission, that was the immediate occasion for enactment 

of the Bureau amendment, see "New York Times," Mar. 14, 1950, p. 1, and May 24, 1950, 

p. 1. " See ch. I, p. 43. 
490 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

The determination of physical constants and properties of materials 

when such data are of great importance to scientific or manufacturing interests and are not to be obtained of sufficient accuracy 

elsewhere. 

The development of methods for testing materials, mechanisms, and 

structures, and the testing of materials, supplies, and equipment, 

including items purchased for use of Government departments and 

independent establishments. 

Cooperation with other governmental agencies and with private 

organizations in the establishment of standard practices, incorporated in codes and specifications. 

Advisory service to Government agencies on scientific and technical 

problems. 

Invention and development of devices to serve special needs of the 

Government. 

The first two functions encompassed the original organic act and were virtually identical with the statements of responsibilities. The next two confirmed the responsibilities acquired through the special appropriations that 

Congress had made to the Bureau over the years. The last two functions represented Bureau responsibilities accrued under transferred funds from other 

Federal agencies, as established by acts of 1920 and 1932 (see app. C) and, 

affirming its advisory capacity, gave a firm legal basis to what had become 

the dominant direction of the Bureau. 

Spelled out in the amendment were 19 specific activities of the Bureau 

which the Secretary of Commerce was authorized to undertake in carrying 

out these functions.'72 

Public Law 619 was approved on July 22, 1950, 4 months before the 

Korean incident became a full-fledged conflict and put the Nation on a war- time footing once again. In the national emergency, the Federal Government reopened its synthetic rubber plants that had been on a standby basis, 

and ordered stepped UI) production at the Bureau of optical glass for use 

in large optical elements. Proximity faze and guided missile development was at once greatly intensified, as were other defense projects at the Bureau, 

including some scheduled for termination.'73 

Anticipating the acceleration in scientific research, a program of re- search in basic instrumentation was initiated, in cooperation with the DepartThe complete amendment appears in app. C. See also "Bureau of Standards Functions," Ft. Rept. 2349, to accompany S. 2201, 81st Cong., 2d sess. [July 22, 19501; NBS 

BuMemo 50—7, Apr. 24, 1950; BuOrd 51—12, Aug. 11, 1950. 

NBS Annual Report 1951, pp. 2, 8, 9, 59, 84. 
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY 491 

ment of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission.174 As the conflict 

began, the Bureau established its North Pacific Radio Warning Service for 

the Arctic region, operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to insure reliable 

radio communications in the war zone. Yet, even with almost half the staff 

engaged once more in classified defense programs, the Bureau reported a total of 630 unclassified projects going on in its laboratories.'75 

As it braced itself for the national emergency, the Bureau marked the 

approach of March 3, 1951, the 50th anniversary of its founding. The publications staff prepared a number of designs for a commemorative stamp for 

the semicentennial but efforts to interest the Post Office were unsuccessful.'7° 

In celebration of the anniversary, some 30 scientific and technical societies 

of the country elected to hold their meetings that year in Washington.'77 

In the Bureau, with the special cooperation of the Office of Naval 

Research, sponsored 12 special symposia on subjects of current importance 

to the Bureau and the Department of Defense.'78 

The symposia were in mid-career when on August 10, 1951, Dr. Condon announced his resignation as Director of the Bureau. For more than 

4 years he had been under intermittent attack by a subcommittee of the House 

Committee on Un-American Activities, headed by Congressman 3. Parnell 

Thomas of New Jersey, as an alleged security risk in high public office'79 

Projected in Condon's "is there a science of instrumentation?" Science, 110, 339 

(1949). 

NBS Annual Report 1952, pp. 1, 2 

It has been stated that as a rule it is not Post Office policy to so honor Federal 

bureaus or agencies. 177 Also marking the semicentennial were companion articles by Dr. Briggs on the early 

work of the Bureau and by Dr. Condon on its current program, in Sci. Mo. 73, 166 (1951). 

See also Condon, "NBS: a Semicentennial," Science, 114, suppl. 3 (Aug. 17, 1951). 178 NBS Annual Report 1951, p. 100, and file, "NBS Semicentennial, 1951," in the Office 

of Technical Information and Publications, NBS. The subjects of the symposia were 

low temperature physics (subsequently published as C519, 1952), mechanical properties 

of metals at low temperatures (C520, 1952), gravity waves (C521, 1952), the solution 

of systems of linear equations and the determination of eigenvalues (AMS39, 1954), mass spectroscopy in physics research (C522, 1953), energy transfer in hot gases (C523, 

1954), electrochemical constants (C521t. 1953), polymer degradation mechanisms 

1953), optical image evaluation (C52'S, 1954), electron physics (C527, 1954), char tc- teristics and applications of resistancc strain gages (C528, 1954), and electrodeposit on research (C529, 1953). 179 The trouble began on July 17, 1947, when the press reported that Thomas' Spe( ial 

Subcommittee on National Security wis investigating Dr. Condon because his 

ances included Russian scientists and alleged Communist sympathizers in this country. 

In the uneasy years after the war, resentment arose against the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, and over transfer of control of atomic energy from the Army to 
492 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51) 

Despite the failure of the subcommittee to prove its charges, despite 

vindication in the press and by the security procedures of the Departments 

of Commerce and Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, and the 

wide support of his fellow scientists, Dr. Condon came to feel that he might 

best serve Bureau interests by resigning. 

Accepting an appointment as director of research at Corning Glass 

Works, Dr. Condon submitted his resignation to President Truman, effective 

September 30. The resignation was regretfully accepted. 

You have served [said the President] in a most critical position 

with continued and loyal attention to your duties as director, and 

by reason of your standing among scientists and the supervision 

you have given to the bureau's activities, you have made of it a more important agency than it ever has been before.'5° 

After presiding over the semicentennial symposia that month on mass 

spectroscopy, on electrochemical constants, and on polymer degradation 

mechanisms, Dr. Condon left the Bureau. Confronting the new Acting Direc. 

the civilian Atomic Energy Commission. Also, rumor were widespread of domestic 

Communist activities in connection with the development of the bomb. 

Dr. Condon had been at Los Alamos, and was scientific adviser to the McMahon com- mittee that had obtained enactment of the law for civilian control of atomic energy. He now directed, according to Mr. Thomas, "one of the most important national defense 

research organizations in the United States, the target of espionage agents of numerous foreign powers." 

Then in a statement handed to the press on Mar. 1, 1948, the Thomas subcommittee 

charged that "the Soviet Union and her satellite nations have been desperately attempting 

to * * secure our complete atomic knowledge. * From the evidence at hand, it 

appears that Dr. Condon is one of the weakest links in our atomic security." He had, 

Thomas said, "knowingly or unknowingly, entertained and associated with persons who 

are alleged Soviet espionage agents." 

From the first, Dr. Condon expressed his willingness to appear for a bearing but was ignored. Almost unanimously the press, the world of science, and other members of 

Congress questioned the charges and the procedure of the House Committee. Although 

he was cleared by the Loyalty Board of the Department of Commerce and by W. Averell 

Harriman and Charles Sawyer, the Secretaries under whom he served, the criticism of 

the Director of the Bureau by this committee of Congress continued. 

See Stephen K. Bailey and Howard D. Samuel, Congress at Work (New York: Henry 

Holt, 1952), pp. 321—336, 487; "Trial by Newspaper," Sci. Am. 180, 16 (1949); and 

congressional documents and newspaper accounts in NBS Historical File. 

"New York Times," Aug. 11, 1951, p. 1. 
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY 493 

tor was the trouble, already warming up, over AD—X2. But that too would 

pass, and with time adj to the new world of science would be made. 

The standard troy pound of Queen Elizabeth, formed of 8-ounce and 4-ounce 

nesting weights. 
One of the three giunt IVurtsburg antennas at the Bureau's Gun Barrel Hill, Colorado, 

field station. Used in radio propagation research, a dipole at the focal point of tive 

paraboloid reflector receives radio energy from the sun. 494 
THE CRUCIAL 

DECADE— 

AN ENVOI 

AN AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORTS 

In April 1953, in the midst of the impasse raised by the controversy over 

AD—X2, Secretary of Commerce Weeks asked the National Academy of 

Sciences to convene an ad hoc committee to evaluate the functions and 

operations of the National Bureau of Standards in relation to the current 

national needs. At stake was not only the reputation but the purpose and 

direction of the Bureau. It was recognized that they were threatened not so much by the controversy over AD—X2 as by the impact on Bureau 

research of the Korean war. 

As in the two World Wars, the staff, facilities, and programs of the 

Bureau were mobilized for the new conflict across the Pacific. A year after 

that war began, prolonged negotiations for its end commenced. A's in 

the case of industry, commerce, and science, the Bureau was on a war 

footing beyond its control. In March 1953, anticipating Secretary Weeks' own request by almost a month, the Director of the Bureau 'had written him. 

to seek the counsel of the National Academy of Sciences on the current program and operations of the Bureau. 

The ad hoc committee appointed by the Academy submitted its initial 

findings in late July and its formal report on October 15. Under the direction of Dr. Marvin J. Kelly, director of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and a member of the Visiting Committee, the 10 members of the committee thoroughly explored the place of the Bureau in the Federal structure, its organization, programs, technical operations, administration, and funds and 

financing. 

There was no question, the 109-page report declared, of the vital 

importance of the Bureau to the Nation or of the quality of its professional 

staff. The heart of the report dealt with certain of the Bureau programs. 

The years following World War II witnessed an unprecedented growth in 

the science and technology of the Nation, and the Bureau's basic research 

programs expanded in aid of them until 1950. Then basic research began to 

lose ground "at a tragic rate," as the Committee expressed it, to the weaponry 

495 
496 THE CRUCIAL DECADE—AN EN VOl 

development work proffered through transferred funds by the Department 

of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission. 

The principal recommendation of the ad hoc committee called for 

the transfer of these weapons programs to the Department of Defense. Except itt wartime, such work did not belong in the Bureau. On the other 

hand, its nonweaponry research, testing and calibration, and evaluation 

projects for the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission 

should continue, as valuable to the basic programs of the Bureau.1 To 

redress the imbalance that had occurred, the committee recommended greatly 

increased direct appropriations for the basic programs of the Bureau and 

for such fundamental research as the determination of physical constants, 

properties of materials, standards and standard practices, and testing and 

evaluation procedures. The committee further recommended that the Bureau 

decrease many of its remaining repetitive test operations as costly in time, 

effort, and funds. And it urged the Bureau to seek greater use by other 

agencies of the Government of its scientific and technical facilities. 

The imbalance in the basic programs of the Bureau occasioned by the 

military demands of the Korean war could be reversed, said the committee, 

and, with adequate appropriations, the staff and research level of 1950 

achieved again within 2 years. Within 4 years "the Bureau should be in a position to perform its authorized functions in balance at the minimum level 

for the nation's needs." 2 The Nation was confronted with a permanent industrial revolution, a continuing technological revolution. The objective of the committee study 

and its recommendations was to restore to the Bureau its "essential services 

for our industrial society." For the translation of new scientific knowledge 

into industrial products, the Bureau must maintain balanced programs in 

those areas of science and technology requiring new measurements and standards. To that end the committee urged that advisory groups from the scientific and technical societies represented on the ad hoc committee be formed 

to aid the Director in achieving balance in the current program and in instituting new programs.3 

'Ad Hoc Committee, NAS, "A Report to the Secretary of Commerce," Oct. 15, 1953, pp. 19—20 (NBS Historical File); NBS Annual Report 1953—54, preface and p. 10. 

Only recently had it become true, as the committee said (p. 12), that "the work of the 

Bureau for the Atomic Energy Commission, which has a dollar value of almost $2,900,000 

in 1953, is not of a weapons development nature." 

2 Ibid., pp. 14, 20—21; NBS Annual Report 1953—54, pp. 11, 126. For the procedure by 

which the Bureau's budget is presented to C6ngress, and the "need for a new philosophy 

[in] the appropriation of funds," see pp. 80—81. 'Ibid., pp. 18, 95. The 10 technical advisory committees to the Bureau represent the 

American Institute of Electriôal Engineers, Institute of Radio Engineers, American Institute of Physics, NAS Policy Committee for Mathematics, American Institute of Mining 
AN AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORTS 497 

Secretary Weeks accepted the recommendations of the committe in 

their entirety and promptly began issuing the directives to carry them out. 

On September 27, 1953, at one stroke, the Bureau lost four of its divisions, 

comprising the whole of the proximity fuze and guided missile programs. 

Three of them, the ordnance electronics, electromechanical, and ordnance development divsions, working on fuzes and related materials, centered around 

the new electronics laboratory erected in 1946 by the Army Engineers on the 

Bureau grounds across Van Ness Street. This complex became the Harry 

Diamond Ordnance Laboratories in 1949, honoring the inventive prodigy 

who came to the Bureau in 1927 and presided over ordnance development 

from 1940 until his death in 1948. With the staff of almost 1,600 members, 

the laboratories were transferred to Army Ordnance.4 At Corona, Calif., 

the Bureau's missile development division, with a staff of over 400, that same month became the Naval Ordnance Laboratories (Corona) 

The transfer of the two major weapons programs involved a loss of 

over one-third of the Bureau staff and more than half its $50 million budget 

for the fiscal year 1952—53. A year later the Institute for Numerical Analysis in the applied mathematics division, supported by the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force at the University of California at Los Angeles, was 

formally transferred to the University. By the end of 1954 the Bureau had 

been reduced from almost 4,600 to 2,800 members, of which approximately 

400 were out at Boulder, Cob.6 

The curtailment of weapons development was quick. More time was required to implement three other recommendations of the committee: the 

insuring of quality and incentive in the Bureau staff; adjustment in the testing and calibration program, to reduce the burden of massive routine testing; and the modernization of facilities, with increased space provided for 

basic programs. 

The high quality of the professional staff had become imperiled by the 

contraction in basic programs in recent years, with consequent reduction in 

staff as large numbers of the junior staff were siphoned into the Bureau's military programs. The future of the staff was threatened by the challenge of 

and Metallurgical Engineers, American Chemical Society, American Ceramic Society, 

American Society of Mechanical Engineers, National Conference on Weights and 

Measures, and American Society of Civil Engineers (NBS Annual Report 1953—54, 

p. 127). 

NBS BuMemo 49—45 (July 25, 1949). Upon its transfer, the complex was renamed the 

Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories (DOFL) - See AdminBul 53—57 (Sept. 30, 1953). 

It is now the Harry Diamond Laboratories. 

Hearings * * * 1953 (Jan. 11, 1954), pp. 6, 66, 77—82. °NBS Annual Report 1953—54, pp. 12—13. 
498 THE CRUCIAL DECADE—AN ENVO! 

supply and demand posed by the postwar surge in employment opportunities 

for young scientists and engineers.T 

Although not mentioned by the committe, there was also an element 

of discontent among the staff, particularly in the upper echelons, induced in 

part by clashing personalities introduced during the previous administraThe postwar reorganization of the Bureau, with its attendant changes 

in research assignments and work loads, staff changes, and increase in administrative duties and paper work, had been carried out largely by new administrative assistants brought in for that purpose. Some confusion and 

concern naturally resulted. 

in order to hear out the staff, both professional and nonprofessional, 

and to discover and strengthen the factors making for a good research 

environment, the Director in November 1953 invited an advisory service, 

Social Research, Inc., of Chicago, to conduct a survey or inventory of staff 

attitudes towards the Bureau, Bureau policies, and working relationships. 

It was an altogether unique experience in the history of the Bureau.9 

The two reports of Social Research made to all members of the staff 

8 months later disclosed that, on the whole, most of the professional staff 

believed the Bureau compared favorably with the best universities and best 

industrial laboratories as a place to work, and that it provided many of 

the amenities of university life with the financial and equipment advan. 

tages of industry. Still, a significant group seemed to feel that the Bureau 

offered less in the way of individual freedom and opportunity to build a scientific reputation than elsewhere, and some apparently considered the 

pressure to publish or perish a unique requirement for promotion at the Bureau. The morale among the nonprofessional staff was about average, corn- pared with that in similar groups in business and industry—an encouraging 

finding considering the late highly publicized unpleasantries. 

The sheer size of the Bureau and its high degree of specialization, 

particularly since World War II, had dissipated to some extent the strong 

sense of community that since its founding had been the special quality of 

the Bureau. Yet the survey found identification high among the staff, both 

with their working unit and with the Bureau as a symbol representing a Ad Hoc Committee report, p. 13. Reduction of funds for basic programs resulted in a loss of 328 members of the research, operations, and testing staff between 1949 and 1952, 

bringing it down from 1,728 to 1,400 members. Report of the Visiting Committee, July 1, 

1952 (in the Office of the Director). 

8 As Bernard L. Gladieux, Executive Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, told the 

House Appropriations Subcommittee, "There is an underlying problem [of personalities] 

out there." It was discussed off the record. Hearings * * 1951 (Feb. 6, 1950), p. 

1361. 

°Announced in NBS AdminBul 53—66, Nov. 25, 1953. 
AN AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORTS 499 

particular way of scientific life. The professional group almost without 

exception, and most of the nonprofessionals, agreed with the ad hoc com- mittee report on the importance of the basic research programs to the 

Bureau and with the fact of their recent serious attenuation. The task of 

the administration, to recover the basic programs and enhance and promote 

the Bureau symbol, was evident'0 

The ad hoc committee had urged some modification in the testing 

program of the Bureau. The program in 1953, comprising calibration, 

quality control, acceptance, qualification, regulatory, and referee testing, 

preparation of standard samples, and product testing, had funds amounting 

to $2.6 million. Both the committee and the Bureau were especially con- cerned over the relative efforts expended on product or acceptance testing 

and calibration testing, and the vital need of the latter as the way in which 

the Bureau disseminated its standards. Yet calibration testing, perhaps the 

most important end product of the Bureau's basic programs, was to a degree 

vitiated by the large amounts of repetitive testing, far more than the high 

level of technology in industry really required. Where such testing could 

not be dispensed with, said the committee, it should be turned over to 

commercial laboratories. 

While the committee agreed that the Bureau must continue to make 

evaluation tests on commercial products at the request of other agencies of 

the Government, such testing was the area that most frequently brought the 

Bureau to the unfavorable attention of the general public—as had happened 

with AD—X2. The committee had no solution. The Bureau must make 

the tests but leave "the policies and activities of a nontechnical nature" 

connected with such tests to the Secretary of Commerce.11 

The first postwar Director, Dr. Condon, had for a time resented the 

effort expended by the Bureau on routine and repetitive testing,, but he came 

to argue more persuasively than any Director for the routine work on Federal 

purchases, as representing "one of the most fertile fields for Government 

economy," than any Director ever had before. Contrary to general opinion, 

10NBS AdminBul 54-49, Aug. 2, 1954; AdininBul 54-68, Sept. 27, 1954. 

The "attitude survey" conducted by social scientists has become an accepted, adjunct 

of administration. In 1957 the Bureau joined with eight other Federal agencies and 

eight private laboratories in a questionnaire designed to find ways "to attract and hold 

scientists and engineers in the Government." Apart from the predictable responses 

(low salary scales, Civil Service examining techniques and processes, inadequate incen. 

tive, uncertain fringe benefits), the principal finding of the survey was that a permanent 

group be created in the Civil Service Commission to work with agencies making such 

attitude surveys (NBS AdminBul 57—39, July 29, 1957; AdminBul 58—1, Jan. 16, 1958). U Ad Hoc Committee report, pp. 15-16. 
500 THE CRUCiAL DECADE—AN EN VOl 

the Bureau had never been given responsibility for laboratory surveillance 

over the quality of Government purchases. There never had been any legislation authority for this activity. Such surveillance as existed offered "only 

a very spotty check," except in the purchase of cement and of electric lamps. 

Bureau testing controlled the acceptance of some 4 million light bulbs bought 

for the Government each year, assuring a consistent quality product; the 

same was true of Government cement purchases.12 

Not less but much more was required in other Government purchases, and Dr. Condon pointed to the $100 million spent by Federal agencies for paint each year and the $500 million for labor to apply it. 

Yet the Bureau in fact tested very little of the paint that the Government 

bought, although it knew there was abundant reason for more testing. It 

had neither the funds nor authorization from other agencies to do that testing. 

The Government spent $12 million annually for automobile tires and $5 million for tires on Air Force planes, without any check on their quality. A 

preliminary study made at the Bureau on truck tires for the Post Office suggested that $150,000 spent on testing tires offered to the Government might 

well save between $3 and $4 million annually.13 

Acting with the support of recommendations of the ad hoc committee, 

however, the Bureau sought to transfer to nongovernmental organizations a number of its other testing services. Efforts to decrease routine calibration 

work met with little satisfaction or success. The U.S. Testing Co. of Hoboken, N.J., set up a calibration service for thermometers but .met little demand and abandoned it. Urged by the ad hoc committee report, the Bureau 

approached other comni ercial testing companies to take over routine calibration not only of therm meters but of volumetric glassware. Following the 

E. U. Condon, "Developing purchase specifications," Pacific Purchasor, February 

1949, p. 13; Hearings * * * 1951 (Feb. 23, 1950), p. 2288; Hearings * C * 1952 

(Apr. 10, 1951), p. 473. 

Hearings * * * 1951, p. 2288; Hearings * * 1952, pp. 464—465. 

Dr. Stratton was chairman of the committee that drew up the act establishing the Federal 

Supply Commission (later the Federal Supply Service), responsible for Federal supplies 

and making purchase contracts. (See Stratton's account of Bureau relations with the 

Commission, in Hearings * * ° 1921, Jan. 2, 1920, pp. 1569—1570.) In 1949 the FSS was transferred from the Treasury Department to a new independent agency, the General 

Services Administration (GSA). Except for the maintenance of Federal Specifications, 

the Bureau has been called on to provide little more quality control over Federal purchases under GSA than under the Treasury, despite the interest of GSA and a "memorandum of understanding" between GSA and the Bureau in 1953 (Hearings * * * 1951 

Feb. 23, 1950, p. 2288; NBS Annual Report 1953—54, p. 131). 

The necessity for the testing is beyond question. In Annual Report 1953—54, p. 99, the 

Bureau noted that of 280 samples of building materials submitted to the Government in 

that period and tested by the Bureau, 137 failed to meet specifications. 
AN AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORTS 501 

unfavorable response ("the work does not appear attractive as a commercial 

venture"), the Bureau began to promote reference standards laboratories 14 in both Government and industry to handle calibrations whose accuracy did 

not necessitate comparison with the national standards.15 

Further unburdening itself of routine efforts, in 1953—54 the Bureau 

turned over three of its service publications requiring periodic revision to 

the American Society for Testing Materials and the American Standards Association, with considerable success except for necessary price increases.'6 

At the same time, commercial firms were given two classes of standard 

samples to prepare and distribute, the Bureau's short-lived radioisotopes 

and its viscosity oil standards.'7 

As foreseen, the rapid advances in technology in the decade after the 

war made relentless demands on the Bureau for more and more testing, calibration, and greater precision measurements. Even with the reduction in 

repetitive testing and standard samples, restriction of calibration to basic 

standards, and the institution of statistical engineering procedures and semiautomatic methods of calibration, the number of tests and calibrations con- tinued to rise. With an authorized increase in the charges made for these 

services, fees rose from $2.9 million in 1953 to more than $5.4 million just a decade later. 

Even though increasingly confined to serving the regulatory, purchasing, or functional responsibilities of other Government agencies, the Bureau's 

testing program and especially its calibration services, grew with the expansion of the Nation's research program. To augment cement testing, for ex- ample, a Cement Reference Laboratory was set up at the Bureau u.nder the 

joint support of NBS, the Bureau of Public Roads, the Army Engineers, and 

the American Society for Testing Materials. The Bureau also initiated a 

14 "Reference standards" are defined in ch. II, p. 76. 

Memo, A. T. McPherson, "Experience in turning over activities of NBS to non-government organizations," Mar. 19, 1960 (NBS Historical File) ; NBS Annual Report 1953— 54, pp. 96—97. For an earlier attempt to shift cement testing to commercial laboratories, 

without success, see letter, P. H. Bates to N. T. Stadfeld, Dec. 11, 1942 (NBS Blue Folder 

Box 72). 

"The publications were M187, "Directory of commercial and college testing laboratories" (1947; issued since 1927) ; M178, "National directory of commodity specifications" (1945; issued since 1925) ; and C410, "National petroleum oil tables" (1936; 

issued since 1916). 

17 Memo, A. T. McPherson, Mar. 19, 1960. Another service discontinued as no longer 

necessary was the performance testing of dry cells, which began in 1924 and cost $10,000 

annually. Memo, Director NBS for Assistant Secretary of Commerce, July 7, 1952 

("General Correspondence Files of the Director, 1945—1955"). 
502 THE CRUCIAL DECI4DE—AN EN VOl 

mobile laboratory service, to make cement tests where time schedules precluded use of the Bureau's area laboratories.18 

Calibration and standard samples programs were similarly augmented. 

In 1955 construction of a new calibration center began at the Boulder Laboratories, initially to calibrate for the Air Force and Navy Bureau of Aeronautics the vast quantity of radio, radar, and other electrical equipment making up more than half the cost of some of their new planes. Representing an investment of $2 million, almost half that sum for interlaboratory standards 

and special equipment, the center would serve science, industry—particularly 

the new aerospace industries—as well as the military and other Government 

agencies.19 

The new importance of Bureau testing was further recognized when 

on May 3, 1956, Public Law 940 authorized the Bureau, for the first time since 

its founding, to retain as working funds its fees charged for the calibration 

of standards and the sale of standard samples to commerce and industry.20 

Congress might let the Bureau retain its testing fees, but it could not 

be immediately persuaded to support the major ad hoc committee recom- mendation, the restoration of the level of basic research at the Bureau through 

increased appropriations. The chairman of the committee, appearing before 

the House Appropriations Subcommittee, informed it that the Bureau was not 

keeping up with the great growth in U.S. technology and was nowhere "big 

enough for its normal basic functions." 21 The House members were not 

moved. Even with the severance of the fuze and missile programs and their 

funds, the remaining sums transferred to the Bureau by other Federal agencies still exceeded by more than three times the direct appropriations of 

Congress, and Congress was concerned about those funds beyond its control. 

"It is the same old program that we are faced with every year," 

Congressman Prince H. Preston, Jr., of Georgia told his fellow members 

on the House subcommittee, 

and that is, lack of control we have over the Bureau of Standards' 

appropriation by virtue of the fact you have so much transferred 

NBS Annual Report 1957, P. 98. 

The new facilities, and better test methods, resulted in more testing of cement but re- duced the volume handled by the Bureau. By the 1960's, just two of the NBS cement 

laboratories were in operation, at Seattle and Denver, and those at Houston, Kansas City, 

San Francisco, Allentown, Pa., and Riverside and Permanente in California were closed 

down. Conversation with Martin R. Defore, Dec. 22, 1964. 

NBS Annual Report 1955, p. 123. Wider dissemination of high precision laboratory 

standards, calibrations, and procedures was the objective of the first meeting of the National Conference of Standards Laboratories held in 1962, attended by over 600 representatives of 200 industrial laboratories and other organizations and reported in NBS 

M248 (1962). 

'° NBS Annual Report 1956, Pp. 108, 140. 21 Hearings * * * 1955 (Jan. 11, 1954), p. 81. 
GAJTHERSBURG 

money or reimbursable projects. * * * J do not know what the 

answer * * * is as long as [the Bureau] can get more money 

from other agencies than we appropriate * * *• As a matter of 

fact, if we were to try some economies * * * a 20 percent cut 

[for example] * * * there would be nothing in the world to pre. 

vent the Bureau of Standards from doing a little staff negotiation 

with the. Navy, or somebody [and get more transferred funds. 

Thus the Bureau doesn't] have to put into effect any reduction 

by virtue of the appropriations we make. [It] would just be going 

to some other source to get the money we denied.22 

Apart from the presumed ease with which the Bureau obtained transferred 

funds was the fact that, while they supported research valuable to basic 

programs of the Bureau, little fundamental research was ever authorized by 

those funds. For that research, and for expansion, the Bureau looked to 

Congress. The predicament was to be resolved 3 years later, with the 

coming of the space age. 

GAITHERSBURG 

Second only to the importance of restoring the basic programs at the 

Bureau to their former high level was the ad hoc committee's recommendation 

for modernization of its facilities and increased space for those basic programs. 

Attention had been called to the condition of the Bureau plant a year after 

the war when a new plant division chief arrived. His initial survey disclosed 

that Bureau facilities were "in a sordid mess." The main buildings were 30 to 40 years old and looked it, since funds had never been made available 

for their periodical rehabilitation. Deterioration had accelerated with their 

great use, abuse, and meager care during the war. Just as alarming was "the almost total lack of basic records on what 'had been built at the Bureau, 

where power, steam, water, electrical and other lines ran, and what the 

ramifications of the facilities really were." 23 The Public Buildings Administration, responsible for the design, con- struction, and protection 'of all Federal buildings, was called to reconstruct 

22 ibid., pp. 90—91, and Hearings * * * 1957 (Mar. 20, 1956), p. 102. 

The counterpart of this observation had been voiced three decades earlier in industry's 

complaint that the special appropriations of Congress to the Bureau expanded its 

sphere of operations, without controls and contrary to the intention of the organic act 

of the Bureau. See ch V, p. 231n. 23 Interview with William I. Ellenberger, Aug. 12, 1964. The condition of the buildings 

and the so-called excessive expenditures for their maintenance were particular targets 

of the House Appropriations Subcommittee survey made at the Bureau in 1949. See 

Hearings * * 1951 (Feb. 23, 1950), pp. 2179 if. 
504 THE CRUCIAL DECADE—AN EN VOl 

the records and survey the Bureau plant.24 Its restoration of records, recommendations for rehabilitation of utilities, and for destruction of some of the 

temporary structures beyond repair were salutary. The modernization of 

electrical, plumbing, and heating facilities, accomplished in 1949—53 as a result of the survey, still left the Bureau plant a maze of over a •hundred 

buildings, annexes, and minor structures. Most were antiquated and far 

short of modern laboratory standards, and all were so crowded that no expansion of activities was possible in them.25 

As a solution to the maze, the visiting PBA architects drew up splendid plans for a completely remodeled Bureau on its present site, reconstructing the entire interiors of the major buildings and replacing the scores of 

lesser buildings with a dozen new and architecturally satisfying modern 

structures.26 The plans were subsequently described as "purely objective * * * on the presumption of unlimited resources," a condition to which 

Congress was not likely to agree.27 

Less than a decade later, convinced of the need of new Bureau facilities and their importance to the national welfare, Congress approved relocation.28 In May .1956 the Director selected a 550—acre plot of high-level 

ground near Gaithersburg, Md., approximately 19 air miles (45 minutes by 

The PBA reconstruction is the basis for the Bureau's plant data given in app. 0. 

The request to the PBA, to survey the plant and determine the repairs and alterations 

necessary to put it in satisfactory condition, was made in January 1946. The report was made on May 21, 1947. The survey is discussed in Hearings * * * 1948 (Mar. 12, 

1947), pp. 295, 308; Hearings * * * 1949 (Jan. 20, 1948), p. 537; Hearings * * * 

1951 (Feb. 23, 1950), p. 2274; and NAS—NRC Report, "The role of the Department 

of Commerce in science and technology," Mar. 2, 1960, p. 92. En a three-stage "redesign of the entire plant," the prospectus called for retention and 

thorough modernization of 26 of the original buildings, demolition of 68, and erection of 

12 new structures. "Redevelopment Program Survey, NBS," Oct. 1, 1948 (PBA, Federal 

Works Agency, Project 49—118, in NBS Historical File). The estimated cost of the PBA 

modernization was subsequently reported as approximately $40 million. [Senate] Hearings * * * 1958 (Apr. 11, 1957), p. 137. 

Interview with W. I. Ellenberger, Aug. 12, 1964. 

As late as the fall of 1957 the Visiting Committee to the Bureau wrote to Secretary 

Weeks that the immediate needs of the Bureau were so great that the committee would 

prefer modernization, new buildings, and expansion at the present site rather than recon- struction at a new site. Letter, M. J. Kelly, Chairman, Visiting Committee, to Secretary 

Weeks, Oct. 17, 1957 (Visiting Committee files in Office of the Director). 

A year later the Visiting Committee approved the decision to build on a new site, but in 

the interest of haste recommended retention of the Washington site and construction only 

of new types of research facilities at Gaithersburg (Minutes of meeting of the Visiting 

Committee, June 19, 1958). 

Ultimately, complete reconstruction was agreed on. A new plant could be more efficiently 

managed and, as had dictated the choice of the original Bureau site, relocation would remove the Bureau from a variety of mechanical, electric, and atmospheric disturbances 

to precise scientific measurement that now surrounded the Bureau in the city. 
GAJTHERSBURG 505 

car) from downtown Washington, and available for an estimated $750,000.29 

Four years later Congress appropriated approximately $23.5 million as the 

first installment on a 'building program estimated to cost in the neighborhood 

of $70 million for buildings and $45 million for special facilities and equipment. 

On June 14, 1961, ground was broken. The first contracts had been 

let for construction of the central boiler plant, to serve the complex planned, 

and for an engineering mechanics laboratory. That fall additional con- tracts were negotiated for a radiation physics laboratory, administration 

building, supply and plant structures, the shops, and a service building. The 

third phase called for construction of seven general purpose laboratories, 

each occupying an area larger than a football field. The fourth and final 

phase was to include several small special purpose laboratories and a re- actor building. When completed the new Bureau complex would comprise 

over 20 structures. 

The ad hoc committee report of 1953, laying down fresh guidelines for 

the work of the Bureau, gave it a direction it had almost lost in the turbulence 

of the postwar decade. The approval of plans to construct a great Bureau 

plant at Gaithersburg bespoke new national needs and a confidence in the 

future. It also reflected the phenomenal involvement of the Federal Government in postwar science. 

Before World War II, Federal participation in research in the physical 

sciences was negligible. Striving to close the .gap in the technology of war, 

the Federal research budget between 1940 and 1944 rose from $74 to $1,377 

million. Two decades later, in continuing escalation, Federal research and 

development exceeded $15 billion annually or close to 15 percent ofthe national budget. Almost 60 percent of all research scientists and engineers in 

the Nation worked wholly or in part on programs financed by the Govern. 

ment. Approximately 68 percent 'of. the $15 billion went into development 

research, 22 percent to applied research, and 10 percent to basic research, 

encompassing every field of physical, biological, and social science. The 

Department of Defense and the National Aeronautic and Space Administration alone accounted for nearly 80 percent of the total funds, supporting development research in hardware immediately pertinent to the national defense, as well as basic and applied research in meteorology, oceanography, 

astronomy, high temperature physics, and low temperature physics.3° 

20 NBS Budget and Management Division, Summary of Files on Gaithersburg (Office of 

the Director). Early estimates of the cost of the Gaithersburg plant appear in Senate 

Hearings * * * 1958 (Apr. 11, 1957), p. 138. 20 National Science Foundation, "Federal Funds for Research, Development, and other 

Scientific Activities" (Washington, D.C., 1964), p. 2 and appendix, table C—32; NSF, 

"Reviews of Data on Research and Development" (Washington, D.C., 1963), p. 1. 
Gaithersburg, showing the high-rise administration building, surrounded by and interconnecting with the general purpose laboratories, as these 

principal units neared completion in 1965. 

C).' 
GAITHERSBURG 507 

It was this fact, the mobilization of national science as a permanent 

peacetime responsibility of the Government, that made anomalous the Bureau's topheavy role in development research. As a consequence, the Bureau was unable to produce new methods of measurement and standards at the rate 

required by the Federal science program. The result was a growing measurement pinch in the physical sciences. 

An event in 1957, the lofting of Russia's Sputnik I into space, marked 

the advent of the space age and made glaring the gap in measurement.31 

Three years before, both the ad hoc committee and the Bureau had expressed 

concern about the unpredictable advances that were being made in science, 

about the shortening lead time between basic discoveries and their application. Forty years had separated Maxwell's publication of the 'laws of the 

electromagnetic field and the first radio experiments; 10 years the discovery 

of the neutron and the first nuclear reaction; and 6 years the invention of 

the transitor and its appearance in an amplifier on the market. Although 

space science was moving in this country, its slow pace was suddenly mocked 

by the Russian achievement. 

The Nation's 'missile and space programs lagged 'badly for want, among 

other things, of high temperature measurements in the combustion of high. 

energy missile fuels; accurate thrust measurements in the million-pound 

range, instead of the hundred-thousand-pound range available; and high and 

low temperature, corrosion, and radiation damage measurements of metals, 

alloys, ceramics, and other materials. Measurements were needed on the 

effects of sudden and violent changes of temperature and pressure on the 

thousands of components in a missile system, on the materials and mechanisms 

of their rocket engines, airframes, electronic devices, and guidance systems.32 

Science, industry, and the military establishment looked tothe Bureau 

for new precision measurements 'that only the most basic research in chemistry, physics, and mathematics could provide. But reflecting public opinion 

during and after the Korean war, budget cuts over the 5 years after 1950 

reduced the basic research capabilities of the Bureau by almost 30 percent.33 

31 The significance of the event, and of Russia's support of five standards laboratories and 

129 calibration centers, was discussed at Hearings * * * 1959 (Apr. 23, 1958), pp. 

421—22. 

See Beverly Smith, Jr., "The measurement pinch," Sat. Eve. Post., Sept. 10, 1960; 

"Measurement standards report," ISA J., February 1961, pp. 1—40. a Operations and research funds fell from $5.5 million in 1951 to $3.9 million in 1955. 

By 1957 small congressional increases over the previous 3 years brought the staff up 

to 75 percent of the 1950 level. Transferred funds still accounted for 63 percent of 

total Bureau funds, even though half of the transferred fund programs were reported as 
508 THE CRUCIAL DECADE—AN EN VOl 

Famed for its lead time in measurement to meet the requirements of industry, 

the Bureau for almost the first time in its history found itself caught in a measurement pinch, by the surging demands of the space age. 

As public opinion veered, the budget cuts were reversed. New plan. 

fling began in order to restaff the Bureau and provide new facilities and 

programs. Waiting for the Bureau to acquire more physicists, chemists, and 

mathematicians and space research results, the Army, Navy, and Air Force 

resorted to long and costly series of empirical trials and test firings. Waiting 

for the Bureau, the services worked to improve their measurement procedures, 

training engineers and technicians in metrology and calibration and setting 

up calibration centers and mobile measurement laboratories. 

Even before ground was broken at Gaithersburg, better thrust 

measurements were in sight, temperature calibrations rose from 2,8000 C 

beyond the 15,0000 mark, and intensified research in high.purity materials 

had begun. Highest priorities were assigned to the construction at Gaithers. 

burg of the mechanical engineering laboratory, to undertake thrust measurements for new missiles; the radiation laboratory, with its linear accelerator 

in the 100 million-electron-volt range, for safety studies of radiation ex- posure; and housing for the Bureau's new research reactor, for programs on neutron and fission physics measurements, radiation damage, and 

radioisotope applications—all of which were impractical or impossible in 

the Washington laboratories.34 As appropriation of research funds rose, 

the Bureau came on course. 

To meet the challenge of space research, to affirm the purpose, focus, 

and urgency of Bureau operations, and give meaning to the individual effort 

of each Bureau staff member, the Director prepared for the staff a formal 

statement of the Bureau's central, continuing mission. The emergence of 

science and technology as the paramount concern of the Nation in the 20th 

century, he declared, demanded the highest order of measurement com- petence, in order to provide the standards and measurement techniques on which maintenance of scientific progress depended. The paramount mission 

of the Bureau henceforth, because of its unique responsibility for leadership 

close enough to Bureau statutory responsibilities to be put under direct appropriations. 

Minutes of meeting of the Visiting Committee, Apr. 25, 1957 (Office of the Director). 

A special advisory committee of the National Academy of Sciences, chaired by Dr. 

M. J. Kelly who had headed the ad hoc committee in 1953, was appointed in 1958 at the 

request of Secretary Weeks to evaluate the operations of all elements of the Department 

of Commerce. The focus of the restudy of Bureau operations was on the progress of 

implementation of the 1953 recommendations. The principal finding was that the 

Nation's need for measurements and standards was not being met by the Bureau, "only 

because of inadequate funds." NAS—NRC Report, "The role of the Department of 

Commerce in science and technology," Mar. 2, 1960, pp. 81, 94. 

Minutes of meeting of the Visiting Committee, June 29, 1959 (Office of the Director). 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 509 

in physical measurement, must be: (1) Provision of the central basis within 

the United States of a complete and consistent system of physical measurement, and coordination of that system with the measurement systems of other 

nations; (2) provision of essential services leading to accurate and uniform 

physical measurements throughout the Nation's science, industry, and com- merce, and consonant with their advancing requirements; (3) provision of 

data on the properties of matter and materials which are of importance to 

science, industry, and commerce, and which are not available of sufficient 

accuracy elsewhere.35 

The mission statement by no means encompassed all of the Bureau's 

future activities. The Bureau had, and would continue to assume, other 

important tasks within its special competence, as its organic act and amendments provided. But physical measurement, and those specialized services 

of a supporting nature, such as applied mathematics and instrumentation, 

were to be the essential focus of future Bureau activities. 

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

In creating a National Bureau of Standards in the Federal structure 

at the turn of the century, Congress sought to redress a long-standing need, 

to provide standards of measurement for commerce and industry, the public, 

and the Government. Inevitably, the focus was on industry. The United 

States had only recently become a trading nation, manufacturing for the 

first time more than it could consume and moving into foreign markets. 

Recognition of the need for higher standards of measurement, of better 

quality of product and performance, had prompted manufacturing interests 

to become the moving force in the founding of the Bureau. 

In its first two decades the Bureau won an international reputation for 

its outstanding achievements in physical measurement, development of standards, and test methods. Through its new standards of measurement, instrumentation, and performance it sought to raise the scientific level of industry. 

Industry accepted the measurements it so desperately needed but tended 

to resist the introduction of scientific methods for the achievement of better 

products and service. In seeking to goad into action those elements of 

industry reluctant to improve the quality of their product or service, the 

Bureau championed consumer causes, and in testing commodities purchased for the Government found a lever to move industry. 

The latter effort fell short of its goal because the lever could not be 

fully applied. At the end of World War I the Bureau reluctantly admitted 

ao Minutes of meeting of the Visiting Committee, June 29, 1959; NBS AdminBul 60—40, 

Sept. 9, 1960; NBS Annual Report 1960, p. 150. 
510 THE CRUCIAL DECADE—AN EN VU! 

that Federal agencies, representing the largest single consumer of products 

in the Nation, were still far from united on the need for quality or standardization in their purchases, and tended to neglect or ignore test results 

made by the Bureau on their behalf. 

The techniques of mass production introduced during the war nevertheless gave an enormous impetus to standardization of methods and materials, 

and the wartime impact of science on industry raised Bureau hopes that it 

might find readier acceptance of its efforts. Determined to foster the new 

industries born of the war, the Bureau sought to become the national re- search laboratory for all industry. By the early 1920's a few 

had begun to exploit the new industrial revolution, most successfully in radio 

and the automobile, but in general industry and commerce resumed their 

wasteful habits. 

Under the Hoover administration, the Bureau continued its efforts 

to raise the scientific level of industry and saw itself firmly tied to the service 

of commerce. In Hoover's crusade to eliminate waste in industry, conserve 

materials and resources, and standardize products and procedures, almost 

every element of the Bureau participated. The Bureau made notable advances in both scientific and industrial research in the period, but as a result of its almost total identification with industry, shared the obloquy 

heaped on commerce and industry when the depression came. Industrial research funds dried up and industrial projects were cur- tailed or eliminated during the great disenchantment. With greatly reduced 

appropriations and staff, but its top echelon almost intact, the Bureau turned 

increasingly to fundamental research during the depression. The fund of 

basic knowledge acquired in those years served the Nation well in the Second 

World War, and with the mobilization of science in the Nation vastly extended 

the limits of technological attainment. Few could have foreseen the wartime 

developments in nuclear physics, atomic energy, electronics, mathematics, in 

aviation, and in missile research, requiring the extension of ranges of all 

former measurements and determination of an array of new measurements 

never contemplated before. 

Unlike the experience after World War I, the impetus given science 

and technology did not recede but accelerated enormously in the succeeding 

years. The import of science for the national welfare became so imperative 

that the Federal Government dared not relinquish its direction of science, and 

its costs had become so great that oniy Government could support it. The 

Bureau found itself in the forefront of the scientific revolution that had 

overtaken the Nation. 

In the stream of the new revolution were the basic programs introduced or built up at the Bureau in nuclear and atomic physics, electronics, 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 511 

mathematics, computer research, and polymer research, as well as in the 

instrumentation, standards, and measurement research required by the pace 

of science and industry. In this period of rapid reorientation some of the 

long established programs at the Bureau suffered, and for a time the measurement requirements in new fields of science appeared to flourish at the expense 

of traditional metrology. The onrush of space science put all metrology at 

hazard. Resolution of that hazard became the aim and continuing achievement of the present decade. 

In that same decade, as the Bureau prepared to move to its new 

laboratories at Gaithersburg, its organization and functions underwent a new realinement of focus and purpose. Believing the Bureau soundly 

grounded in its role as adjunct of the new science, the Department of Commerce called for reorientation of its services to increase its effectiveness as "a 

principal focal point in the Federal Government for assuring maximum application of the physical and engineering sciences to the advancement of technology in industry and commerce." 

Early in 1964 the programs of the Bureau were regrouped into four 

institutes. The Institute for Basic Standards comprised its long-standing 

programs in the field of basic measurement standards and its recently established National Standard Reference Data Program. The Institute for Applied 

Technology brought together the industry-oriented programs of the Bureau 

and the Department's program in textile technology and its Office of Technical 

Services, for the promotion of technological innovation and use of the results 

of science and technology in industry. The Institute for Materials Research 

combined the Bureau programs in chemistry and metallurgy, with a view to 

augmenting their measurements of the properties of materials, strengthening 

and extending the standard samples program, and improving the efficiency 

of production processes in industrial technology. 

A year and a half later the Bureau's 'Central Radio Propagation Laboratory at Boulder, originally intended as a fourth institute, became 

scheduled for transfer from the Bureau to a new agency within the Depart. 

ment of Commerce, the Environmental Science Services Administration 

(ESSA). With inclusion of the U.S. Weather Bureau and the Coast and 

Geodetic Survey, the new environmental agency of the Commerce Department was planned to provide broader based research and better service to the 

public, to business, and to industry.37 

Department of Commerce, Depanment Order No. 90 (revised), "National Bureau of 

Standards" (Jan. 30, 1964). 

Memo, Director NBS for all employees, May 13, 1965. Exempted from the transfer 

to ESSA was the radio standards work carried on at Boulder, which was to remain a function of NBS. 
The Visiting Committee of Commerce to the Bureau in 1957. Left to right, Dr. Clyde E. Williams, Dr. Crawford H. Greenewalt, Dr. Mervin J. 

Kelly, Dr. Detlev Bronk, Prof. Frederick Seitz, and the Bureau's fifth Director, Dr. Allen V. Astin. 

C,' 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 513 

The spin-off of CRPL, the new realinement of functions and purposes, 

are endemic in the history of the Bureau. Its history over more than half a 

century discloses a highly viable form, a living organism of the Federal Government, responsive to national needs as they arose. Established to do no 

more than provide the Nation with its necessary yardsticks of measurement 

and performance, a seemingly mechanical destiny, the Bureau from the beginning reached out to the whole life, the whole welfare of the Nation. 

The present history has tried to show this life force that is the Bureau, 

acting as individuals and as agency, and the part it has played in the 

scientific, industrial, and business life of the Nation. As crusader and 

arbiter, creator and counselor of standards, it works for the future, as it has 

in the past, for the good society, and by its learning and good will makes 

itself felt throughout the Nation and the world. 
514 

The Exchequer standard corn gallon of Henry VII 
APPENDIX A 

FERDINAND RUDOLPH HASSLER 

First Superintendent of the 

Coast Survey and of 

Weights and Measures 

When Professor Stratton arrived at the Office of Weights and Measures on B Street in 

Washington in the spring of 1898 to survey its equipment and operations, he found there 

in the person of Louis A. Fischer, the adjuster, a link with Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, 

the first Superintendent of Weights and Measures in the Federal Government. It was in the atmosphere of the office over which Hassler had presided, Stratton said, 

with its sacred traditions concerning standards, its unsurpassed instrument shop, 

its world-known experts in the construction and comparison of standards, and 

especially in the most precise measurement of length and mass, that the boy 

Fischer, scarcely over 16, found himself when he entered the employ of Government in a minor capacity [about the year 18801. * * Scarcely 40 years had 

passed since the end of Hassler's services and the beginning of Fischer's. His 

first instructors were the direct disciples of Hassler and he knew and talked 

with those who had come in personal contact with the first superintendent.1 

Fischer's reminiscences concerning the early historyof the Weights and Measures office, 

gathered from his association with the successors of Hassler, were never recorded, to 

Stratton's regret, and the only biography of Hassler, by Florian Cajori, professor of 

mathematics at the University of California, centers on his career in the Coast Survey 

gathered from his association with the successors of Hassler, were never recorded, to 

in the history of science in the Federal Government, is the principal source of the present 

sketch.2 

1 Stratton, "Address Memorializing Louis Albert Fischer, 1864.—1921," 15th Annual Con. 

ference on Weights and Measures, May 23—26, 1922, NBS M51 (1922), p. 3. 2 Cajori, The Chequered Career of Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, First Superintendent of 

the United States Coast Survey: A Chapter in the History of Science in America 

(Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1929). 

The biography is a sound summary of the known facts about Hassler. It is based on the numerous published reports Hassler made of his work for the Government; on the 

Hassler correspondence in the Ford Collection of the New York Public Library; Rosalie 

L. H. Norris's unpublished "Recollections" (written in Paris, 1856) in the Simon Newcomb Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; and the papers in the Archives 

of the American Philosophical Society. Considerable use is also made of the 558-page 

work, Zschokke's Memoirs of Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, published in Aarau, 

Switzerland, 1877, with supplementary documents published in 1882, and translated by 

Rosalie L. H. Norris (Nice: V.-Eng. Gauthier & Co., 1882). Zschokke's actual memoirs 

occupy pp. 11—31, and a "Sketch of His Life" by Hassler himself, appears on pp. 35—40. The bulk of the Memoirs, an omniurn-gatherum, comprises reports, newspaper accounts, 

letters and other correspondence by or relating to Hassler. 

515 
516 APPENDIX A 

Hassler, a man highly trained in mathematics and of great practical ability as a scientist, had scant talent in the art of living and even less in the management of 

everyday affairs. Proud, improvident, singleminded in his pursuit of precision, and 

intolerant of expediency, he was destined by events to a life of unending storm and 

stress. Had not revolution in Europe brought him to America, he might have found 

his place in the scientific community abroad. The political and economic climate of 

the New World had room for the practical, the philosophical scientist, but little for 

the often impractical but wholly dedicated man of science such as Hassler.8 

He was born in the town of Aarau, in the northern or German part of Switzerland, on October 7, 1770, his father a member of a distinguished family, a prosperous 

watch manufacturer, and high local official. At 16, Hassler entered the institute that was later to be the University of Berne and there came under the influence of Johann 

Georg Tralles, a young professor of mathematics and physics, who turned Hassler from 

the study of law to mathematics, astronomy, and geodesy. 

The scientific climate Hassler found in America is well depicted in Brooke Hindle's 

The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735—1789 (University of North 

Carolina Press, 1956), especially pp. 79, 84, 255—256, 327. 

An engraving of young Hassler, probably made sometime in the 1790's. From the 

scenery and the spyglass in Hassler's hand, it may be inferred that he and his friend 

Tralles were at that time mapping the area around Berne, Switzerland. Less than a decade later, Hassler left for America. 
APPENDIX A 517 

Geodetics became their hobby, and in 1791, with apparatus and funds supplied 

by Hassler, the two began mapping the area around Berne. Since even tolerable maps 

of any part of the canton did not exist then, the town fathers encouraged the project, 

seeing that it would promote better land utilization and development. Among the 

difficulties that confronted Tralles and Hassler was the lack of precise instruments and 

measurement standards, and so began young Hassler's lifelong preoccupation with 

instrumentation. Between field expeditions, Hassler traveled to Paris and the university 

towns of Germany to attend courses, collect books for his growing library, and acquire 

better instruments and standards for the survey work. His friend Tralles in that same period, as deputy of the Helvetic Republic, was to participate in the establishment of 

the metric system in France. 

The French Revolution of 1798 brought rebellion and French military occupation 

to Switzerland. That same year Hassler, now 28 and a prominent local official, married 

Marianne Gaillard, daughter of a schoolteacher. Of a cheerful disposition and great 

social ambitions, Marianne was not of a very domestic turn and is said to have concerned herself little with the seven sons and two daughters she subsequently bore 

Hassler. 

Under some harassment from the new political regime, and his association with 

Tralles severed when the latter left to become a member of the Academy of Science in 

Berlin, Hassler in 1804 joined with a chance acquaintance to organize a stock company 

for the purchase of large tracts of land in South Carolina, or possibly Louisiana, and 

there found a Swiss colony. On May 15, 1805, Hassler left his native land with his 

wife, four children, servants, and 96 trunks and bales for the trip down the Rhine. 

He had also engaged 120 laborers, artisans, and craftsmen, with their families, to establish the colony, defraying all their expenses. At Amsterdam he chartered the 350-ton 

ship Liberty, out of Philadelphia, and on October 18 after a 6-week voyage the company 

arrived at that port. 

His partner, who had sailed earlier, had in the meantime speculated with the 

funds entrusted to him and lost them. To maintain his family while waiting for 

remittances from his father, Hassler sold many of the works of art he had brought 

with him. He assisted his company of colonists to find new places and, determined not 

to return home, applied for American citizenship. 

Shortly after his arrival in Philadelphia, the seat of Government at that time, 

he met and was cordially welcomed by his compatriot Albert Gallatin, Secretary of 

the Treasury, and introduced to President Jefferson. Through them he became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1807. To the Society he later sold 

some of his instruments and standards in order to maintain his family, and to the 

Library of Congress part of his scientific library of about 3,000 volumes. 

Hassler came to America intending to lead a rural life as steward of the colony 

he planned to establish somewhere in the South. His mathematical books and instruments were to be his recreation, and his youthful interest in triangulation and 

astronomy only recollections of former employments. Instead, a year after his arrival, 

his possessions much reduced, he settled on a small farm on the banks of the Schuylkill, 

north of Philadelphia, and began looking for an occupation. He was now 35, possessed 

of a hardy constitution, considerable learning, but with few immediate prospects. Like 

many of the well-educated of his time he knew Latin and spoke several languages, in 

his case German, French, Italian, and English, the latter clear but heavily accented 

and unidiomatic. Besides his training and experience in political science and jurisprudence, he had an extensive knowledge of mathematics and a good knowledge of 

chemistry, mineralogy, and all the other branches of natural philosophy. And he was versed in astronomy and practical geodetics. 
518 APPENDIX A 

When he made known his need of an income, his new friends in the Philosophical 

Society wrote to President Jefferson recommending Hassler's employment in a geodetic 

survey of the coast then under consideration. On February 10, 1807, Congress appropriated $50,000 for— a survey to be taken of the coasts of the United States, in which shall be 

designated the islands and shoals, with the roads or places of anchorage, within 

twenty leagues of any part of the shores of the United States; and also the 

respective courses and distances between the principal capes, or head lands, 

together with such other matters as [the President] may deem proper for 

completing an accurate chart of every part of the coasts within the extent 

aforesaid.4 

Of a number of plans solicited for conducting the survey, Hassler's proved most satisfactory. It provided for the determination of true geographic positions by astronomical means at key points near the coast, networks of precise triangulation between these 

points, a topographical survey of the coast, and a hydrographic survey of coastal waters 

controlled by triangulation.' 

The President recommended that Hassler be appointed to carry out the work, 

but the solicitations and more pressing affairs of state delayed action on the survey for 

4 years. 

While awaiting acceptance of his plans for the coast survey, Hassler secured a place as acting professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at West Point, resigning 

in February 1810 to teach natural science at Union College at Schenectady. He left a year later when Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin commissioned him to go to London to obtain the instruments he would need for the survey. Hassler had stipulated in 

seeking the post that "good instruments are never to be obtained by buying in shops, 

where only instruments of inferior quality are put up to sell; they must be made on command and by the best mechanicians." He embarked with his family for Europe on August 29, 1811, to seek out those mechanicians and direct the construction of his 

instruments. 

Hassler's eighth child and sixth son was born to his wife during the 4-year stay 

in London and named Edward Troughton, after his next door neighbor and the chief 

instrumentmaker supplying the equipment for the survey. Besides Hassler's reluctance 

to hurry the construction of his instruments, delays arose when shortly after his arrival 

war broke out between England and his country, and for a time he was detained in 

London as an alien. Two years later while his family was living in Paris, England and 

her allies invaded France, Napoleon escaped from Elba and, collecting troops as he went, 

marched to his final battle. Hassler went to France to extricate his family. 

Not all the instruments that Hassler ordered abroad were for the coast survey. 

Some were for two astronomical observatories, as "a permanent national institution," that 

Hassler planned, one in Washington or somewhere in the Southern States, the other 

in the North. Not until his return were the President or Congress to learn of, and 

defer, Hassler's "institution." 

Quoted in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. 

Report of the National Museum, part II, A Memorial of George Brown Goode * * * " [including his] history of science in America (Washington, D.C. 1901), p. 293. 

Jefferson, anticipating war with Great Britain and aware that the only charts of the coast 

were those of the early Dutch, English, and French colonists, proposed the survey to 

Congress in 1806. 

'A. Joseph Wraight and Elliott B. Roberts, "The Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1807—1957" 

(Washington, D.C., 1957), p. 5. 
APPENDIX A 519 

When not tending the construction of his instruments and apparatus, the great 

24-inch theodolite for measuring the angles of the survey, and the telescopes, transit 

instruments, astronomical clocks, chronometers, barometers, thermometers, micrometers, 

and balances he had ordered, Hassler met and discoursed with the astronomers and 

geodecists in London and Paris on the state and progress in these fields in Europe. He 

procured new copies of both French and English standard weights and measures, for 

their like was not known in America and they were needed for the survey, and made 

comparisons of the meter bars and other measures with Troughton's own scales. 

In the spring of 1815, upon the death of his father, he went to Switzerland to settle the estate, returning with his inheritance of some 1,100 pounds sterling. Besides more instruments he bought lavishly of the best and most recent books on astronomy 

and geodesy, some for the instruction of the young officers who would be employed in 

the survey, the rest for his own use and instruction. 

The value of the equipment ordered by Hassler in London and Paris came to $37,550. With his salary of $4,500 and traveling expenses, his accounts came to a grand 

total of $55,634, well above the congressional appropriation. He had to come home 

at his own expense. In the first week of August 1815 he and his family left London, to arrive in Philadelphia 9 weeks later. He had, as Gallatin pointed out, outrun his time 

and his funds, but the instruments he had procured were excellent. 

in the spring of 1816, without waiting for formal approval, Hassler set to work. 

On August 3, 3 months after Congress appropriated funds to initiate the survey, itself, 

Hassler was notified of his appointment as Superintendent of the Survey of the Coast, 

with a salary of $3,000 and $2,000 for expenses. He had discussed with the Secretary 

of the Treasury the operation of the survey and the amount of freedom he should have 

in the work. In a confirming letter that rang like a personal declaration of independence 

he said in part: 

My task would be fully large enough, to make all the combinations, operations, 

and principal observations; to bring up the young officers given to me to the 

capability required for their employment, (as it will in fact be a practical 

school that I shall have to keep, besides the work), and to direct, inspect, and 

verify, the detailed surveys, and their uniting in proper charts, etc. To load me with any of the mechanical, or economical parts, would be impeding the 

work, * * * and place me in a situation not to be supported. 

At 46, Hassler's character was fully formed. He was a scientist of unlimited 

enthusiasm and devotion to his work. He was honest, a proud spirit, and knew his 

worth. He also habitually planned things on a large scale, without giving much thought 

to the practical realities or limitations of his projects. The Swiss colony project had 

been characteristic, and his mentors should have been warned by the apparatus he had 

purchased for his two unauthorized observatories. And, his biographer notes, as "the 

head of a large family, the husband of a woman fond of society and unqualified to 

struggle along devotedly on small means, a scholar who in youth was accustomed to almost unrestricted expenditures for books, scientific instruments, and travel, he was to find himself in maturer years in sharp conflict with economic conditions." But he had on his side warm supporters in the American Philosophical Society, and more valuable, 

the Presidency. As Jefferson first befriended him, so succeeding Presidents Madison, 

Monroe, Adams, and Jackson were to come to his defense and to extricate him from his 

repeated difficulties with accountants and Congress. 

A letter from the Treasury in February 1817, 6 months after his appointment, asked 

Hassler to state the probable time required to complete the survey. He couldn't say, 

for he had not yet begun. Owing to the severity of the winter, he had not even found 
520 APPENDIX A 

Hassler sets up camp in the field, a drawing based on a reproduction of a time-darkened 

painting. 

Jul Jersey wagon, with its wine chamber, disappearing dining and work table, and 

array of compact instrument and provision chests. 

a satisfactory location for a baseline. On the other hand, he had started to train the 

first of the lieutenants of artillery sent him from West Point as assistants, and there was under construction a remarkable carriage for transporting the theodolite and other 

delicate instruments to be used.6 Not until April did he determine on the location for 

his first baseline, near the Hackensack River in New Jersey, and begin establishing 

triangulation points. 

A year after beginning the survey, Hassler was asked again when it would be 

completed and was warned of Congress's dissatisfaction with his meager progress. 

On April 14, 1818, Congress acted, modifying the law authorizing the survey in order 

to put Army and Navy officers in charge of the work, thereby excluding Hassler from 

further direction or participation. His biographer is doubtless right in declaring that 

As completed a year later, the barouche-like vehicle he designed to convey his instruments, some weighing a hundred pounds or more, was based on a Jersey wagon mounted on strong braces and huge springs, to be drawn by two or four horses. Ruggedly con- structed to maneuver on rough roads and hilly terrain, it had numerous compartments 

in a double bottom for storing smaller instruments, tools, stationery and books, and a music box to keep him company as he worked late into the night. In a locker under 

the seat were his traveling clothes and "a little spirit-room," containing his supply of 

Swiss wines and the crackers and cheese he lived on in the field. A tent covering 

secured the carriage in bad weather. With its suspended table, the vehicle served as Hassler's office by day and, with the table secured, as a sleeping chamber at night. 

-- 

Visible under tents are his 24-inch theodolite for measuring angles and his wonder- 
APPENDIX A 521 

"Hassler wanted his survey to be not only practically useful, but also a contribution 

to the science of geodesy * * * on a par with European contributions * * Congress 

had not the least idea of the coast survey as a science; to them it was an enterprise no different from the survey of the Northwest Territory"—a simple matter of using 

compass and chain and turning out maps and charts with regularity. After a year's 

work Hassler had no maps to offer.7 

The next decade was as bleak a period for Hassler as it was for the progress 

of the survey. A week after militarization of the coast survey, President Monroe 

appointed Hassler as one of the astronomers in the party sent to fIx the boundary line 

with Canada in upper New York State, as provided in the treaty ending the War of 

1812. A year later Hassler, in conflict with the U.S. Commissioner over his progress 

and his expenses, resigned. He sought a professorship at Jefferson's University of 

Virginia, still under construction. He considered returning to Europe, but his wife 

would not consent. He decided to farm and teach, and in 1820, despite the known 

severity of climate and his complete lack of experience as a farmer, he purchased a tract of land at Cape Vincent in New York State, overlooking the Thousand Islands in 

the St. Lawrence. There he planned, with characteristic enthusiasm, to establish a normal school and agricultural college. 

With high expectations, he sold at a sacrifice most of the furniture and all of 

the pictures, statuary, and Sèvres porcelain in the house the family was then occupying on the Commons in Newark, N.J., and almost all that was left of his original collection 

of books. The remaining furniture was packed in two large Jersey wagons, and with 

Hassler's wonderful instrument carriage, which he purchased when it was sold at 

auction in 1819, the family set out on the 400-mile journey to Cape Vincent. 

The house he had bought sight unseen in New York State for $1,000 proved to be two 1-room log cabins. Gathering together the carpenters and masons in the 

neighborhood, he began construction of a great 16-room house, destined to be completed but never occupied. Some farming was begun, but the pI'an for a college was soon abandoned. In the spring of 1823, while Hassler was on one of his frequent 

absences from home, perhaps attending a meeting of the Philosophical Society in 

Philadelphia, and his children were in the fields, his wife gathered her personal 

belongings and left him, never to return. 

Leaving his eldest son in charge of the farm, Hassler soon after took a teaching 

position at Union Hall Academy at Jamaica, Long Island, and brought the other children to New York. When the Academy failed in 1827, he taught at another in 

Richmond, Va, and continued to seek a university position. But his marked foreign 

accent, his rather erratic temperament, and his age, then 55, were against him. Always a tireless talker, he had also been a tireless writer, about his projects, his progress in 

the survey work, his construction of instruments, his scientific observations delivered 

before the Philosophical Society. Now he turned to writing textbooks, and with some success found publishers for his "Elements of Analytical Trigonometry" (1826), 

"Elements of Arithmetik, Theoretical and Practical" (1826), "Elements of Geometry of 

Pldnes and Solids" (1828), "A Popular Exposition of the System. of the Universe with 

Plates and Tables" (1830), and "Logarithmic and Trigonometric Tables" (1830). tlu' 

latter with introductions published in five languages. 

Hassler's undertaking, "which Congress supposed would be finished in a few years, 

has now taken 150 years, and no end is in sight" Elliott B. Roberts, "United States 

Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1807—1957," Ann. Rep., Smithsonian Institution, 1957, 

p. 222. . 
522 APPENDIX A 

A new employment came in the autumn of 1829 when, impelled by want, Hassler 

accepted an appointment as gager in the New York Custom House. Then his fortunes 

began to look up. For some time Congress had been discussing the establishment 

of standards of weights and measures for the United States. There was much talk 

about the jeopardy to this country's international trade arising from the different 

concepts of pounds and bushels entertained by the various collectors of customs. On 

May 29, 1830, the Senate adopted a resolution directing a comparison of the weights 

and measures used at the principal customhouses. Five months later, on November 2, 

President Jackson placed Hassler in charge of the study, at $3,000 per year, to make 

an inspection and review of the measures used in the customhouses. 

After 3 months, Secretary of the Treasury Ingham reported Hassler's inspection 

"far advanced; and it has exhibited such a remarkable disparity in the weights and measures used at the different customhouses, as to demonstrate the urgent necessity of 

providing standards for their regulation." Called in from the customhouses, 

the standards, where any such existed, were transmitted to Washington, and 

it soon appeared that they were of so irregular character, and so unworthy of 

confidence, that the comparison of them, indefatigably pursued by Mr. Hassler,. was a task entirely beneath his attention. The measure which proved the nearest 

to the standard was a folding yard stick from Philadelphia, the length of which 

is stated at 36.0002465 standard inches.' 

With no authority but the approval of Secretary Ingham and the President, 

Hassler determined to adopt standards for the United States and produce and distribute 

them to the customhouses. From among the standards that he and Gallatin had secured 

abroad many years earlier for the survey of the coast, Hassler selected the units to be 

used for the construction and comparison of suitable weights and measures, and out 

of his knowledge and skill began construction of the balances and other apparatus for 

their verification. The fundamental. units of length, mass (weight), and capacity rec- ommended by Hassler were adopted by the Treasury Department in 1832, and Fdward 

Troughton Hassler, his 23-year-old son, was taken on to assist in the construction of 

standards based on those units.' 

Apprised by Treasury reports of Hassler's progress, Congress in a joint resolution 

of June 14, 1836, gave its formal approval and directed the Treasury to fabricate for the 

customhouses the standards of weights and measures that had been established—that is,. 

established by Hassler. By reason of the joint resolution of 1836, the Office of Weights 

and Measures in the Coast Survey, as the immediate antecedent of the present National 

Bureau of Standards, is considered formally established as of that date. 

Meanwhile, on July 10, 1832, 2 years after calling for the inquiry into the customhouses, Congress reestablished the Coast Survey on the basis of the original act of 1807. 

Upon President Jackson's recommendation, Hassler again became its Superintendent, at 

Report of Alexander D. Bache in J. Franklin Inst. 13, 238 (1834). Cited in Cajori, 

p. 156, and available on L/C microfilm reel 283, series 01104. 

H. Doc. 229, 22d Cong., 1st sess., 1832 (L/C: J66), is Hassler's report on his examination 

in 1831 of the weights and measures used in the principal customhouses, and includes his 

description of the collection of instruments available to him for constructing weights 

and measures. 

'The start of the work is described in Hassler's Documents Related to the Construction 

of Standards of Weights and Measures for the Custom-Houses from March to November 

1835 (New York: William van Norden, 1835). L/C: QC1000U58. 
APPENDIX A 523 a salary of $3,000 and $1,500 for expenses, and was to continue his superintendency over the work in Weights and Measures, without additional compensation.. 

The survey of the coast that had been carried out after 1818 largely under naval 

auspices produced a vast body of partial maps and charts at vast expense, Secretary of 

the Navy Southard reported in 1828. The maps and charts were based on nautical and 

chronometric surveys, not triangulation, and so far as their use for commercial and naval 

interests and means for national defense was concerned, Southard declared them "unsafe, 

and in many instances, useless and pernicious." Hassler resumed the survey on his 

original plan. 

Once again in charge, he borrowed the mathematical books he had sold to West 

Point more than a decade before, refurbished his traveling carriage brought down from 

Cape Vincent, and ordered from Troughton of London a new and improved theodolite 

made to his specifications, as well as a dividing engine, new telescopes and microscopes 

of his devising, and other instruments. While his son Edward continued the work on 

weights and measures, Hassler himself began measuring a new baseline at Fire Island, 

off the south shore of Long Island, "the longest baseline," it was later reported, run in the history of geodetic surveys." At the peak of activities in 1841, Hassler, with 

the Army topographic engineers and Navy officers detailed to the Survey, had unler his 

superintendence in the two offices a staff of 93 officers and civilians. 

The years between 1832 and 1843 were filled with skirmishes with the Secretaries 

of the Treasury, with accountants and auditors, and with Congress over the financial 

procedure in operating the offices, over congressional demands that would have meant a less accurate, less scientific, and cheaper survey, and threats to form committees to 

supervise Hassler's expenditures and progress. In March 1834, possibly to insure more professional administration, the Coast Survey was transferred from the Treasury to the 

Navy Department, and Hassler at once asked to be relieved from the Survey work. 

President Jackson intervened, kept the accounting of Survey funds in the Treasury, 

and Hassler accepted Navy administration. 

At the time of the transfer, Hassler insisted that he keep his salary of $3,000 for 

superintending Weights and Measures alone. Secretary of the Treasury Levi Woodbury 

replied that the Office need not require much time and attention, and $1,200 or $1,500 was enough for the work. Hassler answered that he had large plans for Weights and 

Measures. As he wrote to the Secretary, he intended "to form an establishment which 

has never even been attempted in this country," for which much heavier expenditures would 

be necessary. He may have had in mind somthing like the bureau established almost 

70 years later, but what he intended is not known. Before the plans were committed to 

paper, President Jackson in March 1836 restored the Coast Survey to the Treasury and 

to Hassler. 

It is said that on the occasion of the restoration a dispute arose about more 

compensation for Hassler's two superintendencies, and Hassler carried his case to the 

White House. 

"So, Mr. Hassler, it appears the Secretary and you cannot agree about this 

matter," remarked Jackson, when Hassler had stated his case in his usual 

emphatic style. "No, Sir, ye can't." "Well, how much do you really think 

you ought to have?" "Six thousand dollars, Sir." "Why, Mr. Hassler, that is as much as Mr. Woodhury, my Secretary of the Treasury, himself, receives." 

"Mr. Voodbury!" declared Hassler, rising from his chair, "There are plenty 

of Voodburys, plenty of Everybodys who can be made the Secretary of the 

Treasury. But," said he, pointing his forefinger toward himself, "there is only 

one, one Hassler for the head of the Coast Survey." President Jackson, sympa- 
524 APPENDIX A 

thizing with a character having some traits in common with his own, granted 

Hassler's demand.1° 

Then in his middle sixties and going strong, Hassler wore flannel both summer 

and winter, believing it kept off the heat as well as kept out the cold. He never used 

glasses for reading or writing, but kept his vest pockets filled with snuff, which he was convinced excited the optic nerves and was the only help his eyes needed. Working at 

night at the Coast Survey office, first on 13th Street and later in adjoining row houses on Capitol Hill, he had for light at his desk six or eight large wax candles, remolded from 

commercial candles to about 2 inches in diameter with double or triple plaited wicks.u 

His daughter Rosalie in her "Recollections" of her father was to say that he never went 

to bed before 2 or 3, and finally lost the sight of one eye shortly before his death "by 

the over fatigue in adjusting the yard and liquid measures." To the last his heavy 

accent sometimes made it difficult to understand him, "but his singularities of manner," 

recalled a zealous friend in the House, Joseph L. Tillinghast of Rhode Island, "did not 

touch his intelligence and eminent capacity in his vocation." 

Between 1832 and 1841 Congress appropriated a total of $620,000 for the Coast 

Survey offices. At Hassler's death in 1843 Survey funds had paid for the triangulation 

of an area of 9,000 square miles, furnishing determinations of nearly 1,200 geodetic 

stations for the delineation of 1,600 miles of shoreline. One hundred and sixty.eight 

topographical maps had been surveyed and 142 hydrographic charts, although only 5 

large charts were engraved and ready for publication.12 

In the Weights and Measures Office, Hassler saw complete sets of weights with 

their multiples and submultiples finished and delivered to the customhouses and to 

the States. Half of the capacity measures and a third of the measures of length were constructed, but 13 years would pass before the last of them, and the necessary balances, were delivered. 

The summer and fall of 1843 found Hassler, now 73, in the field, surveying in 

New Jersey and Delaware. in a rain and sleet storm that October he fell and injured 

himself on a rock while trying to save the tent protecting one of his instruments. As a result of the injury and exposure he developed a fever and inflammation of the lungs 

that forced him to go home to Philadelphia for medical help, where Rosalie could 

look after him. 

During his last weeks he wrote out his annual report to the Secretary of the 

Treasury. The comprehensive plan for the continuation and expansion of the work that 

he outlined in the report had already been approved by the President. Its execution was begun by his successor, Alexander Dallas Bache, and the plan remained the basis 

for survey operations until the enabling act of 1947 established a new, but not greatly 

10 Reported by T. C. Mendenhall in 1916 and by Cajori in 1929, at least two versions of 

this anecdote existed prior to 1900, in E. Zschokke's Memoirs, pp. 529—530, and in Harper's, 

58, 508 (1878—79). It was therefore very much alive in 1900 when Secretary of the 

Treasury Lyman Gage retold it as his own story, with reference to Dr. Stratton's proposed 

salary. See ch. I, p. 45. 

Admiral Richard Wainwright, who came to the Survey just after Hassler's death, said 

he "knew the old office building thoroughly, from the weights and measures in the basement to the computers' rooms in the attic." Centennial Celebration of the U.S. Coast 

and Geodetic Survey (Washington, D.C., 1916), p. 91. 11 For an account of Hassler's search for high grade copper plates in this country, 

Austria, and France, and his importation of two highly trained engravers from Hamburg, see Cajori, p. 216. 
APPENDIX A 525 

altered statement of functions. Hassler continued to work, writing in his journal, until 

shortly before his death on November 20, 1843. 

He left behind his daughter Rosalie Lätitia Norris; his eldest son John James 

Scipio, a topographical assistant in the Coast Survey; Edward Troughton. in the Weights 

and Measures Office; Charles August, a surgeon in the Navy; Ferdinand Eugene, 

consul at Panama; and his second daughter, Caroline, a childlike woman of 43, in the care of Rosalie. His three other sons had died under age or in infancy. His wife 

Marianne, whom he saw just once briefly a few years after she left home, lived with friends 

for a number of years, then with her eldest son in Pennsylvania, later with Rosalie in 

New Brunswick, and finally with friends on Long Island, where her death occurred in 

1858 at the age of 86. Hassler left no debts at this death, nor did he leave any money 

either. The farm at Cape Vincent was all that his surviving children inherited. 

Tribute to Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler as the first scientist of rank in the employ 

of the Federal Government has increased with the years. His genius lay in the design 

of instruments for his geodetic work and in his tireless efforts to contrive the best possible standards of weights and measures with the best possible materials. He was dogmatic and uncompromising, qualities destructive in his personal life, perhaps, but 

true to the spirit of inquiry. As his biographer, Cajori, says, he "stands out greatest in 

perceiving what was best in the practical geodesy of his time, in making improvements 

upon what he found, and then clinging [without compromise to what] he had initiated as being the best that the science of his day had brought forth." 

At the centennial celebration of the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1916, with 

its many tributes to Hassler, it was said: 

To him belongs the credit that to-day the operations of the Survey are bound 

together by a trigonometric survey with long lines and executed by the most 

accurate instruments and the most refined methods. 

Dr. Stratton on that occasion called him— 

not only the first and foremost man in the scientific work of our country at 

that time but one of the leading * * * metrologists of his day. I doubt if 

there were more than half a dozen people in the world at that time who 

According to Dr. Lewis V. Jud%son, who came to the weights and measures division of 

the Bureau in 1917, this plaque or nameplate in gold with Hassler's name in black 

letters was brought from the Office of Weights and Measures on New Jersey Avenue 

to Connecticut Avenue by Mr. Fischer. 
526 APPENDIX A 

possessed the scientific knowledge and the deftness of the artisan necessary to undertake his work. 

More recently it has been said: 

His greatest gift to America was not the surveys he accomplished—it was his reverence for sound thinking, integrity, and accuracy, which have endured as basic elements of Survey philosophy * *• He may have been as 

consecrated a public servant as ever lived.13 

13 Annual Report, Smithsonian Institution, 1957, pp. 223, 225. 
APPENDIX B 

ThE METRIC SYSTEM 

IN THE UNITED STATES 

THE FRENCH ORIGIN OF THE METRIC SYSTEM 

The genesis of the modern metric system was a decimal system, based on the length 

of an arc of 1 minute of a great circle of the earth, first proposed by Gabriel Mouton, a vicar of Lyons, France, in the late 17th century. The proposal confronted a plethora 

of arbitrary systems of weights and measures current in France, as in the rest of 

Europe, their lineage going back to medieval measures based on the size of barley corns and the length of human feet. Mouton's plan was discussed for almost a hundred 

years before the progress of commerce and science called for more rational measures than the weights and measures in common use. The beginning of order took place in 1790 when Tallyrand proposed to the French 

National Assembly the desirability of a system of weights and measures that would 

not only bring uniformity to France but would also be international in application. 

It must, therefore, he reasoned, be based on some invariable unit of nature that couli' 

not only be readily reproduced but would be capable of being measured with a high degree 

of precision. 

A decree of the National Assembly on May 8, 1790, sanctioned by Louis XVI on August 22, called upon the Academy of Sciences, in concert with the Royal Society 

of London, "to deduce an invariable standard for all the measures and all the weights." 1 When English interest in a French undertaking could not be obtained, a committee of 

philosophers of the Academy, composed of Borda, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, and Con. 

dorcet, began deliberations, reporting its conclusions in March 1791. The choice of a fundamental unit as the basis of a rational system of measures was between the length or fraction of the length of a pendulum, vibrating in intervals of 1 second or some chosen unit of time; the quadrant of a great circle of the equator; and the quadrant of a great circle of the earth's meridian. Since the pendulum introduced a new and 

unlike element, the second, and depended on the varying intensity of the gravitational 

force on the earth's surface, the committee preferred a terrestrial arc. 

1 William Hallock and Herbert T. Wade, The Evolution of Weights and Measures and 

the Metric System (New York: Macmillan, 1906), p. 47. Hallock and Wade and 

the article by Henrie Moreau, "The Genesis of the Metric System and the Work of 

the International Bureau of Weights ana Measures," J. Chem. Educ. 30, 3 (1953), pro. 

vide the basis for this account of the metric system. Other sources that have been 

consulted but not cited here include NBS S17, "History of the standard weights and measures of the United States" (Fischer, 1905), reprinted as M64 (1925) ; M122, 

"Weights and measures in Congress" (S. A. Jones, 1936) ; C570, "Units and systems 

of weights and measures" (Judson, 1956) ; C593, "The Federal basis for weights and 

measures" (R. W. Smith, 1958) ; TNB 43, 1—3 (1959) ; and M247, "Weights and measures of the United States" (Judson, 1963). The most complete history of the 

metric system is that of Guillaume Bigourdan, Le Système Métrique des Poids et Mesures 

(Paris, 1901). 

527 
528 APPENDIX B 

As the more practicable of the two earth circles, the committee proposed to measure an arc of meridian between Dunkirk, on the northern coast of France, and 

Barcelona, on the Mediterranean Sea. From the distance determined, computation 

would be made of the length of the entire quadrantal arc from the pole to the equator, 

allowing for the deviation of the earth's form from a true sphere. The ten-millionth 

part of the total computed length was then to be taken as the base or fundamental unit 

of length and accurately marked off on a suitable number of specially constructed metal 

bars, copies of which would provide working standards for science and commerce. 

The plan was adopted and the Academy of Sciences assigned the term metre 

(meter) from the Greek metron, a measure, to the one ten-millionth part of the quadrant, 

fixing the new unit provisionally at 3 pieds 11.44 lignes, based on calculations made of a meridian in France by Lacaille in 1740.2 This unit was roughly similar to the Dutch 

eli, the English yard, the Italian braccio, and other standard lengths in the nations of 

Europe. 

From the concept of this single length standard, all other weights and measures were to be derived. Decimal multiples and submultiples of the meter were to express 

its macro and micro versions. A new, single unit of weight or mass, the gram, with 

similar decimal multiples and submultiples, was to replace existing weights, the new standard corresponding to the mass of 1 cubic centimeter (that is, a cube one-hundredth 

of a meter on a side) of pure water. The unit of capacity, the liter, would be a volume of pure water equal to 1 cubic decimeter. The measure of volume, especially for 

cord wood, the stere, was to be a meter cubed. And the unit of land area, the are, was to be a square 10 meters on a side or 100 square meters. 

The concept had and still has merit and profundity. But as we shall see, the 

theoretical perfection of the metric system could not be realized. 

Working with the greatest precision attainable with the instruments and knowledge available, members of the Academy measured by triangulation the meridional distance through Paris of the arc from Dunkirk to Barcelona, a strip of country made up of 

mountainous and inaccessible districts. The work was not only arduous but hazardous, 

since it was carried out during the Reign of Terror and was subject to repeated 

harassment. 

In April 1795, even before a definitive meter was derived from the astronomical 

and geodetic measurements along the Dunkirk-Barcelona meridian, the revolutionary 

government instituted the metric system in France, using the provisional meter as standard and fixing the nomenclature of the new units of measure. In June 1798, 6 years after beginning the fieldwork, the observations of the parties 

of geodecists under Méchain and Delambre were completed and at the invitation of the 

government a committee of delegates from the republics of Europe studied the assembled 

computations. While one section of the committee examined the measurements of the arc of meridian and the actual length of the meter, another, which included Johann 

Georg Tralles, deputy of the Helvetic Republic,3 undertook determination of the unit of 

mass, the gram. When so small a mass could not be realized with sufficient accuracy, 

its multiple, the kilogram, was selected for construction of the standard of mass. 

2 Interestingly, the provisional meter in brass, constructed by Lenoir of Paris in 1795, 

proved to differ from the meter finally determined by only about 0.33 millimeter. 

Before the establishment of the metric system, the principal units in use in France were the pied du Roi (0325 meter) for lengths and the livre poids de mare (489.5 grams) for 

weights. The pied du Roi was divided into 144 lignes, and 6 pieds du Roi made a toise (1.949 meters), the common unit of length. 

See Hassler appendix for note on Tralles. 
APPENDIX B 529 

The results of the computations gave the distance from the pole to the equator as 5,130,740 toises, with the length of the meter 3 pieds 11.296 lignes. The weight of a cubic decimeter of distilled water at maximum density gave the value 18,827.15 grains 

(a submultiple of the livre poids de marc), which was adopted as the weight of the 

kilogram.4 

THE METER AND KILOGRAM OF THE ARCHIVES 

Construction in platinum of the prototype meter and kilogram was completed in 

June 1799, for deposit in the Archives of the Republic. Iron copies of these standards were then made and distribuied among the committee delegates as models for the con- struction of their new weights and measures. 0n December 10 the provisional meter was abolished and the new standards adopted by statute as the definitive standards of the measures of length and of weight throughout the Republic.5 The grand plan of unifying 

weights and measures was completed. - One of the iron copies of the Meter of the Archives, the gift of Trailes to his 

friend Hassler, and destined to be known in the United States as the "Committee 

Meter," was brought to this country by Hassler in 1805. He also brought a copy of the 

kilogram, another gift of Tralles, and 3 toises, the rival of the meter in France until 

late in the 19th century. 

In financial distress, Hassler in 1806 sold these standards to a member of the 

American Philosophical Society. They were loaned to him when he became Superintendent of Weights and Measures in the Coast Survey, his Committee Meter serving as the 

standard of length in the Coast Survey until 1890. With other standards secured by 

Hassler abroad, it is now preserved in the vault of the National Bureau of Standards.° 

The advantages of the metric system then as now resided in its simplicity, uniform. 

ity, and convenience. It is entirely decimal, like our system of counting.7 The measures of area, capacity, and volume are obtained by squaring and cubing measures of length. 

Weights are directly related to the measures of volume. And the names of their multiples 

and submultiples are obtained by the simple addition of prefixes to the principal unit, 

-for example, kilo (k) =1,000; hecto (h)=100; deka (dk)=10; deci (d)=0.1; centi 

(c) =0.01; milli (m) =0.001. Thus a kilometer is 1,000 meters, and a milligram is a thousandth (0.001) of a gram.8 

But the metric system was not beyond cavil. Lukewarm to pronounced opposition 

under the succeeding imperial government confronted the- standards established by the 

Hallock and Wade, p. 62. 

p. 63. 

The metric and English weights and measures acquired by or available to Hassler for 

his survey of the coast are described in his report to Congress, H. Doe. 299, 22d Cong., 1st 

Sess., 1832. 

The metric system is a decimal system, but the terms "metric" and "decimal" are not 

synonymous. The decimal system, of oriental origin, refers to a numbers system progressing by tens, based on the biological fact that man has that many articulate fingers. 

Equally arbitrary and useful numbers systems have been based on 2, 5, 6, 8, and the 

duodecimal system of 12. 

In 1962 the International Committee on Weights and Measures added two new metric 

prefixes (atto, the submultiple 1018 and femto, to the scale already ranging from 

tera, 1012 to pico, See NBS TNB 48, 61—62 (1964). 
530 APPENDIX B 

republican regime, as witnessed by the failure of the State to construct and distribute 

the necessary secondary standards. The new standards were especially threatened by a decree of Napoleon in 1812 that, yielding to prejudice, permitted for a decade a system 

of mesures usuelles using odd multiples and fractions of the metric system to harmonize 

with the very measures the metric system was intended to replace, those long established 

in commerce and common usage. In 1837 the State repealed the edict and allowed 3 

years for full compliance with the new measures. After January 1, 1840, under pain 

of severe penalties for the use of any other weights and measures, the metric system was made universal and compulsory throughout France. 

The instability of 19th-century Europe, with its profusion of petty kingdoms and 

principalities and its wars and revolutions acted to retard acceptance of the metric 

system. Upon Tralles' return from Paris he urged introduction of metric weights and measures into Switzerland and in 1801 saw a law passed adopting them. But the metric 

system was not made compulsory in that country until 1856. 

Some of the Italian provinces adopted it in the early 19th century, in 1816 the 

metric system was declared obligatory in the Low Countries, and Spain accepted it in 

1849. After 1860 adoptions increased rapidly, the entering wedge in most instances 

the necessity of uniform weights and measures in international trade. 

The metric system crossed the Atlantic when by law it came into effect in 

Mexico in 1862, and before the end of the century it had become the legal system in 

most South and Central American countries. Italy made the metric system obligatory 

in 1863. In Great BritEln, an act of July 29, 1864, authorized the use of the metric 

system concurrently with the imperial system. Two years later, with passage of the 

Metric Act on July 28, 1866, Congress also made use of the metric system legal through. 

out the United States.° By this act, the meter was declared to be 39.37 inches, the 

kilogram 2.2046 pounds, based on the best metric standards available in this country, 

Hassler's Committee Meter and the platinum Arago kilogram obtained in 1821 by Secretary of State Gallatin. 

The agreement among the federated states of Germany in 1868 to adopt the metric 

system became obligatory under the empire in 1872, the same year it was officially 

adopted in Portugal. Austria made its use compulsory in 1876, and Norway in 1882. 

THE METRIC CONVENTION 

It was not commercial application of the metric system but its growing use in 

scientific work in Europe that made the accuracy of its fundamental units of increasing concern, especially to mathematicians, geodecists, and physicists. The more accurate 

measurements of arcs of meridians reported by British and Russian geodecists at the 

International Geodetic Conference held at Berlin in 1867 resulted in new computations 

of the shape of the earth and hence the length of the quadrant. The changes in this 

last quantity therefore affected the length of the meter and raised serious questions 

about it as a natural and absolute standard.1° 

0 An act of Congress on July 27, 1866, authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to 

furnish the States with sets of metric weights and measures, actually preceded passage 

of the Metric Act by 1 day. Hallock and Wade, pp. 128—129. 10 Hallock and Wade, p. 69. The actual difference in the Meter of the Archives, as in 

the International Meter that replaced it, is minute but significant in metrology. It is 

about 0.2 millimeter shorter than its definition, the ten-millionth part of the quadrant 

of the earth's meridian. Similarly, the International Kilogram exceeds by 0.028 gram 

532 APPENDIX B 

The preparation of the standards, the tracing of the defining lines, and com- parison with the standards of the Archives were carried out by the French section of 

the International Bureau. In 1889, at the First General Conference of Weights and 

Measures, the prototype units were selected and deposited in a multiple-locked subterranean vault located between the pavilion and observatory of Sèvres. Distribution 

of the remaining identical meters and kilograms began, the national copies of the 

meter said to agree with the international unit within one-hundredth of a millimeter 

and with a probable error not exceeding two ten-thousandths of a millimeter. The 

copies of the kilogram agreed within 1 milligram, with a probable error not exceeding 

five-thousandths of a milligram. Two thermometers reading to one-hundredth of a degree Centegrade accompanied each pair of national standards. 

The initial copies of the international prototype meter and kilogram allotted 

to the United States, meter No. 27 and kilogram No. 20, arrived in Washington in 

January 1890 and with appropriate ceremonies were deposited in a fireproof room at 

the Office of Weights and Measures in the Coast Survey building. The following 

July, meter No. 2 and kilogram No. 4 were received and deposited with those accepted as the national standards. 

The new U.S. standards, meter No. 27 and kilogram No. 20, were formally 

recognized by an order of the Secretary of the Treasury on April 5, 1893, as the basis 

for deriving the customary units, the yard and pound, and for constructing and 

standardizing secondary metric standards. Over the next decade, efforts to legislate 

adoption of metric weights and measures as the universal standards in this country came closer to realization than at any time in the history of the Nation. Such legislation, 

seeking uniformity in weights, measures, and coinage, had been under consideration 

since the Colonies joined in the Articles of Confederation. 

THE AMERICAN ATTITUDE TOWARD THE METRIC SYSTEM 

The Colonies were in the midst of their war for independence when the question 

of uniform coinage was raised by Thomas Jefferson. The decimal system he urged was finally adopted by Congress on July 6, 1785, and a law of 1828 established a brass 

weight obtained by the Minister of the United States at London as the standard troy 

pound of the U.S. Mint for the control and stabilization of the currency. 

From the first, President after President and the successive Secretaries of the 

Treasury appealed to Congress for uniformity in the weights and measures, as well as the currency, "a subject of great importance," as Washington declared in 1789, "and 

will, I am persuaded, be duly attended to." 

Shortly after adoption of decimal coinage, Jefferson, disapproving of a unit 

derived from an arc of meridian determined on European soil, proposed instead decimal 

weights and measures based on a foot derived by taking one-fifth of the length of a rod forming the seconds pendulum.12 A Senate committee in 1792 reported favorably on its adoption but Congress took no legislative action. Nor was Congress moved by 

the President's report in 1795 announcing adoption in France of the metric system 

and urging its adoption also in America. 

The Coast Survey was the first Federal agency to require a definite length 

standard. Its Superintendent, chose the iron-bar standard copied by Lenoir 

of Paris in 1799 from the Meter of the Archives (the U.S. Committee Meter), given 

Hallock and Wade, p. 112. 
APPENDiX B 533 

him by Tralles. Thus from the outset Coast Survey operations in the United States were based on a metric standard, and all base measurements of the Survey continued 

to be referred to this meter until receipt of the national prototype in 1890. 

Although arguments for uniformity were raised at almost every session 

of Congress, the slow progress of the metric system in France did not encourage its 

introduction in this country. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in his classic 

report of 1821, prepared at the request of Congress, wrote that the French system 

"approaches to the ideal perfection of uniformity applied to weights and measures * * 

The meter will surround the globe in use as well as multiplied extension, and one language 

of weights and measures will be spoken from the equator to the poles." Nevertheless, 

Adams did not think its introduction practicable at that time, nor did Congress. 

A degree of order in the weights and measures in common use was achieved by 

Hassler when in 1838 his Office of Weights and Measures began delivering to the States 

and a year later to the customhouses sets of standard weights, measures of length, 

capacity measures, and balances, derived from yard and pound standards he had secured 

in England. In 1893 the incumbent Superintendent of Weights and Measures, T. C. 

Mendenhall, fixed their values by relating them to the international meter and kilogram. 

To this day the United States has no legal material standard yard or pound. 

USE OF THE METRIC SYSTEM MADE LEGAL 

Not until after the Civil War did serious consideration of thi metric system arise 

again, when on July 28, 1866, upon the advice of the National Academy of Sciences, 

Congress authorized permissive and legal use of the metric system thoughout the Nation. 

Another act directed the Secretary of the Treasury to furnish a sit of standard metric 

weights and measures to each of the States, and a third act that year authorized use of 

metric measures by the Post Office Department.14 

As increasing numbers of scientists and professional men went to Europe in that 

period for their education and returned trained in the metric system, interest in it 

spread. About 1870 metric tables began to appear in American college textbooks, 

particularly in chemistry and physics, and a decade later in high school textbooks.15 

Such active reform groups as the American Metrological Society, established in New 

York in 1873 (ceased publication in 1888), and the American Metric Bureau, founded 

in Boston in 1876, sought nationwide acceptance and use of the metric system in place 

of yards and pounds.'° 

When in 1869 France first proposed to construct new metric standards, the 

strong interest in this country led the Government to send delegates to Paris to participate 

in the deliberations. Prof. Joseph Henry, the preeminent physicist in America at that 

time, and Prof. Julius E. Hilgard, in charge of weights and measures in the Coast Survey, 

Hallock and Wade, p. 117. 14 For a contemporary account of the provision of metric measures to the States, see Prof. J. E. Hilgard's report to Congress in H. Misc. Doc. 61, 45th Cong., 2d sess., May 18, 

1878. 

'5Hallock and Wade, p. 125 a. At the height of the movement, the first "society for opposing introduction of the 

French Metric System in this country" was also formed, with the establishment in Boston 

in 1879 of the International Institute for Preserving and Perfecting Weights and Measures. 

See Edward F. Cox, "The International Institute: First Organized Opposition to the 

Metric System," Ohio Hist. Q. 68, 3 (1959). 
534 APPENDIX B 

and later Superintendent of the Survey, were sent to join the committee that assembled 

in 1872 to oversee the work of construction. On May 20, 1875, when the American 

Minister to France, Elihu B. Washburn, signed the Metric Convention that established the 

International Bureau of Weights and Measures, commitment of the United States to the 

principle of international metric measures was formalized.17 

The arrival of the national prototype meter and kilogram in 1890 again stirred 

interest in reform. Early in 1894 the Army Surgeon General's Office, following the 

Marine Hospital Service and the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, directed use of 

the metric system in all transactions pertaining to medical supplies, and Congress moved a step closer when its act of July 12, 1894, defined the national units of electrical 

ments in the new international metric terms.18 In another affirmation, continuation of the 

metric system, in everyday use in both Puerto Rico and the Philippines when they became a protectorate and possession, respectively, of the United States in 1898, was con- firmed. And a known champion of the metric system was raised to bureau status 

in the Federal Establishment when the Office of Weights and Measures became the 

National Bureau of Standards in 1901. 

Besides acquiring new standards for promulgation in American science and 

industry, the Bureau was also concerned with reverifying its existing standards. In 

1904 Louis A. Fischer took meter No. 27 to Paris for comparison with the standards 

at the International Bureau and redetermined its value in terms of the International 

Prototype. The minute difference that Fischer reported, in the first scientific paper 

published by the Bureau, had little significance at that time; and since the relation of 

No. 27 to No. 21, the other national prototype, was accurately known, the Bureau con- sidered its standards quite sufficient to guarantee the accuracy and permanency of the measures in the United States.1° 

LEGISLATION FOR THE METRIC SYSTEM 

Legislation around the turn of the century for replacement of customary measures 

with the metric system appeared increasingly imminent and each bill won stronger 

support than the last. In 1896 a bill to make mandatory the metric system received 

unanimous recommendation for adoption by the House Committee on Coinage, Weights, 

and Measures, only to fail of passage in its third reading. Another bill in 1901 was received too late to be considered by the Congress then in session. Hearings were held on similar bills again in 1902 and 1903, and although none proposed compulsory ac- ceptance but only gradual extension of the metric system into universal use, they suc- cumbed in committee. So did a new bill in 1905 that sought establishment of the metric 

system in all transactions and activities of the Federal Government, whence, it was thought, its use would filter down to industry and eventually to the general public. 

A notable impetus towards wider acceptance of the metric system loomed in 

1914—15 when American industries supplying the French with war materiel necessarily 

converted their plants to the metric system. The conversion in industry became widespread in 1917—18 when the American armies in France adopted the metric system not 

only in ordnance and instrumentation but in all operational computations. But the 

armies did not bring the metric system home with them, and American industry reverted 

to its former habits when the war production lines stopped. 

Hallock and Wade, pp. 129—130. 

Ibid., pp. 195—196, 208—210. 

NBS S1,"Recomparison of the United States Prototype Meter" (1904). 
APPENDIX B 535 

By the 1930's metric measures had become sufficiently important in American 

industry to call for a simple factor for converting inch measurements to metric measure- ments, and in 1933 the American Standards Association approved an American standard 

inch-millimeter conversion for industrial use in which the inch was defined as 25.4 

millimeters. 

As a result of difficulties in interchanging precision parts and products manu- factured during World War II, legislation was again sponsored between 1945 and 1947 to define the relation as a standard, this time as 2.54 centimeters. Although passage 

again failed, the obvious usefulness of the centimeter-inch ratio led to its adoption 

in 1952 by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. 

When the Director of the National Bureau of Standards realized that legislation was not necessary if agreement could be reached with the other national standards 

laboratories to use the conversion factor, it was proposed to them. Apart from the 

Coast and Geodetic Survey, which, with its amassed calculations fixed, would be excepted, 

the proposal won agreement. On July 1, 1959, the directors of the national standards 

laboratories of Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United 

States adopted the equivalents, 1 yard=O.9144 meter (whence 1 inch=25.4 millimeters) 

and 1 avoirdupois 592 37 kilogram. Without national legislation, the 

differences between the United States inch and pound and the British inch and pound, so important to industry and trade, were reconciled and uniformity was established in the 

science and technology of the English-speaking nations. 

WAVELENGTH DEFINITION OF THE METER 

When the National Bureau of Standards was established in 1901, the principal 

units of weights and measures were the yard and pound as defined by Mendenhall 

and 0.453 592 427 7 kilogram, respectively) and the gallon and bushel as defined by Hassler (a volume of 231 cubic inches and of 2,150.42 cubic inches, re- spectively) These definitions remained unchanged for 58 years, and the last two are still the official values. 

Failure of the metric legislation in the United States has not, however, deterred 

American contributions to continuing refinement of the value of the meter upon which our 

units depend. When the original basis of the metric system on a terrestrial dimension 

proved untenable, and a more serviceable and secure basis was found in an internationally 

accepted definition of the meter, world. metrologists continued to seek some other natural, 

physical standard that would make for higher precision and more universal reproducibility. Such a physical standard became available in 1892—93 when Prof. Albert A. 

Michelson, on leave from the physics department of the University of Chicago for a year's 

work at the International Bureau at Sèvres, showed that the standard of length could be 

replaced by reference to a specific wavelength of light, one of those in the cadmium 

spectrum. 

The line of research stimulated by Michelson's work was not to change the magnitude of the meter unit but to define it as a specified number of wavelengths. More than a quarter of a century later, in 1927, the Seventh General Conference of Weights and 

Measures provisionally adopted as a supplementary standard of length the equation, 1 meter= 1 553 164.13 wavelengths, with an accuracy within 1 part in 10 million, as the 

relation between the meter and Michelson's red cadmium light wave. 20 ch. I, pp. 26—27, 30. 
536 APPENDIX B 

The small palace that is the international Bureau of Weights 

and Measures near Sèvres, 

France. 

After another three decades of research, which saw light wave measurements pass 

from those of the elements to their isotopes, the 11th General Congress on October 14, 

1960, adopted as a new definition of the meter, 1 650 763.73 wavelengths of the orangered radiation of the isotope of krypton with mass 86. 

Adoption by the National Bureau of Standards of the new definition does 'not 

invalidate the fact that the International Prototype Meter is still the major source and 

support of the common measures of the United States, even though it is no longer neces- sary to take the U.S. prototype meter to the International Bureau for comparison. And, 

periodically, legislation will continue to be proposed for conversion in one degree or another to the metric system. Its completeness, uniformity, simplicity, and widespread use elsewhere in the civilized world make its use obligatory in almost all scientific 

measurements and computations. Besides our coinage, it is found in general use in 

library catalog cards, in book, pamphlet, postage, and film measurements, in describing 

the properties of photographic lenses, in track and field events in athletics, in electrical 

units of measurement, and in exact mechanical work. The thickness of metals, paper, 

and glass is commonly measured in metric terms, as is the diameter of wire, tubing, 

and similar products. 

The metric system is used in microscopy and spectroscopy, in geodesy and 

engineering, in the scientific measurement of mass and volume and capacity, and in 

much of international commerce. No voice disputes the complexity of the system in 

daily use that still necessitates, as do our "English" measures, weighing copper by one standard, silver by another, medicine by a third, diamonds and other precious stones by a fourth, and chemicals by a fifth, all noninterchangeable. 

The varieties of units universally used in trade in the English-speaking countries 

have their source in a conglomeration of discordant series with no simple relation either 

between the different sets of units or between units of different size in a given series. 

The uniformity in measures that the founding fathers sought has yet to be duly 

attended to. 
APPENDIX C 

BASIC LEGISLATION 

Relating to Standards of Weights and Measures 

and to the Organization, 

Functions, and Activities of the 

National Bureau of Standards* 

9 July 1778 ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION, Art. 9, § 4: 

The United States, in Congress assembled, shall also have the sole and exclusive 

right and power of regulating the alloy and value of coin struck by their own authority, or by that of the respective States; fixing the standard of weights and measures throughout the United States. 

CONSTITUTION of the UNITED STATES, Article 1, § 8. 

The Congress shall have power . . . To coin money, regulate the value thereof, 

and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures. 

Act of 19 May 1828 (4 Stat. 278)—[Adoption of a brass troy pound 

weight copied by Captain Henry Kater from the British troy pound of 1758 as the standard for coinage. An Act of 12 Feb 1873 (17 Stat. 424, 432) 

reenacted the provisions of 1828 concerning the troy pound weight.] 

An Act . . . for the purpose of securing a due conformity in weight of the coins 

of the United States. . .. The brass troy pound weight procured by the minister of 

the United States at London, in the year 1827, for the use of the mint . . . shall be 

the standard troy pound of the mint of the United States, conformably to which the 

coinage thereof shall be regulated. 

Joint Resolution of 14 June 1836 (5 Stat. 133)—A Resolution Providing for the [construction and] distribution of weights and measures [as 

modified by Acts of 14 February 1903 and 4 March 1913 transferring the 

responsibility to the Secretary of Commerce]. 

That the Secretary of the Treasury be, and he hereby is directed to cause a com- plete set of all the weights and measures adopted as standards, and now either made or in the progress of manufacture for the use of the several custom-houses, and for 

other purposes, to be delivered to the Governor of each State in the Union, or such 

person as he may appoint, for the use of the States respectively, to the end that an uniform standard of weights and measures may be established throughout the United 

States. 

*In most instances only the pertinent parts have been reproduced here. 

537 
538 APPENDIX C 

Joint Resolution of 27 July 1866 k(14 Stat. 369)—Joint Resolution to 

enable the Secretary of the Treasury to furnish to each State one Set of the 

Standard Weights and Measures of the Metric System [as modified by Acts 

of 14 February 1903 and 4 March 1913 transferring the responsibility 

to the Secretary of Commerce]. 

Be it resolved . . ., That the Secretary of the Treasury be, and he is hereby, authorized and directed to furnish to each State, to be delivered to the governor thereof, one set of the standard weights and measures of the metric system for the use of the States 

respectively. 

Act of 28 July 1866 (14 Stat. 339)—An Act to authorize the Use of 

the Metric System of Weights and Measures. 

Be it enacted - . -, That from and after the passage of this act it shall be lawful 

throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the 

metric system; and no contract or dealing, or pleading in any court, shall be deemed 

invalid or liable to objection because the weights or measures expressed or referred to 

therein are weights or measures of the metric system. 

SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the tables in the schedule hereto annexed 

[omitted herel shall be recognized in the construction of contracts, and in all legal 

proceedings, as establishing, in terms of the weights and measures now in use in the 

United States, the equivalents of the weights and measures expressed therein in terms 

of the metric system; and said tables may be lawfully used for computing, determining, 

and expressing in customary weights and measures the weights and measures of the 

metric system. - Joint Resolution of 3 March 1881 (21 Stat. 521)—Joint resolution 

authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to furnish States, for the use of 

agricultural colleges, one set of standard weights and measures and for other 

purposes [as modified by Acts of 14 February 1903 and 4 March 1913 

transferring the responsibility to the Secretary of Commerce]. 

Resolved - - ., That the Secretary of the Treasury be, and he is hereby, directed 

to cause a complete set of all the weights and measures adopted as standards to be 

delivered to the governor of each State in the Union, for the use of agricultural colleges 

in the States, respectively, which have received a grant of lands from the United States, 

and also one set of the same for the use of the Smithsonian Institution: Provided 

That the cost of each set shall not exceed two hundred dollars, and a sum sufficient 

to carry out the provisions of this resolution is hereby appropriated out of any money 

in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated. 

Act of 11 July 1890 (26 Stat. 242)—An Act Making appropriations 

for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1891. . . . [to the] Office of Construction of Standard Weights and Measures [as modified by Acts of 14 

February 1903 and 4 March 1913 transferring responsibility to the Secretary 

of Commerce], making sums available: 
APPENDIX C 539 

For construction and verification of standard weights and measures, including 

metric standards, for the custom-houses, and other offices of the United States, and for 

the several States. 

For the purchase of materials and apparatus . . .: Provided, That hereafter such 

necessary repairs and adjustments shall be made to the standards furnished to the 

several States and Territories as may be requested by the governors thereof, and also to standard weights and measures that have been, or may hereafter be, supplied to 

United States custom-houses and other offices of the United States, under act of 

Congress, when requested by the Secretary of the Treasury. 

For the construction of standard gallons and their subdivisions for the use of States 

and Territories which have not received the same. For purchase of a balance of precision and its mounting. 

[Subsequently, the Sundry Civil Appropriation Act of 18 August 1894 (28 Stat. 

383) directed the Secretary of the Treasury to furnish precise copies of standard 

weights and measures when lost or destroyed, upon defrayment of the expense of their 

construction.] 

Joint Resolution of 12 April 1892 (27 Stat. 395) —Joint resolution to 

encourage the establishment and endowment of institutions of learning at the 

National Capital by defining the policy of the Government with reference 

to the use of its literary and scientific collections by students. [Basis for 

the admission of Research Associates to the use of the research facilities of 

the National Bureau of Standards and for providing educational courses for 

undergraduate members of the staff towards higher degrees.] 

Whereas, large collections illustrative of the various arts and sciences and facilitating literary and scientific research have been accumulated by the action of Congress 

through a series of years at the National Capital; and 

Whereas it was the original purpose of the Government thereby to promote research 

and the diffusion of knowledge, and is now the settled policy and present practice of 

those charged with the care of these collections specially to encourage students who 

devote their time to the investigation and study of any branch of knowledge by allowing 

to them all proper use thereof; and 

Whereas it is represented that the enumeration of these facilities and the formal 

statement of this policy will encourage the establishment and endowment of iñstitutions of learning at the seat of Government, and promote the work of education of 

attracting students to avail themselves of the advantages aforesaid under the direction 

of competent instructors: Therefore, 

Resolved: That the facilities for research and illustration in the following and any 

other Governmental collections now existing or hereafter to be established in the city 

of Washington for the promotion of knowledge shall be accessible, under such rules 

and restrictions as the officers in charge of each collection may prescribe, subject to such 

authority as is now or may hereafter be permitted by law, to the scientific investigators 

and to students of any institution of higher education now incorporated or hereafter to 

be incorporated under the laws of Congress or of the District of Columbia, to wit: 1. Of the Library of Congress. 2. Of the National Museum. 3. Of the Patent Office. 

4. Of the Bureau of Education. 5. Of the Bureau of Ethnology. 6. Of the Army 

Medical Museum. 7. Of the Department of Agriculture. 8. Of the Fish Commission. 
540 APPENDIX C 

9. Of the Botanic Gardens. 10. Of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. 11. Of the Geo. 

logical Survey. 12. Of the Naval Observatory. 

Also 

Deficiency Appropriation Act of 3 March 1901 (31 Stat. 1039): 

That facilities for study and research in the Government Departments, the 

Library of Congress, the National Museum, the Zoological Park, the Bureau of Ethnology, 

the Fish Commission, the Botanic Gardens, and similar institutions hereafter established 

shall be afforded to scientific investigators and to duly qualified individuals, students, 

and graduates of institutions of learning in the several States and Territories, as well as in the District of Columbia, under such rules and restrictions as the heads of the 

Departments and Bureaus mentioned may prescribe. 

Act of 12 July 1894 (28 Stat. 1O1)—An Act To define and establish 

the units of electrical measure. 

Be it enacted . . ., That from and after the passage of this Act the legal units of 

electrical measure in the United States shall be as follows: 

First. The unit of resistance shall be what is known as the international ohm, 

which is substantially equal to one thousand million units of resistance of the centimetergram-second system of electro-magnetic units, and is represented by the resistance 

offered to an unvarying electric current by a column of mercury at the temperature of 

melting ice fourteen and four thousand five hundred and twenty-one ten-thousandths 

grams in mass, of a constant cross-sectional area, and of the length of one hundred and 

six and three-tenths centimeters. 

Second. The unit of current shall be what is known as the international ampere, 

which is one-tenth of the unit of current of the centimeter.gram-second system of electro. 

magnetic units, and is the practical equivalent of the unvarying current, which, when 

passed through a solution of nitrate of silver in water in accordance with standard 

specifications, deposits silver at the rate of one thousand one hundred and eighteen 

millionth of a gram per second. 

Third. The unit of electro-motive force shall be what is known as the international 

volt, which is the electro-magnetic force that, steadily applied to a conductor whose 

resistance is one international ohm, will produce a current of an international ampere, 

and is practically equivalent to one thousand fourteen hundred and thirty-fourths of 

the electromotive force between the poles or electrodes of the voltaic cell known as Clark's cell, at a temperature of fifteen degrees centigrade, and prepared in the manner 

described in the standard specifications. 

Fourth. The unit of quantity shall be what is known as the international coulomb, 

which is the quantity of electricity transferred by a current of one international ampere 

in one second. 

Fifth. The unit of capacity shall be what is known as the international farad, 

which is the capacity of a condenser charged to a potential of one international volt by one international coulomb of electricity. 

Sixth. The unit of work shall be the Joule, which is equal to ten million units of 

work in the centimeter-gram-second system, and which is practically equivalent to the 

energy expanded in one second by an international ampere in an international ohm. 

Seventh. The unit of power shall be the Watt, which is equal to ten million units 

of power in the centimeter-gram-second system, and which is practically equivalent to 

the work done at the rate of one joule per second. 
APPENDIX C 541 

Eighth. The unit of induction shall be the Henry, which is the induction in a circuit when the electro-motive force induced in this circuit is one international volt 

while the inducing current varies at the rate of one Ampere per second. 

SEC. 2. That it shall be the duty of the National Academy of Sciences to prescribe 

and publish, as soon as possible after the passage of this Act, such specifications of 

details as shall be necessary for the practical application of the definitions of the ampere 

and volt hereinbefore given, and such specifications shall be the standard specifications 

herein mentioned. 

Act of 3 March 1901, 31 Stat. 1449 (Public Law 177—56 Congress)— 

An Act To the National Bureau of Standards 

Be it enacted by the Senate and Hou,se of Representatives of the United States of 

America in Congress assembled, That the Office of Standard Weights and Measures 

shall hereafter be known as the National Bureau of Standards. 

SEC. 2. That the functions of the bureau shall consist in the custody of the standards; 

the comparison of the standards used in scientific investigations, engineering, manufac. 

turing, commerce, and educational institutions with the standards adopted or recognized 

by the Government; the construction, when necessary, of standards, their multiples 

and subdivisions; the testing and calibration of standard measuring apparatus; the 

solution of problems which arise in connection with standards; the determination of 

physical constants and the properties of materials, when such data are of great importance to scientific or manufacturing interests and are not to be obtained of sufficient 

accuracy elsewhere. 

SEC. 3. That the bureau shall exercise its functions for the Government of the 

United States; for any State or municipal government within the United States; or for 

any scientific society, educational institution, firm, corporaion, or individual within the 

United States engaged in manufacturing or other pursuits requiring the use of standards or standard measuring instruments. All requests for the services of the bureau shall 

be made in accordance with the rules and regulations herein established. 

SEC. 4. That the officers and employees of the bureau shall consist of a director, at 

an annual salary of $5,000; one physicist, at an annual salary of $3,500; one chemist, 

at an annual salary of $3,500; two assistant physicists or chemists, each at an annual 

salary of $2,200; one laboratory assistant, at an annual salary of $1,400; one laboratory 

assistant, at an annual salary of $1,200; one secretary, at an annual salary of $2,000; one 

clerk, at an annual salary of $1,200; one messenger, at an annual salary of $720; one engineer, at an annual salary of $1,500; one mechanician, at an annual salary of $1,400; one watchman, at an annual salary of $720; and one laborer, at an annual salary of $600. 

SEC. 5. That the director shall be appointed by the President, by and with the 

advice and consent of the Senate. He shall have the general supervision of the bureau, 

its equipment, and the exercise of its functions. He shall make an annual report to 

the Secretary of the Treasury, including an abstract of the work done during the year 

and a financial statement. He may issue, when necessary, bulletins for public distribution, containing such information as may be of value to the public or facilitate the 

bureau in the exercise of its functions. 

SEC. 6. That the officers and employees provided for by this Act, except the director, 

shall be appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury, at such time as their respective 

services may become necessary. 
542 APPENDIX C 

SEC. 7. That the following sums of money are hereby appropriated For the payment 

of salaries provided for by this Act, the sum of $27,140, or so much thereof as may be 

necessary; toward the erection of a suitable laboratory, of fireproof construction, for 

the use and occupation of said bureau, including all permanent fixtures, such as plumb. 

ing, piping, wiring, heating, lighting, and ventilation, the entire cost of which shall 

not exceed the sum of $250,000, $100,000; for equipment of said laboratory, the sum of $10,000; for a site for said laboratory, to be approved by the visiting committee hereinafter provided for and purchased by the Secretary of the Treasury, the sum of $25,000, or so mrch thereof as may be necessary; for the payment of the general expenses of 

said bureau, including books and periodicals, furniture, office expenses, stationery and 

printing, heating and lighting, expenses of the visiting committee, and contingencies of 

all kinds, the sum of $5,000, or so much thereof as may be necessary, to be expended 

under tiLe supervision of the Secretary of the Treasury. 

Sn:. 8. That for all comparisons, calibrations, tests, or investigations, except those 

performed for the Government of the United States or State governments within the 

United States, a reasonable fee shall be charged, according to a schedule submitted by 

the director and approved by the Secretary of the Treasury. 

Src. 9. That the Secretary of the Treasury shall, from time to time, make regulations regarding the payment of fees, the limits of tolerance to be attained in standards 

submitted for verification, the sealing of standards, the disbursement and receipt of 

moneys, and such other matters as he may deem necessary for carrying this Act into 

effect. 

SEC. 10. That there shall be a visiting committee of five members, to be appointed 

by the Secretary of the Treasury, to consist of men prominent in the various interests 

involved, and not in the employ of the Government. This committee shall visit the 

bureau at least once a year, and report to the Secretary of the Treasury upon the 

efficiency of its scientific work and the condition of its equipment. The members of 

this committee shall serve without compensation, but shall be paid the actual expenses 

incurred in attending its meetings. The period of service of the members of the original 

committee shall be so arranged that one member shall retire each year, and the appointments thereafter to be for a period of five years. Appointments made to fill vacancies 

occurring other than in the regular manner are to be made for the remainder of the 

period in which the vacancy exists. 

Approved, March 3, 1901. 

31 Stat. Ch. 872, p. 1449 

Act of 14 February 1903 (32 Stat. 825) —An Act to establish the 

Department of Commerce and Labor [as modified by Act of 4 March 1913]. 

Be it enacted - . ., That there shall be at the seat of government an executive 

department to be known as the Department of Commerce and Labor, and a Secretary 

of Commerce and Labor, who shall be the head thereof. - - SEC. 4. That the following named . . . bureaus. - . of the public service, now and 

heretofore under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Treasury, and all that pertains 

to the same, known as - . - the National Bureau of Standards . . ., be, and the same hereby are, transferred from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of 

Commerce and Labor, and the same shall hereafter remain under the jurisdiction and 

supervision of the last-named Department. - . 
APPENDIX C 543 

Act of 4 March 1909 (35 Stat. 904)—An Act making appropriations 

for the legislative, executive, and judicial expenses of the Government for 

the fiscal year ending June 30, 1910, and for other purposes. [Beginning 

of special appropriations to the Bureau.] 

Bureau of Standards: 

For the investigation of the Pentane, Hefner, and other flame standards used in the 

measurement of the illuminating power of gas, and determining the accuracy practically 

obtainable in such measurements; also for the determination of the heat of combustion 

of certain gases which occur in illuminating gas, which are used as a basis for 

puting the heat value of the gas, and for the determination of the heat combustion of 

materials employed by engineers in the standardization of industrial calorimeters. 

To enable the bureau to collect information relative to the weights and measures used in trade and to aid State sealers and other officers in adopting standard practice as to the establishment of tolerances, methods of inspection and sealing, and other 

technical details necessary to insure correct weights and measures in commerce and 

trade. 

Sundry Civil Appropriations Act of 25 June 1910 (36 Stat. 743)— 

[Repealed Act of 16 May 1910 (36 Stat. 369), which transferred the work 

of investigating structural materials for the use of the United States from 

the Geological Survey to the Bureau of Mines. The work was transferred, 

instead, in the regular appropriations act, to the Bureau of Standards, with 

the sutm of $50,000 to continue the investigation.] 

Act of 4 March 1911 (36 Stat. 1354)—An Act To amend sections thirty. 

five hundred and forty-eight and thirty-five hundred and forty.nine of the 

Revised Statutes of the United States, relative to the standards for coinage. 

Be it enacted . . ., That section thirty.five hundred and forty.eight of the Revised 

Statutes of the United States be, and the same is hereby, amended so as to read as follows: 

"SEC. 3548. For the purpose of securing a due conformity in weight of the coins 

of the United States to the provisions of the laws relating to coinage, the standard troy 

pound of the Bureau of Standards of the United States shall be the standard troy pound 

of the Mint of the United States conformably to which the coinage therof shall be 

regulated." 

SEC. 2. That section thirty-five hundred and forty-nine of the Revised Statutes of 

the United States be, and the same is hereby, amended so as to read as follows: 

"SEC. 3549. It shall be the duty of the Director of the Mint to procure for each 

mint and assay office, to be kept safely thereat, a series of standard weights corresponding 

to the standard troy pound of the Bureau of Standards of the United States, 

of a one-pound weight and the requisite subdivisions and multiples thereof, from the 

hundredths part of a grain to twenty-five pounds. The troy weight ordinarily employed 

in the transactions of such mints and assay offices shall be regulated according to the 

above standards at least once in every year, under the inspection of the superintendent 
544 APPENDIX C 

and assayer; and the accuracy of those used at the Mint at Philadelphia shall be tested 

annually, in the presence of the assay commissioner, at the time of the annual examination 

and test of coins." 

Act of 4 March 1913 (37 Stat. 736)—An Act To create a Department 

of Labor. 

Be it enacted . . ., That . . . the Department of Commerce and Labor shall here. 

after be called the Department of Commerce, and the Secretary thereof shall be called 

the Secretary of Commerce, and the Act creating the said Department of Commerce and 

Labor is hereby amended accordingly. 

Act of 4 March 1913 (37 Stat. 945)—An Act Making appropriations 

to provide for the expenses of the government of the District of Columbia 

for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1914, and for other purposes. [This 

act, by inference, recognized the testing of materials for the Federal Government, not specified in the Organic Act of the Bureau or elsewhere, as a function of the Bureau.] 

Hereafter materials for fireproof buildings, other structural materials, and all 

materials, other than materials for paving and for fuel, purchased for and to be used 

by the government of the District of Columbia, when necessary in the judgment of the 

commissioners to be tested, shall be tested by the Bureau of Standards under the same conditions as similar testing is required to be done for the United States Government. 

Act of 29 July 1914, 38 Stat. 573 (Public Law 155, 63 Congress)— 

[Transfer of miscellaneous testing laboratory in Bureau of Ohemistry, Department of Agriculture, to NBS] 

The salaries of employees of the Department of Agriculture transferred to the 

Department of Commerce for the purpose of testing miscellaneous materials, including 

the supplies for the Government departments and independent establishments, may be 

paid from July first, nineteen hundred and fourteen, from the appropriation of $20,000 

in the legislative, executive, and judicial appropriation Act for the fiscal year nineteen 

hundred and fifteen, made for testing miscellaneous materials under the Bureau of 

Standards. 

Act of 3 March 1915, 38 Stat. 930 (Public Law 271, 63 Congress)— 

An Act Making appropriations for the naval service. - . - [NBS representation on National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] 

An Advisory Committee for Aeronautics is hereby established, and the President 

is authorized to appoint not to exceed twelve members, to consist of two members from 

the War Department, from the office in charge of military aeronautics; two members 

from the Navy Department, from the office in charge of naval aeronautics, a represent. 

ative each of the Smithsonian Institution, of the United States Weather Bureau, and 

of the United States Bureau of Standards; together with not more than five additional 

persons who shall be acquainted with the needs of aeronautical science, either civil or 

military, or skilled in aeronautical engineering or its allied sciences: 
APPENDIX C 545 

Provided, That the members of the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, as such, 

shall serve without compensation: 

Provided further, That it shall be the duty of the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight, with a view 

to their practical solution, and to determine the problems which should be experimentally attacked, and to discuss their solution and their application to practical questions. In the event of a laboratory or laboratories, either in whole or in part, being 

placed under the direction of the committee, the committee may direct and conduct 

research and experiment in such laboratory or laboratories: 

And provided further, That rules and regulations for the conduct of the work of 

the committee shall be formulated by the committee and approved by the President. 

That the sum of $5,000 a year, or so much thereof as may be necessary, for five 

years is hereby appropriated, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, to be immediately available, for experimental work and investigations undertaken by the committee, clerical expenses and supplies, and necessary expenses of 

members of the committee in going to, returning from, and while attending meetings 

of the committee: 

Provided, That an annual report to the Congress shall be submitted through the 

President, including an itemized statement of expenditures. 

Urgent Deficiency Act of 15 june 1917 (40 Stat. 216)—[Beginning 

of NBS military research during World War I] 

• . - To enable the Bureau of Standards to cooperate with the War and Navy 

Departments by providing the scientific assistance necessary in the development of 

instruments, devices, and materials, and the standardization and testing of supplies - 

• $250,000. 

- . - To provide by cooperation of the Bureau of Standards the War Department, 

the Navy Department, and the Council of National Defense, for the standardization and 

testing of the standard gauges, screw threads, and standards required in manufacturing 

throughout the United States, and to calibrate and test such standard gauges, screw 

threads, and standards • - ., $150,000. - Act of 18 july 1918 (40 Stat. 912)—An Act To provide for the appointment of a commission to standardize screw threads [as amended by Act of 

3 Mar 1919 (40 Stat. 1291)]. 

Be it enacted - - ., That a commission is hereby created, to be known as the Commission for the Standardization of Screw Threads, hereinafter referred to as the com- mission, which shall be composed of nine commissioners, one of whom shall be the 

Director of the Bureau of Standards, who shall be chairman of the commission; two 

commissioned officers of the Army, to be appointed by the Secretary of War; two commissioned officers of the Navy, to be appointed by the Secretary of the Navy; and four 

to be appointed by the Secretary of Commerce, two of whom shall be chosen from 

nominations m'ade by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and two from 

nominations made by the Society of Automotive Engineers. 

SEC. 2. That it shall be the duty of said commission to ascertain and establish 

standards for screw threads, which shall be submitted to the Secretary of War, the 

Secretary of the Navy, and the Secretary of Commerce for their acceptance and approval. 

Such standards, when thus accepted and approved, shall be adopted and used in the 
546 APPENDiX C 

several manufacturing plants under the control of the War and Navy Departments, 

and, so far as practicable, in all specifications for screw threads in proposals for manufactured articles, parts, or materials to be used under the direction of these departments. 

SEC. 3. That the Secretary of Commerce shall promulgate such standards for use by the public and cause the same to be published as a public document. 

SEC. 4. That the commission shall service without compensation but nothing herein 

shall be held to affect the pay of the commissioners appointed from the Army and Navy or of the Director of the Bureau of Standards. 

SEC. 5. That the commission may adopt rules and regulations in regard to its pro. 

cedure and the conduct of its business. 

SEC. 6. That the commission shall cease and terminate at the end of one year and 

six months from the date of its original appointment. 

[The term of the National Screw Thread Commission was extended for two years 

from 21 Mar 1920 by Joint Resolution of 23 Mar 1920 (41 Stat. 536), and for five years 

from 21 Mar 1922 by Joint Resolution of 21 Mar 1922 (42 Stat. 469) .1 Appropriation, Act of 20 May 1920 (41 Stat. 683)—[Beginning of 

transferred funds to NBS] 

Department of Commerce 

Bureau of Standards 

During the ñscal year 1921, the head of any department or independent establishment 

of the Government having funds available for scientific investigations and requiring 

operative work by the Bureau of Standards on scientific investigations within the scope 

of the functions of that Bureau, and which it is unable to perform within the limits 

of its appropriations, may, with the approval of the Secretary of Commerce, transfer to 

the Bureau of Standards such sums as may be necessary to carry on such investigations. 

The Secretary of the Treasury shall transfer on the books of the Treasury Department 

any sums which may be authorized hereunder and such amounts shall be placed to the 

credit of the Bureau of Standards for the performance of work for the department or establishment from which the transfer is made. 

Act of 27 February 1925 (43 Stat. 1019) —An Act Making appropriations for the Departments of State and Justice and for the Judiciary, and for 

the Departments of Commerce and Labor, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 

1926, and for other purposes. 

International Obligations. 

International Bureau of Weights and Measures. 

For contribution to the maintenance of the International Bureau of Weights and 

Measures, in conformity with the terms of the convention of May 20, 1875, the same to 

be paid, under the direction of the Secretary of State, to said bureau on its certificate of 

apportionment, $3,000. 
APPENDIX C 547 

Economy Act of 30 June 1932 (47 Stat. 410)—[Amendment to Section 

8 of the Act establishing the National Bureau of Standards, authorizing 

payment of fees, except for other Federal agencies, for NBS tests and 

calibrations] 

SEC. 312. Section 8 of the Act entitled "An Act to establish the National Bureau of 

Standards," approved March 3, 1901, as amended and supplemented [U.S.c., title 15, sec. 276], is amended to read as follows: 

"SEc. 8. For all comparisons, calibrations, tests, or investigations, performed by 

the National Bureau of Standards under the provisions of this Act, as amended and 

supplemented, except those performed for the Government of the United States or State 

governments within the United States, a fee sufficient in each case to compensate the 

National Bureau of Standards for the entire cost of the services rendered shall be 

charged, according to a schedule prepared by the Director of the National Bureau of 

Standards and approved by the Secretary of Commerce. All moneys received from 

such sources shall be paid into the Treasury to the credit of miscellaneous receipts." 

Act of 30 June 1932, 47 Stat. 417 (Public Law 212, 72 Congress)— 

[Restatement of policy of transferring funds, making the policy general 

throughout the Federal Government] 

Title VI—Interdepartmental Work. 

SEC. 601. Section 7 of the Act entitled "An Act making appropriations for fortifications and other works of defense, for the armament thereof, and for the procurement of heavy ordnance for trial and service, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1921, 

and for other purposes," approved May 21, 1920 [U.S.C., title 31, sec. 686], is amended 

to read as follows: 

"SEc. 7(a). Any executive department or independent establishment of the Government, or any bureau or office thereof, if funds are available therefor and if it is 

determined by the head of such executive department, establishment, bureau, or office to be in the interest of the Government so to do, may place orders with any other such 

department, establishment, bureau, or office for materials, supplies, equipment, work, 

or services of any kind that such requisitioned Federal agency may be in a position to supply or equipped to render, and shall pay promptly by check to such Federal agency 

as may be requisitioned, upon its written request, either in advance or upon the furnishing or performance thereof, all or part of the estimated or actual cost thereof, as determined by such department, establishment, bureau, or office as may be 

requisitioned 

Provided, however, That if such work or services can be as conveniently or more cheaply performed by private agencies such work shall be let by competitive bids to such private agencies. . . . Executive Order 10096, 23 January 1950—Providing for a uniform 

patent policy for the Government with respect to inventions made by Government employees and for the administration of such policy. 

Whereas inventive advances in scientific and technological fields frequently result 

from governmental activities carried on by Government employees; and 
548 APPENDIX C 

Whereas the Government of the United States is expending large sums of money 

annually for the conduct of these activities; and 

Whereas these advances constitute a vast national resource; and 

Whereas it is fitting and proper that the inventive product of functions of the 

Government, carried out by Government employees, should be available to the Government; and 

Whereas the rights of Government employees in their inventions should be recognized in appropriate instances; and 

Whereas the carrying out of the policy of this order requires appropriate administrative arrangements: 

NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution 

and statutes, and as President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the 

Armed Forces of the United States, in the interest of the establishment and operation of a uniform patent policy for the Government with respect to inventions made by Government employees, it is hereby ordered as follows: 1. The following basic policy is established for all Government agencies with respect 

to inventions hereafter made by any Government employee: 

(a) The Government shall obtain the entire right, title and interest in and to all inventions made by any Government employee (1) during working hours, or 

(2) with a contribution by the Government of facilities, equipment, materials, funds, or information, or of time or services of other Government employees on official duty, or (3) which bears a direct relation to or are made in consequence of the official 

duties of the inventor. 

(b) In any case where the contribution of the Government, as measured by any one or more of the criteria set forth in paragraph (a) last above, to the invention 

is insufficient equitably to justify a requirement of assignment to the Government 

of the entire right, title and interest to such invention, or in any case where the 

Government has insufficient interest in an invention to obtain entire right, title 

and interest therein (although the Government could obtain same under paragraph (a), above), the Government agency concerned, subject to the approval of 

the Chairman of the Government Patents Board - . - shall leave title to such invention in the employee, subject, however, to the reservation to the Government 

of a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license in the invention with pow3r to 

grant licenses for all governmental purposes, such reservation, in the terms thereof, to appear, where practicable, in any patent, domestic or foreign, which may issue on such invention. 

Act of 29 June 1950, 64 Stat. 279 (Public Law 583, 81 Congress)— 

An Act Making appropriations to supply deficiencies in certain appropriations for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1950, and for other purposes. 

Chapter III 

Department of Commerce 

National Bureau of Standards 

Working Capital Fund 
APPENDIX C 549 

For the establishment of a working capital fund, to be available without fiscal year 

limitation, for expenses necessary for the maintenance and operation of the National 

Bureau of Standards, including the furnishing of facilities and services to other Government agencies, not to exceed $3,000,000. Said funds shall be established as a special 

deposit account and shall be reimbursed from applicable appropriations of said Bureau 

for the work of said Bureau, and from funds of other Government agencies for facilities and services furnished to such agencies pursuant to law. Reimbursements so made 

shall include handling and related charges; reserves for depreciation of equipment and 

accrued leave; and building construction and alterations directly related to the work 

for which reimbursement is made. 

Act of 21 July 1950, 64 Stat. 369 (Public Law 617, 81 Congress)— 

An Act To redefine the units and establish the standards of electrical and 

photometric measurements. 

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of 

America in Congress assembled, That from and after the date this Act is approved, the 

legal units of electrical and photometric measurements in the United States of America 

shall be those defined and established as provided in the following sections. 

SEC. 2. The unit of electrical resistance shall be the ohm, which is equal to one thousand million units of resistance of the centimeter-gram-second system of electromagnetic units. 

SEC. 3. The unit of electric current shall be the ampere, which is one-tenth of the 

unit of current of the centimeter-gram-second system of electromagnetic units. 

SEC. 4. The unit of electromotive force and of electric potential shall be the volt, 

which is the electromotive force that, steadily applied to a conductor whose resistance 

is one ohm, will produce a current of one ampere. 

SEC. 5. The unit of electric quantity shall be the coulomb, which is the quantity 

of electricity transferred by a current of one ampere in one second. 

SEC. 6. The unit of electrical capacitance shall be the farad, which is the capacitance 

of a capacitor that is charged to a potential of one volt by one coulomb of electricity. 

SEC. 7. The unit of electrical inductance shall be the henry, which is the inductance 

in a circuit such that an electromotive force of one volt is induced in the circuit by 

variation of an inducing current at the rate of one ampere per second. 

SEC. 8. The unit of power shall be the watt, which is equal to ten million units of 

power in the centimeter-gram-second system, and which is the power required to cause an unvarying current of one ampere to flow between points differing in potential by one volt. 

SEC. 9. The units of energy shall be (a) the joule, which is equivalent to the energy 

supplied by a power of one watt operating for one second, and (b) the kilowatt-hour, 

which is equivalent to the energy supplied by a power of one thousand watts operating 

for one hour. 

SEC. 10. The unit of intensity of light shall be the candle, which is one-sixtieth of 

the intensity of one square centimeter of a perfect radiator, known as a "black body," 

when operated at the temperature of freezing platinum. 

SEC. 11. The unit of flux light shall be the lumen, which is the flux in a unit of 

solid angle from a source of which the intensity is one candle., 

SEC. 12. It shall be the duty of the Secretary of Commerce to establish the values 

of the primary electric and photometric units in absolute measure, and the legal values 
550 APPENDIX C 

for these units shall be those represented by, or derived from, national reference standards 

maintained by the Department of Commerce. 

SEC. 13. The Act of July 12, 1894 (Public Law 105, Fifty-third entitled 

"An Act to define and establish the units of electrical measure," is hereby repealed. 

Act of 21 July 1950, 64 Stat. 370 (Public Law 618, 81 Congress)— 

An Act To provide authority for certain functions and activities in the Department of Commerce, and for other purposes. [Authorization for the 

initial planning leading to the move of the Bureau from Washington, D.C. 

to Gaithersbuirg, Md.] 

Be it enacted by the Senate and Hoase of Representatives of the United States of 

America in Congress assembled, That - SEC. 2. Within the limits of funds which may be appropriated therefor, the Secretary of Commerce is authorized to make improvements to existing buildings, grounds, 

and other plant facilities, including construction of minor buildings and other facilities 

of the National Bureau of Standards in the District of Columbia and in the field to house 

special apparatus or material which must be isolated from other activities: Provided., 

That no improvement shall be made nor shall any building be constructed under this 

authority at a cost in excess of $25,000, unless specific provision is made therefor in the 

appropriation concerned. 

Act of 22 July 1950, 64 Stat. 371 (Public Law 619, 81 Congress)— 

An Act To amend section 2 of the Act of March 3, 1901 (31 Stat. 1449), to 

provide basic authority for the performance of certain functions and ac- tivities of the Department of Commerce, and for other purposes. [First 

complete restatement of Bureau functions since 1901] 

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of 

America in Congress assembled, That section 2 of the Act of March 3, 1901 (31 Stat. 

1449), as amended, be, and the same hereby is, furthter amended so as to read in full as follows: 

SEC. 2. The Secretary of Commerce (hereinafter referred to as the "Secretary") is 

authorized to undertake the following functions: 

(a) The custody, maintenance, and development of the national standards of 

measurement, and the provision of means and methods for making measurement 

consistent with those standards, including the comparison of standards used in 

scientific investigations, engineering, manufacturing, commerce, and educational 

institutions with the standards adopted or recognized by the Government. 

(b) The determination of physical constants and properties of materials when 

such data are of great importance to scientific or manufacturing interests and are 

not to be obtained of sufficient accuracy elsewhere. 

(c) The development of methods for testing materials, mechanisms, and structures, and the testing of materials, supplies, and equipment, including items purchased for use of Government departments and independent establishments. 

(d) Cooperation with other Government agencies and with private organizations 

in the establishment of standard practices, incorporated in codes and specifications. 

(e) Advisory service to Government agencies on scientific and technical problems. 
APPENDIX C 551 

(f) Invention and development of devices to serve special needs of the Government. 

In carrying out the functions enumerated in this section, the Secretary is authorized 

to undertake the following activities and similar ones for which need may arise in the 

operations of Government agencies, scientific institutions, and industrial enterprises: 

(1) the construction of physical standards; 

(2) the testing, calibration, and certification of standards and standard measur- ing apparatus; 

(3) the study and improvement of instruments and methods of measurements; 

(4) the investigation and testing of railroad track scales, elevator scales, and 

other scales used in weighing commodities for interstate shipment; 

(5) cooperation with the States in securing uniformity in weights and measures laws and methods of inspection; 

(6) the preparation and distribution of standard samples such as those used in 

checking chemical analyses, temperature, color, viscosity, heat of combustion, and 

other basic properties of materials; also the preparation and sale or other distribution 

of standard instruments, apparatus and materials for calibration of measuring 

equipment; 

(7) the development of methods of chemical analysis and synthesis of materials, 

and the investigation of the properties of rare substances; 

(8) the study of methods of producing and of measuring high and low temperatures; and the behavior of materials at high and at low temperatures; 

(9) the investigation of radiation, radioactive substances, and x-rays, their uses, 

and means of protection of persons from their harmful effects; 

(10) the study of the atomic and molecular structure of the chemical elements, 

with particular reference to the characteristics of the spectra emitted, the use of 

spectral observations in determining chemical composition of materials, and the 

relation of molecular structure to the practical usefulness of materials; 

(11) the broadcasting of radio signals of standard frequency; 

(12) the investigation of the conditions which affect the transmission of radio waves from their source to a receiver; 

(13) the compilation and distribution of information on such transmission of 

radio waves as a basis for choice of frequencies to be used in radio operations; 

(14) the study of new technical processes and methods of fabrication of materials 

in which the Government has a special interest; also the study of methods of 

measurement and technical processes used in the manufacture of optical glass and 

pottery, brick, tile, terra cotta, and other clay products; 

(15) the determination of properties of building materials and structural elements, and encouragement of their standardization and most effective use, including 

investigation of fire-resisting properties of building materials and conditions under 

which they may be most efficiently used, and the standarization of types of 

appliances for fire prevention; 

(16) metallurgical research, including study of alloy steels and light metal 

alloys; investigation of foundry practice, casting, rolling, and forging; prevention of 

corrosion of metals and alloys; behavior of bearing metals; and development of 

standards for metals and sands; 

(17) the operation of a laboratory of applied mathematics; 

(18) the prosecution of such research in engineering, mathematics, and the 

physical sciences as may be necessary to obtain basic data pertinent to the functions 

specified herein; and 
552 APPENDIX C 

(19) the compilation and publication of general scientific and technical data 

resulting from the performance of the function specified herein or from other sources when such data are of importance to scientific or manufacturing interests or to the 

general public, and are not available elsewhere, including demonstration of the 

results of the Bureau's work by exhibits or otherwise as may be deemed most 

effective. 

SEC. 3. The Bureau shall exercise its functions for the Government of the United 

States; for any State or municipal government within the United States; or for any 

scientific society, educational institution, firm, corporation, or individual within the 

United States engaged in manufacturing or other pursuits requiring the use of standards or standard measuring instruments. All requests for the services of the Bureau shall 

be made in accordance with the rules and regulations herein established. 

SEC. 4. (Salaries of officers and employees. This section superseded by Classification Act.) 

SEC. 5. The Director shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice 

and consent of the Senate. He shall have the general supervision of the Bureau, its 

equipment, and the exercise of its functions. He shall make an annual report to the 

Secretary of 'Commerce, including an abstract of the work done during the year and a financial statement. He may issue, when necessary, bulletins for public distribution, 

containing such information as may be of value to the public or facilitate the Bureau in 

the exercise of its functions. 

SEC. 6. The officers and employees of the Bureau, except the Director, shall be 

appointed by the Secretary of Commerce at such time as their respective services may 

become necessary. 

SEC. 7. The Secretary shall charge for services performed under the authority of 

Section 3 of this Act, except in cases where he determines that the interest of the 

Government would be best served by waiving the charge. Such charges may be based 

upon fixed prices or cost. The appropriation or fund bearing the cost of the services 

may be reimbursed, or the Secretary may require advance payment subject to such 

adjustment on completion of the work as may be agreed upon. 

SEC. 8. In the absence of specific agreement to the contrary, additional facilities, 

including equipment, purchased pursuant to the performance of services authorized by 

Section 3 of this Act shall become the property of the Department of Commerce. 

SEC. 9. The Secretary of Commerce shall, from time to time, make regulations regarding the payment of fees, the limits of tolerance to be attained in standards submitted for 

verification, the sealing of standards, the disbursement and receipt of moneys, and 

such other matters as he may deem necessary for carrying this Act into effect. 

SEC. 10. There shall be a visiting committee of five members to be appointed by the 

Secretary of Commerce, to consist of men prominent in the various interests involved, 

and not in the employ of the Government. This committee shall visit the Bureau at 

least once a year, and report to the Secretary of Commerce upon the efficiency of its 

scientific work and the condition of its equipment. The members of this committee 

shall serve without compensation, but shall be paid the actual expenses incurred in 

attending its meetings. The period of service of the members of the committee shall 

be so arranged that one member shall retire each year, and the appointments to be for a period of five years. Appointments made to fill vacancies occurring other than in 

the regular manner are to be made for the remainder of the period in which the 

vacancy exists. 

SEC. 11. (a) The Secretary of Commerce is authorized to accept and utilize gifts or bequests of real or personal property for the purpose of aiding and facilitating the 

work authorized therein. 

554 APPENDIX C 

Act of 20 June 1956, 70 Stat. 321 (Public Law 604)—An Act Making 

appropriations for the Department of Commerce and related agencies for 

the fiscal year ending June 30, 1957, and for other purposes. [Formal ap. 

proval for the construction of a new Bureau plant at Gaithersburg.] 

Be it enacted . . . That the following sums are appropriated . . . for the Depart. 

ment of Commerce . . . namely: 

Title I—Department of Commerce 

National Bureau of Standards 

Construction of facilities: For acquisition of necessary land and to initiate the 

design of the facilities to be constructed thereon for the National Bureau of Standards 

outside of the District of Columbia to remain available until expended, $930,000, to 

be transferred to the General Services Administration. 

APPENDIX E 

MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE 

of the Secretary of Commerce 

to the National Bureau of Standards 

Term 

ALBERT LADD COLBY 1901-07 

Consulting engineer in metallurgy, South Bethlehem, Pa., and secretary, 

Association of American Steel Manufacturers. 

DR. ELIHU THOMSON 1901-18 

Electrical engineer, General Electric Co., Lynn, Mass. 

DR. IRA REMSEN 1901-09 

Director of Chemical Laboratory and president, Johns Hopkins University. 

DR. HENRY S. PRITCHETT 1901-10 

President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; later president, Carnegie 

Foundation for the Advancement of-Teaching. 

PROF. EDWARD L. NICHOLS. 1901-11 

Professor of physics, Cornell University. 

DR. ROBERT S. WOODWARD 1908-12 

President, Carnegie Institution of Washington. 

PROF. HENRY M. HOWE 1909-14 

Professor of metallurgy, Columbia University. 

PROF. ARTHUR G. WEBSTER 1910-15 

Director, Physics Laboratory, Clark University. 

PROF. JOHN F. HAYFORD 1912-21 

Director, College of Engineering, Northwestern University. 

PROF. ARTHUR E. KENNELLY 1912-17 

Professor of electrical engineering, Harvard University. 

JOHN R. FREEMAN 1915-24, 1926-31 

Consulting engineer, Providence, RI. 

PROF. WILLIAM A. NOYES 1915-20 

Director, Chemical Laboratory, University of Illinois. 

PROF. JOSEPH S. AMES 1917-22 

Director, Physical Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University. 

PROF. FRED W.' McNAIR 1921-23 

President, Michigan College of Mines,' Houghton, Mich. 

PROF. WILDER D. BANCROFT 1920-25 

Professor of physical chemistry, Cornell University. 

DR. AMBROSE SWASEY 1921-26 

Chairman of the Board, Warner & Swasey Co., Cleveland, Ohio. 

DR. SAMUEL W. STRATTON 1923-31 

President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Sources: NARG 167, NBS Box 296; NARG 40, files of Secretary of Commerce, 

67009/5; current files, Office of the Director, NBS. 

557 
558 APPENDIX E 

Term 

GANO DUNN 1923-48 

President, J. G. White Engineering Corp., New York. 

PROF. WILLIAM F. DURAND 1924-29 

Professor of mechanical engineering, Leland Stanford University. 

DR. WILLIS R. WHITNEY 1925-30 

Director, General Electric Research Laboratory, Schenectady, N.Y. 

DR. CHARLES F. KETTERING 1929-34, 1947-52 

Director of research and vice president, General Motors Corp. 

DR. CHARLES L. REESE 1930-35 

Consulting chemist to E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. 

MORRIS E. LEEDS 1931-41 

President, Leeds & Northrup Co., Philadelphia, Pa. 

DR. KARL T. COMPTON 1931-47 

President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

DR. WILLIAM D. COOLIDGE 1935-49 

Vice president and director of research, General Electric Co. 

DR. FRANK B. JEWETT 1935-45 

Vice president in charge of research and development, American Telephone & Telegraph Co.; president, National Academy of Sciences. 

DR. VANNEVAR BUSH 1942-46 

President, Carnegie Institution of Washington; director, Office of Scientific 

Research and Development. 

DR. HAROLD C. UREY 1945-50 

Research professor of chemistry, University of Chicago. 

DR. EUGENE P. WIGNER 1946-51 

Metallurgical Laboratory, University of Chicago; director of research, 

Clinton Laboratories, Oak Ridge, Tenn. 

DR. ROBERT F. MEHL 1948-53 

Director, Metals Research Laboratory, Carnegie Institute of Technology. 

DR. DONALD H. MENZEL 1949-54 

Chairman, Department of Astronomy, Harvard University; associate 

director, Harvard Observatory. 

DR. DETLEV W. BRONK 1950-60 

President, Johns Hopkins University. 

PROF. JOHN H. VAN VLECK 1951-56 

Dean, Division of Applied Science, Harvard University. 

DR. MERVIN J. KELLY 1952-62 

President, Bell Telephone Laboratories. 

DR. CLYDE E. WILLIAMS 1953-58 

Director, Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio. 

DR. CRAWFORD H. GREENEWALT 1954-64 

President, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. 

PROF. FREDERICK SEITZ .1956-61 

Chairman, Department of Physics, University of Illinois. 

DR. LLOYD V. BERKNER 1957-62 

Scientific research administrator; chairman, Space Science Board, National 

Academy of Sciences. 

PROF. CHARLES H. TOWNES 1960-65 

Department of Physics, Columbia University, consultant, Brookhaven 

National Laboratories. 
In 

30 24 

18 

12 

!.iiii!I!I!!!lIiiiiiflI 

1925 1930 1935 

54 

48 

NBS APPROPRIATIONS AND OTHER SUPPORTING FUNDS, 1902-1955 APPENDIX F 

THE YEARS OF CONSOLIDATION, 1918-1941 r 

42 36 

1: 

6 

LEGEND 

— U DIRECT APPROPRIATIONS 

o LAND 0 CONSTRUCTION / EQUIPMENT • SPECIAL APPROPRIATIONS •TRANSFERRED FUNDS 

END FIGURES REPRESENT TOTAL FUNDS FOR FISCRI. OEM 

0 a 

z 0 

§ 

£ 

NISCAA YEARS 

CR 

1940 

FISCAL YEARS 

SOURCES: ABS ANNUAL REPORTS 1902-1042. 1946—1919, 1954-1955 fr, 1913.1945, 9949-9953 .,ppliü A, 69$ BUDGET MANAGEMENT DIVISION 
NBS SPECIAL APPROPRIATIONS, 1910-1935 APPENDIX C 

1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 

Weights and measuies ($10,000)* Gas light ($10,000) 

Electrolysis investigation ($15,000) 

Testing structural 4iaterials ($50 000 $333 200) 

Testing structural for U.S. 

Testing machines $54 700) 

Refrigeration ($15,000) 

High-voltage ($15,000) 

Testing railroad $les ($25 000 $62 000) 

Fire resisting prop4rties ($25 000 $3S000) 

Testing materials ($20 $51 163) 

I Railway materials 

Public utility ($25 000 $114 159) Radio research ($12 263 $85 700) 

I Color standardization ($10 000 $15 

Clay products I 

Physical constants F ($5,000) I Standardizing mechanical apptiances 

Optical glass ($10I000-$84,388) 1 

Military research ($577,176) 

Gage standardization ($226,138- $433,000) 

National Security Defense Funds ($j,395,000) 

Standard materials ($4,000-$10,000) 

Textile investigatiOn ($10,000-$60,900) 

Sugar technology 

Storage batteries ($20,000) I Mine scales and cars ($15,000) 

Public utility investigation ($53,522) 

Metallurgical research ($30,040- $61,000) 

High.temperature 

Industrial ($362,881- $437,009) . . Sound investigationF ($7237111260) 

Industrial safety ($25,000) 

Testing Government materials 

Standardization of ($52 292 $258 

Platinum and rare ($15,000) , Radioactive substahces and x rays ($1,000- $31,741) . Rope investigation ($20,000) 

F Automotive engine research ($10 000 60000) N 

Utilization of waste products ($50,000 

. Dental materials 

Furnaces and shelter ($22,000) 

Hydraulic researchF($36,880-$44,270) N 

1910 1920 1925 1930 1935 

*Figures represent initial and maximum appropriations. 

Note: Speciai appropriations continued after 1935 in special annuai appropriations for Standards for commerce (1936-1946), 

investigation of building materials (1938-1942), and Radio propagation awl standards (1950-1955). 
V-E Day V-i Day 1945 

Pearl Harbor 

1941 

AEF arrives in 

France 1917 

APPENDIX H 

Ft —t— 

NBS AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL 4781 

Sources: NBS Annual Reports; Records 

of NBS Personnel Division; 

Sources cited in the History — 

3636 

South Korea 1957 

Invaded 1950 

5000 

4500 

4000 

3500 

3000 

2500 

2000 

1500 

1000 

U 800 

Transfer of NBS 

Fuse and Mlsslie 

Programs to Dept. of Defense 1953 

\\ Stock Market I crash 1929 I I I 1150 

1066 ii 

I I World War I 668 

500 begIns 1914 

135 FV 1900 

World War II 

begIns 1939 

1920 

STRATTON BURGESS BRIGGS CONDON ASTIN 

1SJ 
1500 

1400 PUBLICATIONS 

BY THE STAFF OF THE 

1300 NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

APPENDIX I 

Total Publications 

FISCAL YEAR 
APPENDIX 1 567 

PUBLICATIONS 

OF THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

NOTES 

The Annual Reports of the Bureau, 1901—1960, are the source for the basic data of this 

publications chart. 

Dash lines on the chart span years when the Annual Report omitted publication data. 

In some instances of omission the number of publications was determined by actual 

count in NBS C460, which lists all formal Bureau publications issued by the Government 

Printing Office from 1901 to 1947, and in Supplements to C460 for publications since 

1947. 

Not represented on the chart are revisions, reprints, and new editions of Bureau publi. 

cations (as many as 50 to 90 annually by 1915); publicity releases and general articles 

in the periodical literature on the work of the Bureau; nor calibration and test reports 

prepared by the staff. 

NBS RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS include the early Scientific Papers (1904—1928) 

and Technologic Papers (1910—1928), combined in 1928 in a single Journal of Research as Research Papers until the reorganization of NBS publications in 1959, noted below. 

MISCELLANEOUS NBS PUBLICATIONS in the chart comprise: 

Circulars, the compilations of information related to NBS scientific, technologic, and 

engineering activities, published from 1903 to 1959. They include the extensive NBS 

and U.S. Government Specifications series in the years 1912—1937. 

Miscellaneous Publications (1905 to date), which include the NBS Annual Reports, 

Weights and Measures Conference Reports, the Standards Yearbook from 1927 through 

1933, and charts, directories, and administrative reports. 

Handbooks (1921 to date). 

Building and Housing Publications (1922—1932). 

Simplified Practice Recommendations (1923 to date). 

Technical News Bulletin, published monthly (1924 to date). 

Letter Circulars, in mimeograph form (1924 to date). 

Commercial Standards (1929 to date). 

Building Materials and Structures Reports (1930-1939). 

Mathematical Tables (1941—1945). 

Applied Mathematics Series (1948 to date). 

Basic Radio Propagation Predictions, published monthly (1952—1959) ; Central Radio 

Propagation Laboratory Ionospheric Predictions (1960 to date). 

NON-NBS PUBLICATIONS, first recorded in 1925, comprise articles by members of 

the staff appearing in the journals of professional and scientific societies. 

NBS REPORTS, on research conducted under transferred funds and formalized in 1951 

(estimated in 1952 as more than a thousand reports), actually began before World 

War II as nonpublished reports to NACA on special research for that agency, and 

later as reports to NDRC, OSRD and other wartime agencies. They continue to com- prise classified and unclassified reports to other Government agencies on projects 

supported by transferred funds. 
568 APPENDIX I 

Reorganization of NBS Publications: In 1959 the journal of Research was reorganized 

into four separately published sections: A. Physics and Chemistry; B. Mathematics 

and Mathematical Physics; C. Engineering and Instrumentation; D. Radio Propagation. 

Two nonperiodicals, Monographs (papers too long for the Journal) and Technical Notes 

(scientific data of limited or transient interest) were established that same year. 

Continuing nonperiodicals included the Applied Mathematics Series, Handbooks, and 

Miscellaneous Publications. Commercial Standards and Simplified Practice Recomniendations, discontinued as NBS publications from 1951 to 1963, were resumed as Bureau publications. 

Continuing monthly periodicals included the Technical News Bulletin and CRPL 

Ionospheric Predictions (former Basic Radio Propagation Predictions). 
APPENDIX J 

569 

Almost certainly the first official NBS payroll and roster, these half-monthly payments, 

according to the paybook cover, were made on July 15. 

The appearance of Miss Sliney's name on the roll cannot be explained. She may 

have been a temporary appointment before Dr. Stratton took over. Her name does 

not appear on subsequent payrolls or on staff rosters. 
APPENDIX J 

DIVISION. AND SECTION CHIEFS 

OF ThE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL STAFF 

NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS as of July 1, 1905* 

DIRECTOR Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 1901—22 

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES Fischer, Louis A. 1901-21 

Comparison of Capacities Ferner, Roy Y. 1903—18 

Weights and Measures Assistant Pienkowsky, Arthur T. 1905—44 

HEAT AND THERMOMETRY Waidner, Dr Charles W. 1901-22 

Low Temperature Investigations Waidner, Dr Charles W. 

High Temperature Investigations Burgess, Dr George K. 1903—32 

Comparison of Thermometers Dickinson, Dr Hobart C. 1903—45 

Heat and Thermometry Assistant Mueller, Eugene F. 1905—44 

LIGHT AND OPTICAL INSTRU- Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 

MENTS 

Spectroscopy Nutting, Dr Perley G. 1903—12 

Magneto-optics Bates, Frederick J. 1903—47 

Computer Coblentz, Dr William W. 1905—44 

ENGINEERING INSTRUMENTS 'Charles F. 1902—13 

AND MATERIALS 

Engineering Instruments and Materials *Merrill, Albert S. 1903—06 

Assistants *Lange, Oscar G. 1902—37 

ELECTRICITY Rosa, Dr Edward B. 1901-21 

Inductance and Capacity Rosa, Dr Edward B. 

*Grover, Dr Frederick W. 1903—11 

*This 1905 roster is based on information in MS, N. Ernest Dorsey, "Some memories of the early days of the NBS," Oct. 28, 1943 (NBS Historical File). The names preceded by an asterisk are staff members who left the Bureau before the 

next roster. Their subsequent employment or other reason for separation is noted 

below. 

The dates on the right both mark the first appearance of a staff member in these 

rosters and his inclusive dates of association with the Bureau. 

5Sponsler, resigned Mar. 22, 1913. 

*Merrill, resigned May 3, 1906; returned briefly Mar.—July 1920. 

*Lange, retired Nov. 30, 1937. 

5Grovcr, to Colby College, 1911—20; to Department of Electrical Engineering, Union College, Schenectady, N.Y., 1920. 

571 
572 APPENDIX I 

ELECTRICITY—Continued 

Magnetism and Absolute Measurement *Guthe, Dr Karl E. 1903—06 

of Current 

Electrical Measuring Instruments Brooks, Herbert B. 1903—39, 

1942—45 

*Lloyd, Dr Morton G. 1902—10, 

1917—41 

Reid, Clarence E. 1903—05 

Photometry *Hyde, Dr Edward P. 1903—08 

Electrical Resistance and Electromotive Wolff, Dr Frank A. 1901—41 

Force 

*Middlekauff, 1903—17 

Dr George W. 

Electricity Assistants *Cady, Francis E. 1903—20 

Durston, Franklin S. 1903—17 

*Dorsey, Dr N. Ernest 1903—20, 

1928—43 

*Shoemaker, Maynard P. 1905—36 

Naval Radio Research Laboratory *Austin, Dr Louis W. 

Army Signal Service Radio Laboratory *Crannn, E. R. 

CHEMISTRY *Noyes, Dr William A. 1903-08 

Chemistry Assistants *Stokes, Dr Henry N. 1903—09 

Cain, Dr John R. 1905—21, 

1936—45 

Waters, Campbell E. 1904—42 

*Guthe, to State University of Iowa as chairman, Physics Department, 1906. 

*Lloyd, to Review and Western Electrician," Chicago; as technical 

editor, 1910—17. 

*Hyde, to NELA Research Laboratory, General Electric, 1908. 

*Middlekauff, resigned 1917. 

*Cady, to National Lamp Works, Nela Park, 1920. 

*Dorsey, private consultant and consultant in physics to NBS, 1920—28; independent 

research worker at NBS, 1928—43; died July 6, 1959. 

*Shoemaker, retired 1936. *Austin, died June 27, 1932. 

*Cramm, no data available. 

*Noyes, to Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois, as chairman, 1908. 

*Stokes, to Critic," as editor, 1909. 
CHIEFS OF THE 

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL 

STAFF 

as of September 1, 1910* 

DIRECTOR Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 

I. ELECTRICITY Rosa, Dr Edward B. 

Inductance and Capacity Curtis, Dr Harvey L. 1907—46 

Precision Resistance Measurement Wenner, Dr Frank 1907—43 

Electrical Measuring Instruments Brooks, Herbert B. 

Magnetism Burrows, Dr Charles W. 1906—18 

Electrical Testing Vinal, Dr George W. 1904—50 

Photometry Crittenden, Dr. Eugene 1909—50 

C. 

Electrolysis McCollum, Burton 1909—26 

Electromotive Force and Resistance Wolff, Dr Frank A. 

Electricity Assistants 5Agnew, Dr Paul G. 1906—20 

Taylor, Dr A. Hadley 1909—21 

McBride, Russell S. 1909—20 

Grover, Dr. Frederick W. 

II. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES Louis A. 

Length and Expansion Measure. Gray, Dr. Arthur W. 1909—16 

ments 

Capacity Measurements Ferner, Roy Y. 

Mass Pienkowsky, Arthur T. 

Density (Vacant) 

Time Ferner, Roy Y. 

Trade Weights and Measures Holbrook, Fay S. 1909—40 

Weights and Measures Assistant Bearce, Henry W. 1908—45 

III. THERMOMETRY, PYROMETRY Waidner, Dr Charles W. 

AND HEAT MEASUREMENT 

Thermometry Dickinson, Dr Hobart C. 

Calorimetry Mueller, Dr Eugene F. 

Pyrometry Burgess, Dr George K. 

Low Temperature Investigations Kanolt, Clarence W. 1909—25 

5This and subsequent rosters are based on NBS personnel records, NBS telephone directories, archival materials, and interviews with present and past staff members. 

In some instances available records were incomplete; in others, the Federal Records 

Center at St. Louis, Mo., reported "no records found." 

*Agnew, to American Engineering Standards Committee as executive secretary, 

1920. 

573 
574 APPENDIX / 

III. THERMOMETRY, PYROMETRY 

AND HEAT MEASUREMENT—Continued 

Thermometry, Pyrometry and Heat Buckingham, Dr Edgar 1906—37 

Assistant 

IV. OPTICS Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 

Radiometry Coblentz, Dr William W. 

Polarimetry Bates, Frederick J. 

Spectroscopy and Applied Optics Priest, Irwin G. 1907—32 

Interferometry *Nutting, Dr Perley G. 

V. CHEMISTRY Hillebrand, Dr William F. 1908—25 

Electrochemistry Blum, Dr William 1909—52 

Oils, Rubber, Paper, Textiles Waters, Campbell E. 

Metals, Cement, Bituminous Mate- Voorhees, Samuel S. 1910—21 

rials 

ENGINEERING INSTRUMENTS Her8ey, Dr Mayo D. 1910-20, 

1927—31 

STRUCTURAL, ENGINEERING Wormeley, Philip L. 1910-47 

AND MISCELLANEOUS MATERIALS 

Structural Materials *Howard, James E. 1910—14 

Cement Pearson, Joseph C. 1910—24 

Lime (Not known) 

Metals (Not known) 

Protective Coatings (Not known) 

Paper and Textiles *Clark, Dr Frederick C. 1910—19 

PITTSBURGH LABORATORY Bleininger, Dr Albert V. 1910-23 

Emley, Warren E. 1910—43 

Bates, Phaon H. 1910—45 

NORTHAMPTON LABORATORY *Humphrey, Richard L. 1910-10 

ATLANTIC CITY LABORATORY Wig, Rudolph J. 1910-14 

*Nutting, to research laboratory of Eastman Kodak Co., Rochester, N.Y., 1912; 

to Westinghouse Electric Co. as research director, 1916. 

*Howard, transferred to Interstate Commerce Commission, 1914. 

*Clark, to American Writing Paper Co., Holyoke, Mass., 1919. 

*Humphrey, NBS member Aug. 5—10, 1910; no further record. 
DIRECTOR 

CHIEFS 

OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL STAFF 

as of July 1,1915 

I. ELECTRICITY 

Inductance and Capacity 

Precision Resistance Measurement 

Electrical Measuring Instruments 

Magnetic Measurements 

Electrochemistry 

Photometry 

Electrolysis 

Radio Measurements 

Radio Engineering 

Electromotive Force and Resist- ance Electrical Service Standards 

Electricity Assistants 

II. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES 

Mass 

Density and Capacity 

Trade Weights and Measures Investigations 

Time and Length 

III. THERMOMETRY, PYROMETRY, AND HEAT MEASUREMENT 

Thermometry 

Pyrometry 

Calorimetry 

Low Temperature Investigations 

Fire Resistance 

IV. OPTICS 

Radiometry 

Polarimetry 

Spectroscopy 

Colorimetry 

Interferometry 

Dispersoids 

to go into private business, 1918. 

Rosa, Dr Edward B. 

Curtis, Dr Harvey L. 

Wenner, Dr Frank 

Brooks, Dr Herbert B. 

Burrows, Dr Charles W. 

Vinal, Dr George W. 

Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

McCollum, Burton 

Dellinger, Dr J. Howard 

Kolster, Frederick A. 

Wolff, Dr Frank A. 

Meyer, Dr J. Franklin 

Agnew, Dr. Paul G. 

Silsbee, Dr Francis B. 

Fischer, Louis A. 

Pienkowsky, Dr Arthur T. 

Peffer, Elmer L. 

Holbrook, Fay S. 

*Ferner, Roy Y. 

Waidner, Dr Charles W. 

Dickinson, Dr Hobart C. 

Foote, Dr Paul D 

Mueller, Eugene F. 

Kanolt, Clarence W. 

Ingberg, Simon H. 

Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 

Coblentz, Dr William W. 

Bates, Frederick J. 

Meggers, Dr. William F. 

Priest, Irwin G. 

Peters, Chauncey G. 

Wells, Dr Philip V. 

Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 

1907—48 

1911—21 

1913—41 

1911—59 

1913—48 

1911—27 

1914—47 

1914—58 

1913-49 

1913—23 

575 
576 APPENDIX J 

V. CHEMISTRY 

Electrochemistry 

Metals, Cement, Bituminous 

Materials 

Gas Chemistry 

Reagents and Apparatus 

Paint, Varnish, Soap, etc. 

VI. ENGINEERING RESEARCH 

AND TESTING 

Engineering Instruments and 

Mechanical Appliances 

Aviation Instruments 

VII. METALLURGY 

Foundry and Mechanical Plant 

Microscopy of Metals 

Working of Metals 

VIII. STRUCTURAL, ENGINEERING 

AND MISCELLANEOUS 

MATERIALS 

Clay 

Lubricating Oils 

Cement, Sand, Stone 

Rubber, Leather, Textiles 

Hillebrand, Dr Wiffiam F. 

Blum, Dr William 

Voorhees, Samuel S. 

Weaver, Elmer R. 

Smither, Frederick W. 

Walker, Dr Percy H. 

Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 

Stutz, Walter F. 

Hersey, Dr Mayo D. 

Burgess, Dr George K. 

Karr, Carydon P. 

Rawdon, Dr Henry S. 

*Woodward, Dr Raymond 

W. 

*Merica, Dr Paul D. 

Bates, Phaon H. 

Phaon H. 

Herschel, Dr Winslow H. 

Pearson, Joseph C. 

Wormeley, Philip L. 

Bleininger, Dr Albert V. 

Bleininger, Dr Albert V. 

Emley, Warren E. 

1912—57 

1914-46 

1914—37 

1912—47 

1913—25 

1912—45 

1914-21 

1914—19 

1913—43 

PiTTSBURGH LABORATORY 

Optical Glass 

Lime, Gypsum, Sand, Brick 

5Woodward, to Whitney Manufacturing 

1921. 

*Merica, to International Nickel Co., Bayonne, N.J., 1919. 

Co., Hartford, Conn., as chief metallurgist, 
WARTIME PROJECTS OF THE 

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL STAFF 

as of September 1918* 

DIRECTOR Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 

Technical Assistant to the Director *Schlink Frederick J. 1913—19 

ELECTRICAL DIVISION Rosa, Dr Edward B. 

Technical Assistants Agnew, Dr Paul C. 

Crittenden, Dr Eugene 

C. 

Standards of Resistance 

Airplane gun control and other problems Wenner, Dr Frank 

Macaulay, D. L. 

High frequency sound waves in water *wright, Winthrop R. 1917—19 

Centrifugal gun and other problems *Purington, Ellison S. 1915—19 

Inductance and capacity 

Ballistics of large caliber guns Curtis, Dr Harvey L. 

Exterior ballistics of large caliber guns *Duncan, Robert C. 1917—21 

Richards, Horace C. 

*Moore, Harry H. 1915—23 

Interior ballistics of large caliber guns Kester, Frederick E. 

Subterranean sound investigations Hufford, Mason E. 

Wood, Capt. H. 0. 

Crane, 1st Lt. E. C. 

Machine gun synchronization *Morgan, Raymond 1917—42 

Jump and whip of gun at time of firing Mertz, Pierre 

Electrical Measuring Instruments 

Fire-control apparatus Brooks, Dr Herbert B. 

*Stannard, Winfield H. 1909—19 

Ignition Silsbee, Dr Francis B. 

*Dempsey, James B. 1916—39 

*Gorton, William S. 1917—19 

Electric trucks and tractors Farmer, T. 0. 

*Source: Letter, Director NBS to Technical Information Section, Bureau of Aircraft Production, WD, for the General Staff, Sept. 20, 1918 (NBS Box 10, IC). *Schlink, to instrument control department, Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., 1919; 

assistant secretary, AESC, 1922; technical director and president, Consumers' 

Research, Inc., 1929. 

*Wright, returned to teaching, 1919. *purington, to Hammond Radio Laboratory, Gloucester, Mass., 1919. 

*Duncan, to Bureau of Ordnance, Navy Department, 1921. 

*Moore, to Navy Department, 1923. 

*Morgan, to Department of Physics, University of Maryland, 1942. 

*Stannard, to Central Scientific Co., Chicago, 1919. 

*Dempsey, retired, May 11, 1939. 

*Gorton, to Western Electric Co., New York, 1919. 

577 
578 APPENDIX / 

Magnetic Measurement 

Supervision of section; magnetic mines Sanford, Raymond L. 

Magnetic testing of metals for rifle barrels *Kouwenhoven, Prof. 

William B. 

Magnetic testing of airplane tie wires 5Fisher, Melvin F. 1913—43 

Airplane and marine compasses Dawson, Leo H. 

Magnetic testing of welded ship plates Becker, James A. 

Photometry and Illuminating Engineering 

Special illuminating equipment Taylor, Dr A. Hadley 

*Commery, Eugene W. 1917—19 

Properties of incandescent lamps *Skogland, James F. 1908—31 

Methods of photometric measurement *Morse, Marie L. T. 1918—31 

Field searchlights Karrer, Enoch 

*WiIlis, Benjamin S. 1917—24 

Zahn, E. T. 

Radio Communications Section 

Vacuum tube measurements Beltz, H. H. 

Radio measurements Grover, Dr Frederick W. 

*Frecman, Herbert M. 1917—19 

*Breit, Gregory 1918—19 

Harmon, H. W. 

Merriman, A. G. 

Montgomery, N. 

Snow, H. A. 

Werden, E. T. 

Radio design Buckley, J. P. 

Radio development Dellinger, Dr J. Howard 

*Dunmore, Francis W. 1918—49 

*Hull, Lewis M. 

Hillebrand, L. E. 

Koister, Frederick A. 

Percival D. 1913—24, 

1941—62 

*McDowell, Louise S. 

*Miller, John M. 1907—19 

Ould, Richard S. 1918—23 

*Preston, J. L. 

*Kouwenhoven, returned to Johns Hopkins University staff. 

*Fisher, died Dec. 23, 1943. 

*Commery, to National Lamp Works, Nela Park, Cleveland, Ohio. 

*skogland, died Feb. 10, 1931. *Morse, resigned, illness 1931. 

*Willis, to Iowa State College, 1919. 

*Freeman, to Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co., Pittsburgh, Pa., 1919. 

*Breit, to University of Leiden, Holland, on National Research Fellowship, 1919, 

and then to Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C. 

*Dunmore, retired, 1949. 

*Hull, L. M. to Radio Frequency Laboratory, Boonton, N.J. 

*Lowell, retired, 1962 (now consultant). *McDowell, to Wellesley College, Mass. *Miller, to Atwater Kent Radio Corp., 1919. 

*preston, to Bureau of Lighthouses. 
APPENDIX 1 579 

Radio Communications Section—Continued 

Radio development—Continued 

*Southworth, George C. 1917—18 

*Whittemore, Laurens E. 1917—24 

Wade, W. G. 

*Winoughby, John A. 1916—22 

Electrolysis Prevention 

Sound ranging McCollum, Burton 

Eckhardt, Dr Englehardt 

A. 

*Weibel, Dr Ernest E. 

*Karcher, Dr J. C. 

*peters, Orville S. 1910—29 

*Fisher, J. Carl 

Melton, E. R. 

Goren, David 

*Snyder, Carl F. 1909—60 

Electrolysis mitigation *Shepard, Edgar R. 1914—33 

Standards of electric railway service Logan, Kirk H. 

Bailer, M. J. 

Monroe, W. P. 

Electrical Safety Engineering 

Public utility standards Lloyd, Dr Morton G. 

Industrial safety standards *Oakes, Charles E. 1917—21 

Electrical safety standards Sahm, Paul A. B. 1916—NRF 

5Waldschmidt, Albert 

Congdon, W. E. 

Wind pressure on wires Dahm, P. E. 

Gas Engineering 

Coke ovens, toluol, gas standards McBride, Russell S. 

*Reinecker, Charles E. 1916—23 

Lausley, J. W. 

Hydrogen gas plant operation Walter M. 1916—23 

*Southworth, to Yale University, 1918; American Telephone & Telegraph Co., 

New York, 1923. 

5Whittemore, to Bureau of Navigation, Department of Commerce, 1920; to Amen-. 

can Telephone & Telegraph Co., New York, 1925. 

5Willoughby, to the Naval Research Laboratory, 1922. 

*Weibel, killed in France, August 1918. 

*Karcher, to Western Electric, Chicago, 1923; later to Arnerada Oil Co. 

*Peters, resigned to become consultant engineer, 1929. 

*Fisher, to Consolidated Gas and Electric Co., Baltimore, Md. *Snyder, retired 1960. 

*Shepard, to Department of Agriculture, 1933. 

*Oakes, to Pennsylvania Power and Light Co., Allentown, Pa. 

5Waldschmidt, to Patent Office, Department of Commerce, 1920. 

*Reinecker, to United Gas Improvement Co., Philadelphia, Pa. 

*Berry, to California Gas Research Council, Los Angeles, Calif. 
580 APPENDIX I 

Gas Engineering—Continued 

Natural gas, economic problems, 

standards 

Assistants in gas engineering 

Electrical Service Standards 

Electric light and power service 

Jurisdiction of state public service 

commissions 

Telephone Service Standards 

Supervision of telephone investigations 

Telephone traffic investigations 

Telephone equipment investigations 

Methods of measurement 

Assistant to Dr Taylor 

Standard cell and microphone investigations 

The audion and its applications 

Transmission investigations 

Microphone investigations 

Electrochemistry 

Battery research and testing 

Chemistry of primary and storage 

batteries 

Development of galvanic piles 

Dry cell and small storage batteries 

Storage batteries - Radioactivity and X—Ray Measurements 

Properties, use, and measure of lumi- Dorsey, Dr N. Ernest nous materials 

X-ray apparatus and materials Huff, Dr W. B. 

Self-luminous materials *Brown, Prof. T. B. 

Richmond, J. E. 

Taylor, M. D. 

McCrea, W. D. 

Yung-Kwai, Elizabeth 

Alderton, Nina M. 

*Eiseman, retired Dec. 31, 1957. *Taylor, H. 0., to the Franklin Union, Boston, Mass., as director 

department, 1921. 

*Shoemaker, to the Treasury Department, 1936. 

*Sasuly, reduction in force, 1924. 

*Holler, to Geology Department, Vassar College. *Brown, to George Washington University. 

Morgan, C. S. 

Frankel, M. J. 

Gray, G. A. 

*Eiseman, John H. 

Meyer, J. Franklin 

Crawford, J. P. 

Wolff, Dr Frank A. 

Macomber, G. S. 

Brown, W. E. 

*Taylor, Dr Hawley 0. 

Pike, C. E. 

5Shoemaker, Maynard P. 

Beltz, H. H. 

*Sasuly, Max 

Godfrey, C. M. 

Vinal, Dr George W. 

*Holler, Dr H. D. 

Sefton, Miss L. B. 

Schott, R. C. 

Koller, L. R. 

Cole, T. S. 

1916—57 

1905—36 

1913—24 

of the electrical 

Assistant observer in investigations 

Application of self-luminous materials 

X-ray protective materials 
APPENDIX J 581 

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES Fischer, Louis A. 

Length, Time, and Capacity Section 

Calibration of scales, haemacytom- Judson, Dr Lewis V. 

eters Maslin, M. 

Stop watches (Ordnance), clocks Beal, Arthur F. 

(Shipping Board) 

Gas measuring devices, aviation in- Stillman, Marcus 

struments 

Packaging of materials for oversea Roeser, Harry W. 1914—34 

shipment 

Laws, Weights, and Measures 

Density and thermal expansion of Peffer, Elmer L. 

liquids 

Dilution pipettes (haemacytometers) Hill, E. E. 

Gas Measuring Instruments 

Aircraft inclinometers, telephone Stiliman, Marcus H. 

transmitters, gas measuring, photography 

Thermal Expansivity 

Thermal expansion of airplane alloys, Souder, Dr Wilmer 

spark plug insulators, etc., silicon Hidnert, Dr Peter 

Eisinger, J. 0. 

Mu scale study for Signal and Navy; Souder, Dr Wilmer 

rulings for Ordnance 

Gage Research 

Supervision of gage research *Van Keuren, Harold L. 1914—19 

Miscellaneous gages; weighing *Bruggs, Clarence A. 1910—24 

Gordon, E. D. 

Fullmer, Irwin H. 

*Haigh, Joseph A. 1917—44 

Bean, Howard S. 

HEAT AND THERMOMETRY Waidner, Dr Charles W. 

Thermometry 

Thermometer testing; airplane ther- Wilhelm, Robert M. 1908—20 

mometry Martin, Frank W. 

Thermal properties of methane Finkelstein, Joseph L. 

Pyrometry 

Chief of high temperature investiga- Foote, Dr Paul D. 

.tions 

Optical and radiation pyrometry Fairchild, Charles 0. 

Optical glass Tool, A. Q. 

Valasek, Joseph 

*Van Keuren, to Wilton Tool Co., 1919. 

*Briggs, to Department of Agriculture, 1924. 

*Haigh, retired, Aug. 17, 1944 (disability). 
582 APPENDIX J 

Pyrometry—Continued 

Gas explosions; spark plugs for airplanes 

Optical pyrometry and ionization 

Thermocouple testing; specific heats 

Melting points of refractories 

Coke ovens and optical glass (Signal 

Corps) 

Heat measurement problems 

Thermal conductivity; balloon problems 

Thermal properties of methane at low 

temperatures 

Torpedo 

Technical thermodynamics 

Operation of liquid air plant 

Low temperature testing 

Fire tests of building columns 

Fire tests of reinforced concrete col- umns Fire resistance of structural materials; methane 

Fire resistance and aspects of city 

building codes 

Supervisor of airplane engine re- search 

Assistant to supervisor 

Aeronautic engine performance 

Mohler, Dr Fred L. 

Rognley, 0. 

*Harrison, Thomas R. 

Dana, Leo I. 

Christie, Pvt. J. L. 

Mueller, Eugene F. 

VanDusen, Dr Milton S. 

*Osborne, Nathan S. 

Stimson, Dr Harold F. 

*Sligh, Thomas S. Jr. 

Cragoe, Carl S. 

Jessup, Ralph S. 

Meyers, Cyril H. 

DuPriest, J. R. 

Buckingham, Dr Edgar 

Ford, Thomas B. 

Cook, J. Williamson 

Ingberg, Simon H. 

*Griffin, Harry K. 

*Hull, W. A. 

Fulton, W. C. 

Kanolt, Clarence W. 

*Gtading, Frank W. 

Dickinson, Dr Hobart C. 

*James, William S. 

Anderson, G. V. 

Boreman, R. W. 

Brinkerhoff, V. W. 

Lapp, Sgt. C. J. 

Lee, T. E. 

1903—39 

1916—60 

1916—26 

1918—50 

*Harrison, resigned, 1920. 

*Osborne, retired 1939. 

5Sligh, to Studebaker Corp., 1926. 

5Griffin, to Barnett Co., 1921. 

*Hull, to Terra Cotta Service, Chicago, Ill., 1924. 

*Glading, to Baldwin Locomotive Works as industrial engineer. *James resigned, 1924. 

Heat Measurements 

1915—20 

Thermodynamics 

Low Temperature 

Fire Resistance 

Airplane Power Plant 

1908—21 

1914—19 

1911—24 
APPENDIX J 583 

Airplane Power Plant—Continued 

Aeronautic engine performance— Long, A. R. 

Continued McKenzie, D. 

Sparrow, Stanwood W. 

Stern, A. G. 

Scholz, W. P. 

Thomson, Malcolm 

Walden, C. 0. 

Wetherill, Frederic V. 

Spark plugs Arnold, S. B. 

Bradshaw, G. R. 

Fonseca, Edward L. 

Honaman, R. Karl 

Johnson, G. M. 

Sawyer, L. C. 

Lubrication Bingham, F. C. 

Grosklaus, 0. 

Markie, F. H. 

Menzies, W. C. 

Schuize, J. E. 

Wiley, B. 

Carburetion Blackwell 

Brewer, R. E. 

Stanton, W. F. 

Tice, P. S. 

Physical properties of carburetor air *Hoxton, Dr Llewelyn C. 1901—04, 

1917—18 

Radiators Brown, William 

Castleman, Robert A. Jr. 

*Harper, Dr D. Roberts Jr. 1909—25 

Harvey, A. R. 

Haydoch, E. 

Kleinschmidt, Robert V. 

Parsons, S. R. 

Van de Water, Jean 

Voorhees, L. E. 

Indicators Newell, F. B. 

LIGHT AND OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS 

Spectroscopy 

Infra.red spectroscopy and photog. Meggers, Dr William F. 

raphy *Burns, Dr Keivin 1913—19 

Kiess, Carl C. 1917— 

Color sensitive photographic emul. 5Merrill, Dr Paul W. 1916—19 

sions Ellis, J. H. 

Francis M. 

*Hoxton, returned to Physics Department, University of Virginia. *Harper, to engineering laboratory of General Electric Co., Schenectady, N.Y., 

Sept. 30, 1925. 

to Allegheny Observatory, Pittsburgh, Pa. 

*Merrill, to Mt. Wilson Observatorj. *Walters, to Carnegie Institute of Technology. 
584 APPENDIX / 

Spectroscopy—Continued 

Photographic lens design 

Glass weathering, spectroscopic analysis 

Polarimetry 

Magneto optics; sugar technology 

Physical chemistry of carbohydrates 

Physics relating to sugar testing 

Interferometry and Colorimetry 

Color standards; spectrophotometry; 

chromatic camouflage 

Dyes 

Lens Testing 

Effect of striae on optical glass 

Glass for goggles 

Camera designing for the Navy 

Optical designing for the Navy 

Lens design 

Radiometry 

Radiometers; photoelectric signaling 

Assistant 

Sound 

Transmission of sound in airplane 

ranging 

CHEMISTRY 

Physical Chemistry 

*Mellor, Lewis L. 

*Burka, Samuel M. 

Bates, Frederick J. 

*Jackson, Dr Richard F. 

Phelps, Francis P. 

Priest, Irwin G. 

Gibson, Dr Kasson S. 

*Tyndall, E. P. T. 

McNicholas, Harry J. 

Mathewson, Capt. W. E. 

*Bennett, A. H. 

Smith, Thomas T. 

Wensel, Dr Henry T. 

Curtis, Dr Heber D. 

*Michelson, Albert A. 

Eckel, Arthur F. 

Schultz, Harry I. 

White, H. S. 

Dr William W. 

Kahier, H. 

Jones, A. T. 

*McKelvy, Ernest C. 

Taylor, Dr Cyril S. 

*Isaacs, Aaron 

*yurow, Louis 

Simpson, D. H. 

Ruderman, A. 

5Burka, to Optical Division, Patterson Airfield, Dayton, Ohio. 

5Jackson, died June 1, 1943. 

5Tyndall, to Iowa State University. 5Bennett, to American Optical Co. 

5Michelson, returned to Physics Department, University of Chicago. *McKelvy, accidental death, Nov. 29, 1919. 

*Isaacs, resigned, 1934. 

5Yurow, resigned, 1919. 

1907—43 

1913-NRF 

1907—19 

1913—34 

1913—19 

Hillebrand, Dr William F. 

Physical constants and purification of 

methane; standard samples 

Analysis of gasolines 

*Mellor, to Bell & Howell. 
APPENDIX J I 585 

Electrochemistry 

Electrodeposition Blum, Dr William 

Commercial electroplating Hogaboom, C. B. 

Liscomb, F. J. 

Slattery, T. J. 

Analytical methods for plating Jencks, E. Z. 

Ritchie, LeMarr 

Ham, L. B. 

Physical-chemical methods for plating Bell, A. D. 

Special plating problems Madsen, C. P. 

Gas Chemistry 

Balloon fabrics: life tests, perme- *Edwards, Junius D. 1913—19 

ability Moore, Irwin L. 

Pickering, S. F. 

Schoch, H. K. 

Saper, P. G. 

Automatic gas analysis: nitrate plant; *Franktin, Dr E. C. 

submarines Frantz, H. W. 

Gordon, B. D. 

Mackenzie, J. D. 

Palmer, P. E. 

Crump, C. C. 

Weaver, Elmer R. 

Young, S. W. 

*Bliss, Dr W. J. A. 

Balloon gases Ledig, P. G. 

Balloon temperatures Long, Maurice B. 

Gas engine exhaust analysis MacPherson, Dr 1918— 

Archibald T. 

Reagents and Apparatus 

Chemistry of the platinum metals Smither, Frederick W. 

Wichers, Dr Edward 1917—63 

Gilchrist, Dr Raleigh A. 1918—62 

Methods of testing chemical reagents Sive, Benjamin E. 

Analytical Methods and Standard Samples 

Tungsten, molybdenum, zirconium Lundell, Dr Gustave 1917—48 

analysis E. F. 

Methods of iron and steel analysis *Witmer, Luther F. 1909—20 

Hoffman, James I. 1918—62 

Silwinski, A. A. 

Determination of zirconium in ores *Knowles, Howard B. 1913—50 

Determination of tungsten in ores Rennie, W. E. 

*Edwards, resigned, 1919. 

*Franklin, returned to Chemistry Department, Stanford University. *Bliss, returned to Chemistry Department, Johns Hopkins University. *Witmer, resigned, 1920. 

*Knowles, retired, June 29, 1950. 
586 APPENDIX / 

Oils, Rubber, Paper, Textiles, Ink, Glue 

Lubricants 

Airplane dopes and related subjects 

Leather 

Dyestuffs 

Textile dyeing 

Rubber analysis 

Printing inks 

Corrosion of metals 

Toluol benzol 

Paint, Varnish, and Soap 

Paint, varnish, detergents 

Varnish, drying oils, enamels 

Preservative materials 

ENGINEERING INSTRUMENTS 

Waters, Campbell E. 

Smith, W. Harold 

Jacobson, I. M. 

Whitmore, Lester M. 

Mathewson, W. E. 

Clark, Edgar R. 

Sleeper, R. R. 

Epstein, Samuel W. 

Basseches, J. L. 

Voorhees, Samuel S. 

Bright, Harry A. 

*Fitch, Roy 0. 

*Scherrer, John A. 

Burger, E. N. 

Finn, Alfred N. 

Washburn, Frederic 

MeL. 

Walker, Dr Percy H. 

*Bower, John H. 

McNeil, Hiram C. 

*SChmidt, George C. 

*Lewis, A. J. 

Demovsky, A. 

Cooke, Sgt. G. W. 

Franklin A. 

Prince, Lt. K. P. 

Mechanical Appliances and Engineering Inslruments 

Mechanical applicances Wormeley, Philip L. 

Theory and design of measuring in- Schlink, Frederick J. 

struments 

Engineering instruments 

Aviation Instruments 

Stutz, Walter F. 

Hodge, Orlando J. 

Baster, F. S. 

Hersey, Dr Mayo D. 

Hunt, Dr Franklin L. 

Franklin, Dr W. S. 

*Nusbaum, Dr Christian 

Altimeters, elasticity, viscosity 

Ground speed indicators 

Gyroscopic stabilizers and bomb sights 

Vibrations in airplanes 

*Fitch, died Oct. 13, 1918. 

*Scherrer, retired, Dec. 31, 1940. *Bower, retired, June 30, 1948. *Schmidt, resigned 1922. 

*Lewis, to H. H. Franklin Manufacturing Co., Syracuse, 1920. 

*Wertz, resigned, 1918. 

*Nusbaum, returned to Case School of Applied Science, Cleveland, Ohio. 

Metals, Cement, and Bituminous Materials 

Cement, alloys, and bituminous ma- terials 

1910—57 

1913—60 

1913—18 

1910—40 

1911—42 

1918—37 

1914—48 

1914—22 

1914—20 

1913—18 

1917—24 
APPENDIX J 587 

Aviation Instruments—Continued 

Tachometers 

Elastic properties of diaphragms 

Rate of climb indicators 

Oxygen control apparatus 

Air speed indicators 

Inclinometers 

Bimetallic strips 

Aviation Physics 

Aerodynamical laboratory investigations 

Wind tunnel investigations 

Scientific instrument design 

Construction of research apparatus 

ENGINEERING, STRUCTURAL, 

AND MISCELLANEOUS 

MATERIALS 

Metals 

Metal airplane construction 

Airplane instruments 

Calibration testing machines 

Strength of welded ship plates 

Strength of reinforced concretes 

Impact strength of steel 

Impact strength of wood 

Causes of failure in steel rails 

Strength of full-length airplane beams 

Strength of military construction 

materials 

Washburn, George E. 

Sylvander, Roy C. 

Rawlins, C. H. 

Neims, W. S. 

Mears, Atherton H. 

Hoffman, Leslie A. 

Smith, B. A. 

Keat, W. G. 

Stearns, Howard 0. 

Stiliman, Marcus H. 

Peterson, J. B. 

Briggs, Dr Lyman J. 

Heald, Roy H. 

Upton, Frederick E. 

McMurdie, Alex M. 

Cook, Robert 

Simpson, W. S. 

Blackwood, W. J. 

Dolinar, M. 

Oser, 0. 

Voorhees, Dr Samuel S. 

Whittemore, Dr. Herbert 

L. 

Johnston, R. S. 

*McNair, Dr F. W. 

Templin, Richard L. 

Moore, H. F. 

Hoffman, Charles P. 

Curts, H. L. 

Larson, L. J. 

Cushing, B. L. 

Robbins, L. L. 

Anderson, H. A: 

Sorey, T. L. 

Wise, F. J. 

Rynders, G. W. 

Cement, Concrete, Stone, Gravel, Sand 

Reversal of stress on concrete beams *Smith, George A. 

Concrete investigations Kessler, Daniel W. 

*McNair, to presidency of Michigan School of Mines. 

*Smith, resigned, 1926. 

1916—26 
588 APPENDIX J 

Cement, Concrete, Stone, Gravel, Sand—Continued 

Concrete ship construction problems Maconi, G. V. 

Davis, Watson 

Design of reinforced concrete Slater, W. A. 

Effect of alkali and sea water on con- *Wiffiams, Guy M. 1911—2 3 

crete 

Volume change in concrete Laubly, Charles S. 

Miscellaneous Materials 

Section chief Wormeley, Philip L. 

Lubricants Herschel Dr Winslow H. 

Leather Hart, Reeves W. 

Cheney, Walter L. 

Bowker, Roy C. 

Wallin, F. W. 

Rubber *patrick, Erwin C. 1912—20 

Collier, S. 

Morgan, W. F. 

Linscott, R. F. 

Bond, E. R. 

Textiles 

Airplane fabrics *Walefl, Ernest D. 1914—19 

Fisher, Russell T. 

Cotton fabrics Dickson, E. E. 

Bauldry, C; E. 

Perkins, J. H. 

Wool fabrics and felt Webster, P. 

Spicer, E. 

McGavan, F. R. 

General military fabrics Duman, R. W. 

Philpot, I. 

Wackman, C. F. 

Textile microscopy Basche, H. 

Ceramics (Pittsburgh Laboratory) 

Chemistry of cements, clay, glass Stecker, H. C. 

Royal, H. F. 

Maag, 0. L. 

Structural Materials (Pittsburgh Laboratory) 

Physical properties of portland and *parsons, Walter E. 1916—20 

sorel cements Greenwald, A. H. 

Properties of cements and concretes Bates, Phaon H. 

Fire Resisting Materials (Pittsburgh Laboratory) 

Fire-resisting qualities of structural .. Walter A. 1914—23 

materials. Fulton, W. C. 

________ 

Gunning, R. T. 

*Williams, resigned, *patrick, to Mason Tire and Rubber Co., Kent, Ohio, as chief chemist and engineer, 

1920. 

*Walen, to manager, Textile Research Co., Boston, 1919. 

*Parsons, reduction in force, 1920. 

*Hull, W. A., to Northwestern Terra Cotta Co., Chicago, Ill., 1923. 
APPENDIX / 589 

Steel, Concrete, Cement (Pittsburgh liaboratory) 

Steel columns, building tile 

Earth resistance of cement and con- crete 

Cement, concrete, wire rope, manila 

rope 

Paper 

Section chief 

Wall board, adhesives, test methods 

Paper for gas masks and airplane fabrics 

Operation of paper machine for gas 

masks 

Microphotography of balloon fabrics 

Optical methods for testing gas mask 

paper 

Paper samples from military agencies 

METALLURGY DIVISION 

Microscopy of Metals 

Microscopy studies; corrosion of nonferrous alloys 

Microstructure of ordnance steels, 

brass 

Bernard D. 

5Griffith, John H. 

Virgin, W. H. 

*Newell, Palmer F. 1913—NRF 

Clark, Dr Frederick C. 

*Conley, Albert D. 

Durgin, Albert G. 

Harding, R. H. 

Houston, P. L. 

Bicking, G. W. 

Loftan, R. E. 

Curtis, Cpl. Frederick A. Mendel, Pvt. J. P. 

Burgess, Dr George K. 

Rawdon, Dr Henry S. 

Nauss, George M. 

Heat Treatment and Thermal Analysis 

Grossmann, Marcus A. 

Freeman, John R. Jr. 

Howard 1912—25 

Merica, Dr Paul D. 

*Waltenberg, Romaine G. 

France, R. 

Oesterle, Pvt. J. F. 

*Woodward, Dr Raymond 

W. 

*Hathcock, resigned, 1919. 

*Griffith, resigned, 1919. 

*Newell, resigned, 1919. 

*Conley, resigned, 1919. 

*Scott, resigned, 1925. 

*Waltenburg, resigned, 1921. 

*Woodward, to Whitney Manufacturing Co., Hartford, Conn., as chief metallurgist, 

1921. 

1916-NRF 

1911-NRF 

1916-NRF 

Heat treatment of steels; rust proofing 

Heat treatment of metallic alloys 

Physical Properties and Miscellaneous 

Light aluminum alloys; electric welding 

Bearing metals; tin conservation 

Tin conservation; solders 

Electric welding 

1912—21 

1914—21 

Gurevich, Louis J. 

Hurvitz, B. 
590 APPENDIX J 

Chemical Metallurgy 

Preparation of alloys Jordan, Louis 

Owens, A. W. 

Methods for determining gases in steel, Wetmore, A. S. 

iron 

General metallurgical research Cain, Dr John R. 

Foundry and Mechanical Plant 

Aluminum alloys for airplane work Karr, Carydon P. 

Foundry work in aluminum alloy re Flegel, A. 

search 

Molding sands; vitreous enamels for Staley, Prof. Homer F. 

metals 

CLAY PRODUCTS Bleininger, Dr Albert V. 

Ceramics 

Special spark plugs, optical glass, light Bleininger, Dr Albert V. 

clay aggregates for concrete ships, Riddle, F. H. 

graphite crucibles, porcelain studies Wright, Joseph W. 

Fuller, D. E. 

McDaniel, W. W. 

5Cutler, Charles H. 1914—31 

Spark plugs for airplanes Geiger, C. F. 

Containers for firing airplane spark Hornung, M. R. 

plugs 

Optical Glass 

Optical glass research Gregory, M. C. 

Rand, C. C. 

Payne, A. R. 

Dodd, L. E. 

Roberts, George C. 

McKee, A. P. 

Zimmer, Casper 

Williams, W. S. 

Noyes, M. P. 

Lime 

Lime and gypsum products Kirkpatrick, Frank A. 

Orange, William B. 

Householder, F. F. 

*Cutler, retired, Nov. 30, 1931. 
CHIEFS 

OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL STAFF 

as of January 1, 1920 

DIRECTOR 

Technical Assistant to the Director 

I. ELECTRICAL 

1. Standards of Resistance 

2. Inductance and Capacity 

3. Electrical Measurings Instruments 

4. Magnetic Measurements 

5. Photometry and Illuminating 

Engineering 

6a. Radio Research and Testing 

6b. Radio Development 

7. Electrolysis Prevention 

8. Safety Engineering 

9. Gas Engineering 

10. Electrical Service Standards 

11. Telephone Service Standards 

12. Electrochemistry 

13. Radioactivity and X.ray 

Measurements 

II. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES 

1. Length 

2. Mass 

3. Time 

4. Capacity and Density 

5. Gas Measuring Instruments 

6. Thermal Expansivity 

*Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 

Brown, Dr Fay C. 1919-27 

*Rosa, Dr Edward B. 

Wenner, Dr Frank 

Curtis, Dr Harvey L. 

Brooks, Dr Herbert B. 

Sanford, Raymond L. 1910—54 

*Taylor, Dr A. Hadley 

Dellinger, Dr J. Howard 

*Kolster, Frederick A. 

McCollum, Burton 

Lloyd, Dr Morton G. 

*McBride, Russell S. 

Meyer, Dr J. Franklin 

Wolff, Dr Frank A. 

Vinal, Dr George W. 

Dorsey, Dr N. Ernest 

*Fischer, Louis A. 

Judson, Dr Lewis V. 

Pienkowsky, 

Dr Arthur T. 

*Beal, Arthur F. 

Peffer, Elmer L. 

*Stillman, Marcus H. 

Souder, Dr Wilmer 

*Stratton, to M.I.T. as president, Jan. 1, 1923; died Oct. 18, 1931. 

*Rosa, died May 17, 1921. 

*Taylor, A. Hadley, to Nela Park, Cleveland, 1921. 

*Kolster, resigned to join Federal Telegraph Co., 1921. 

*McBride, to McGraw-Hill, 1920, later private consulting chemical engineer. 

5Fischer, died July 25, 1921. 

5Beal, to Census Bureau, 1923. 

*Stillman, to Fairbanks Scale Co., 1920. 

591 

1917—65 

1917—23 

1910—20 

1910—13, 

1917—54 
and Administration 

8. Investigation, Testing of 

2. Pyrometry 

3. Heat Measurements 

4. Thermodynamics 

5. Cryogenic Laboratory 

6. Fire Resistance 

7. Airplane and Automotive 

Power Plant 

IV. LIGHT AND OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS 

1. Spectroscopy 

2. Polarimetry 

3. Colorimetry 

4. Refractometry and Optical 

Instruments 

5. Radiometry 

6. Dispersoids 

7. Photographic Technology 

8. Interférometry 

9. Searchlight Investigations 

V. CHEMISTRY 

1. Physical Chemistry 

2. Electrochemistry 

3. Metallurgical Chemistry 

4. Gas Chemistry 

5. Reagents and Apparatus 

6. Analytical Methods, Standard 

Samples 

7. Oils, Rubber, Paper, etc. 

8. Metals, Cement, Bituminous 

Materials 

9. Paint, Varnish, Soap 

Holbrook, Fay S. 

Bearce, Henry W. 1908—45 

Dr Charles W. 

5Withebo, Robert M. 

Foote, Dr Paul D. 

Mueller, Eugene F. 

5Buckmgham, Dr Edgar 

Kanolt, Clarence W. 

Ingberg, Simon H. 

Dickinson, Dr Hobart C. 

Skinner, Dr Clarence A. 1919—41 

Meggers, Dr William F. 

Bates, Frederick J. 

Priest, Irwin G. 

*Scbultz, Harry I. 1913—20 

Coblentz, 

Dr William W. 

*Wells, Dr Philip V. 

(Planned). 

Peters, Chauncey G. 

*Karrer, Enoch 

Hillebrand, Dr William F. 

*Taylor, Dr Cyril S. 

Dr William 

*Cain, Dr John R. 

'Weaver, Elmer R. 

Smither, Frederick W. 

Lundell, Dr Gustave 

E. F. 

Waters, Campbell E. 

5Voorhees, Samuel S. 

Walker, Dr Percy H. 

*Waidner, died Mar. 1922. 

5Wilbelm, to C. J. Tagliabue Manufacturing Co., Aug. 31, 1920. 

5Buckingham, consultant to engineering physics division, NBS, 1923—37; retired 

1937; died Apr. 29, 1940. 

*Schultz, resigned to set up private business, 1920. 

5Wells, to E. I. duPont (Redpath Laboratories), Parlin, N.J., 1923. 

*Karrer, to General Electric, 1922. 

5Taylor, to Aluminum Company of America, in research laboratory, 1920. 

*Cain, NBS Research Associate, 1921—36; member of NBS, 1936 until retirement 

May 31, 1945. 

5Voorhees, died Sept. 21, 1921. 

592 APPENDIX I 

II. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES—Continued 

7. Weights and Measures Laws Holbrook, Fay S. 

Scales 

9. Gages 

III. HEAT AND THERMOMETRY 

1. Thermometry 

1918—22 

1913—20 
APPENDIX 1 593 

VI. ENGINEERING PHYSICS 

1. Mechanical Appliances 

2. Engineering Instruments 

3. Aviation Instruments 

4. Aviation Physics 

5. Special Investigations 

(Sound) 

VII. ENGINEERING, STRUCTURAL, 

AND MISCELLANEOUS MA. 

TERIALS 

1. Metal Structures 

2. Cement, Sand, Stone, etc. 

3. Rubber, Leather, etc. 

4. Textiles 

5. Paper 

6. Lubricating Oils 

7. Lime, Gypsum, Sand, Brick 

VIII. METALLURGY 

1. Microscopy of Metals 

2. Heat Treatment and Thermal 

Analysis 

3. Physical Properties of Metals 

4. Chemical Metallurgy 

5. Foundry and Mechanical 

Plant 

1. Clay Products 

2. Optical Glass 

3. Refractories 

4. Enameled Metal Products 

MISCELLANEOUS 

Sound 

Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 

Wormeley, Philip L. 

Stutz, Walter F. 

*Hersey, Dr Mayo D. 

Briggs, Dr Lyman J. 

*Hayford, John F. 

Stratton, Dr Samuel W. 

Whittemore, Herbert L. 

*Pearson, Joseph C. 

Wormeley, Philip L. 

*McGowan, Frank R. 

*Curtis, Frederick A. 

*Herschel, Dr 

Winslow H. 

Emley, Warren E. 

Burgess, Dr George K. 

Rawdon, Dr Henry S. 

French, Herbert J. 

Burgess, Dr George K. 

Cain, Dr John R. 

*Karr, Carydon P. 

5Bleininger, Dr Albert V. 

Bleininger, Dr Albert V. 

*Taylor, William H. 

*staley, Homer F. 

Staley, Homer F. 

Eckhardt, 

Dr Englehardt A. 

1917—46 

1917—21 

1917—46 

1918—25 

1918—24 

1918—25 

1918—20 

IX. CERAMICS 

1919—29 

1917—25 

*Hersey, NBS consultant, 1921—22; in physics laboratory of U.S. Bureau of Mines, 

1922—26; returned to Bureau 1926. 

5Hayford, completed investigation, June 30, 1921. 

5Pearson, to Lehigh Portland Cement Co., Allentown, Pa., 1924. 

*McGowan, to Cotton Textile Institute, New York, as director, Jan. 30, 1925; 

continued as consultant to NBS. 

5Curtis, to American Writing Paper Co., Holyoke, Mass., 1924. 

*Herschel, section discontinued; continued research until retirement, Aug. 31, 1943. *Karr, died June 10, 1925. 

5Bleininger, to Homer Laughlin China Co., West Virginia, 1923. *Taylor, W. Hadley, to Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co., 1925. 

*Staley, former professor in department of ceramic engineering, Iowa State College; resigned to enter commercial work. Dec. 31, 1920. 
CHIEFS 

OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL STAFF as of February 1, 1925 

DIRECTOR 

Assistant to the Director 

I. ELECTRICAL 

1. Resistance Measurements 

2. Inductance and Capacitance 

3. Electrical Measuring Instruments 

4. Magnetic Measurements 

5. Photometry and Illuminating 

Engineering 

6. Radio Communication 

7. Electrolysis Prevention 

8. Safety Engineering 

9. Electrochemistry 

10. Telephone Standards 

II. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES 

1. Length 

2. Mass 

3. Time 

4. Capacity and Density 

5. Gas Measuring Instruments 

6. Thermal Expansivity 

7. Weights and Measures Laws 

Administration 

8. Investigation and Testing of 

Scales 

9. Gages 

III. HEAT AND POWER 

1. Thermometry 

2. Pyrometry 

Burgess, Dr George K. 

5Brown, Dr Fay C. 

Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

Wenner, Dr Frank 

Curtis, Dr Harvey L. 

Brooks, Dr Herbert B. 

Sanford, Raymond L. 

Meyer, Dr J. Franklin 

Dellinger, Dr J. Howard 

*McCollum, Burton 

Lloyd, Dr Morton G. 

Vinal, Dr George W. 

Wolff, Dr Frank A. 

Holbrook, Fay S., and 

Bearce, Henry W. 

Judson, Dr Lewis V. 

Pienkowsky, Dr Arthur 

T. 

Gould, Ralph E. 

Peffer, Elmer L. 

Bean, Howard S. 

Souder, Dr Wilmer 

Smith, Ralph W. 

*Roeser, Harry W. 

Miller, David R. 1908—52 

Dickinson, Dr Hobart C. 

Mueller, Eugene F. 

*Fairchild, Charles 0. 1915—26 

5Brown, to Museum of the Peace Arts (later renamed New York Museum of Science 

and Industry) as director, 1927. 

5McCollum, to McCollum Geological Exploration Inc., as technical director, 1926. 

*Roeser, separated in reduction in force, June 30, 1934; contract employee from 

1944 to death in 1950. 

*Fairchild, to Tagliabue Manufacturing Co., Brooklyn, N.Y., 1926. 

594 

1918—50 

1917—58 

1920—50 
APPENDIX J 595 

III. HEAT AND POWER—Continued 

3. Heat Measurements Mueller, Eugene F. 

4. Heat Transfer (Vacant) 

5. Cryogenic Laboratory *Kanolt, Clarence W. 

6. Fire Resistance Ingberg, Simon H. 

7. Automotive Power Plant *Sparrow, Stanwood W. 1918—26 

IV. OPTICS Skinner, Dr Clarence A. 

1. Spectroscopy Meggers, Dr William F. 

2. Polarimetry Bates, Frederick J. 

3. Colorimetry Priest, Irwin G. 

4. Optical Instruments Gardner, Dr Irvine C. 192 1—59 5. Radiometry Coblentz, Dr William W. 

6. Atomic Physics, Radium, X. Dr Paul D. 

Ray 

7. Photographic Technology Davis, Raymond 1911—58 

8. Interferometry Peters, Chauncey G. 

V. CHEMISTRY *Hillebrand, Dr William F. 

1. Paints, Varnishes, Bituminous Walker, Dr Percy H. 

Materials 

2. Detergents, Cement, Corrosion Smither, Frederick W. 

3. Rubber, Lubricants, Textiles, Waters, Campbell E. 

Inks 

4. Metal and Ore Analysis and Lundell, Dr Gustave E. F. 

Standard Samples 

5. Reagents Wichers, Dr Edward 

6. Electrochemistry Blum, Dr William 

7. Gas Chemistry Weaver, Elmer R. 

VI. MECHANICS AND SOUND Briggs, Dr Lyman J. 

1. Engineering Instruments and Stutz, Walter F. 

Mechanical Appliances 

2. Sound *Eckhardt, Dr Englehardt 

A. 

3. Aeronautic Instruments Eaton, Herbert A. 1918—53 

4. Aerodynamical Physics Dryden, Dr Hugh L. 1918—47 

5. Engineering Mechanics Whittemore, Herbert L. 

VII. STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING Bates, Phaon H. 

AND MISCELLANEOUS MATERIALS 

1. Structural and Engineering (Vacant) 

Materials 

5Kanolt, to Cryogenic Laboratory, Bureau of Mines, 1925; later to Farrand Optical 

Co., N.Y. 

*Sparrow, to Studebaker Corp. as director of research, 1926. 

*Foote, to Gulf Research and Development Co., Pittsburgh, as director of research, 

Aug. 1, 1927; returned through National Academy of Sciences in 1960 as Executive 

Secretary of NAS—NRC Technical Advisory Panels to NBS 

5llillebrand, died Feb. 7, 1925. *Eckbardt to Gull Research and Development Co. as geophysicist, 1925; to 

Marlan Refining Co., Oklahoma, as assistant chief of research, 1927. 
596 APPENDIX / 

VII. STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING 

AND MISCELLANEOUS MATERIALS—Continueci 

2. Cement, Sand, Stone 

3. Rubber, Leather, etc. 

4. Textiles 

5. Paper 

6. Lime, Gypsum, etc. 

VIII. METALLURGY 

1. Optical Metallurgy 

2. Thermal Metallurgy 

3. Mechanical Metallurgy 

4. Chemical Metallurgy 

5. Experimental Foundry 

IX. CERAMICS 

1. Pottery 

2. Optical Glass 

3. Refractories 

4. Enameled Metals 

BUILDING AND HOUSING 

SIMPLIFIED PRACTICE 

STANDARDIZATION OF SPECIFICATIONS 

Federal Specifications 

Industrial Specifications 

*Hitchcock, Frank A. 

Wormeley, Philip L. 

(Vacant) 

Scribner, Bourdon W. 

5porter, John M. 

*Gillett, Dr Horace W. 

Rawdon, Dr Henry S. 

*French, Herbert J. 

*Freeman, John R. Jr. 

Jordan, Louis 

Saeger, Charles M. Jr. 

Bates, Phaon H. 

*wadleigh, Walter H. 

Finn, Alfred N. 

Geller, Roman F. 

*Wolfram, Harold G. 

*Gries, Dr John M. 1921—28 

*Hudson, Ray M. 1922—29 

Burgess, Dr George K. 

(Chairman, Federal 

Specifications Board) 

*Harriman, Norman F. 

McAllister, Dr Addams 

S. 

5Hitchcock, to George Washington University, 1926. 

*porter, to American Cyanamid Co., 1928. 

5Gillett, to Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio, as director, 1929. *French, to research laboratory, International Nickel Co. of New Jersey, 1929 

(died 1955). 

5Freeman, to American Brass Co., Waterbury, Conn., 1929. 

5wadleigh, reduction in force, June 30, 1934. *Wolfram, to Porcelain Enamel Manufacturing Co., Baltimore, Md., 1926. 

5Gries, to Division of Public Construction, Department of Commerce, 1928. 

5Hudson, to New England Council, Boston, as technical advisor, 1929. 

*Harriman, to Treasury Department, 1933. 

1918—26 

1923—52 

1921—28 

1924—29 

1918—29 

1917—36 

1918—45 

1918—34 

1911—42 

1918—55 

1923—26 

1921—33 

1923—45 
ADMINISTRATIVE, SCIENTIFIC, AND 

TECHNICAL STAFF CHIEFS 

as of April 1, 1930 

DIRECTOR *Burgess, Dr George K. 

Assistant Director for Research and 

Testing 

Assistant Director for Commercial 

Standardization 

.1. ELECTRICAL 

1. Resistance Measurements 

2. Inductance and Capacitance 

3. Electrical Instruments 

4. Magnetic Measurements 

5. Photometry 

6. Radio 

7. Underground Corrosion 

8. Safety Standards 

9. Electrochemistry 

10. Telephone Standards 

II. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES 

1. Length 

2. Mass 

3. Time 

4. Capacity and Density 

5. Gas Measuring Instruments 

6. Thermal Expansivity 

7. Weights and Measures Laws 

and Administration 

8. Railroad Scales and Test Cars 

9. Gages 

III. HEAT AND POWER 

1. Thermometry 

2. Pyrometry 

3. Heat Measurements 

4. Heat Transfer 

5. Cryogenic Laboratory 

6. Fire Resistance 

*Burgess, died July 2, 1932. 

Briggs, Dr Lyman J. 

McAllister, Dr Addams S. 

Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

Wenner, Dr Frank 

Curtis, Dr Harvey L. 

Brooks, Dr Herbert B. 

Sanford, Raymond L. 

Meyer, Dr J. Franklin 

Dellinger, Dr J. Howard 

Logan, Kirk H. 

Lloyd, Dr Morton G. 

Vinal, Dr George W. 

Wolff, Dr Frank A. 

Holbrook, Fay S., and 

Bearce, Henry W. 

Judson, Dr Lewis V. 

Pienkowsky, Dr Arthur T. 

Gould, Ralph E. 

Peffer, Elmer L. 

Bean, Howard S. 

Souder, Dr Wilmer 

Smith, Ralph W. 

Holbrook, Fay S. 

Miller, David R. 

Dickinson, Dr Hobart C. 

Busse, Miss Johanna 

Wensel, Dr Henry T. 

Mueller, Eugene F. 

VanDusen, Dr Milton S. 

Brickwedde, Dr Ferdi. 

nand G. 

Ingberg, Simon H. 

1911—44 

1918—49 

1917—46 

1913—46 

1925—57 

597 
598 

III. HEAT AND POWER—Continued 

APPENDIX I 

7. Automotive Power Plant 

8. Friction and Lubrication 

IV. OPTICS 

1. Spectroscopy 

2. Polarimetry 

3. Colorimetry 

4. Optical Instruments 

5. Radiometry 

6. Atomic Physics, Radium, 

X-rays 

7. Photographic Technology 

8. Interferometry 

V. CHEMISTRY 

1. Physico-chemical Research 

2. Paints, Varnish, Bituminous 

Materials 

3. Detergents, Cement, Corrosion 

4. Rubber, Lubricants, Textiles 

5. Metal and Ore Analysis, Standard Samples 

6. Reagents and Platinum Metals 

7. Electrochemistry 

8. Gas Chemistry 

VI. MECHANICS AND SOUND 

1. Engineering Instruments and 

Mechanical Appliances 

4. Aerodynamical Physics 

5. Engineering Mechanics 

6. Hydraulic Laboratory 

VII. ORGANIC AND FIBROUS MATERIALS 

1. Rubber 

2. Textiles 

3. Paper 

4. Leather 

VIII. METALLURGY 

1. Optical Metallurgy 

2. Thermal Metallurgy 

3. Mechanical Metallurgy 

4. Chemical Metallurgy 

5. Experimental Foundry 

Cummings, Herbert K. 1922—53 

*Hersey, Dr Mayo D. 

Skinner, Dr Clarence A. 

Meggers, Dr William F. 

Bates, Frederick J. 

*Priest, Irwin G. 

Gardner, Dr Irvine C. 

Coblentz, Dr William W. 

Mobler, Dr Fred L. 

Davis, Raymond 

Peters, Chauncey G. 

*Washburn, Dr Edward W. 1926—34 

Washburn, Dr Edward W. 

Walker, Dr Percy H. 

Smither, Frederick W. 

Waters, Campbell E. 

Lundell, Dr Gustave E. F. 

Wichers, Dr Edward 

Blum, Dr William 

Weaver, Elmer R. 

Briggs, Dr Lyman J. 

Stutz, Walter F. 

G. 

Dryden, Dr Hugh L. 

Whittemore, Herbert L. 

Eaton, Herbert N. 

Emley, Warren E. 

Wormeley, Philip L. 

Appel, William D. 

Scribner, Bourdon W. 

Bowker, Roy C. 

Rawdon, Dr Henry S. 

Rawdon, Dr Henry S. 

*Dowdell, Dr Ralph L. 

Swanger, William H. 

Jordan, Louis 

Saeger, Charles M. Jr. 

1917—60 

2. Sound 

3. Aeronautic Instruments 

HeyI, Dr Paul R. 

Brombacher, Dr William 

1920—42 

1927—54 

1922—59 

1918—43 

1928—30 

1921—42 

*Hersey, senior physicist, 1928—31; to Vacuum Oil Co., New Jersey, 1931. 

*Priest, died July 19, 1932. *Washburn, died Feb. 6, 1934. *Dowdell, to University of Minnesota, as Chairman, Department of Metallurgy, 

1930. 
APPENDIX 1 599 

IX. CLAY AND SILICATE PRODUCTS 

1. Whiteware 

2. Glass 

3. Refractories 

4. Enamels 

5. Heavy Clay Products 

6. Cement and Concrete Mate7. Masonry Construction 

8. Lime and Gypsum 

9. Stone 

X. SIMPLIFIED PRACTICE 

1. Stone, Clay and Glass 

2. Wood, Textiles and Paper - 3. Metal Products and Construction Materials 

4. Containers 

5. Promotion and Adherence 

XI. BUILDING AND HOUSING 

1. Building Codes 

2. Building Practice and Homebuilders' Problems 

3. City Planning and Zoning 

4. Construction Economics 

5. Mechanics Liens 

XII. SPECIFICATIONS 

1. Certification: Producer Contacts 

2. Labeling: Consumer Contacts 

3. Directory of Specifications 

4. Encyclopedia of Specifications 

XIII. TRADE STANDARDS 

1. Wood Products, Paper, Rubber, etc. 

2. Metal Products 

3. Textiles and Garments 

4. Ceramic Products and Cement 

Bates, Phaon H. 

Geller, Roman F. 

Finn, Alfred N. 

Heindl, Raymond A. 

Harrison, William N. 

Stull, Ray T. 

Tucker, John Jr. 

Parsons, Douglas E. 

*Murray, James A. 

Kessler, Daniel W. 

Ely, Edwin W. 

*CoIwell, Herbert R. 

Schuster, George 

*Dunn, Peter H. H. 

Braithwaite, William E. 

*Galt, Alexander B. 1924-33 

Taylor, James S. 

*Riggleman, Dr John R. 

*Wheeler, Daniel H. 

McAllister, Dr Addams S. 

*Martino, Robert A. 1923—33 

McAllister, Dr Addams S. 

*Ingels, Clarence W. 

*Wardlaw, George A. 

Fairchild, Ihier J. 

Fairchild, Ihier J. 

Wray, George W. 

*Murray, to Warner Co., Pittsburgh, as Director of Research, 1930; died 1960. 

*Colwell, to President's Emergency Committee for Employment, 1931. 

*Dunn, to Department of Interior, 1933. 

*Galt, resigned 1933. 

*Taylor, to Federal Housing Administration, 1934. 

5Riggleman, to National Recovery Administration, 1933. 

*Wheeler, to Federal Emergency Administration, 1933. 

5Martino, to National Recovery Administration, 1933; returned briefly to NBS 

in 1940. 

*Ingels, to Navy 1933. 

5Wardlaw, to Navy Department, 1933 

5Steidle, to private industry, 1938. 

rials 

1923—55 

1922—63 

1927—44 

1916—17, 

1926—49 

1923—63 

1926—30 

1914—52 

1923—47 

1921—31 

1927—33 

*Taylor, James S. 

Thompson, George N. 

Phelan, Vincent B. 

1921—34 

1923—55 

1927—50 

1929—33 

1923—33 

Fairchild, Ihler J. 

*Steidle, Harry H. 

1928—33 

1930—33 

1922—45 

1928—38 
ADMINISTRATIVE, SCIENTIFIC, AND 

TECHNICAL STAFF CHIEFS 

as of November 15, 1934 

DIRECTOR 

Assistant to the Director 

ASSISTANT DIRECTORS 

Assistant Director for Research and 

Testing 

Assistant Director for Commercial 

Standardization 

I. ELECTRICAL 

1. Resistance Measurements 

2. Inductance and Capacitance 

3. Electrical Instruments 

4. Magnetic Measurements 

5. Photometry 

6. Radio 

7. Underground Corrosion 

8. Electrochemistry 

9. Telephone Standards 

II. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES 

1. Length 

2. Mass 

3. Time 

4. Capacity and Density 

5. Gas Measuring Instruments 

6. Thermal Expansivity, 

Dental Materials 

7. Weights and Measures Laws 

and Administration 

8. Railroad Scales and Test Cars 

9. Gage Standardization 

III. HEAT AND POWER 

1. Thermometry 

2. Pyrometry 

3. Heat Measurements 

5Brooks retired Jan. 31, 1939. 

*Holbrook, died Feb. 4, 

600 

Briggs, Dr Lyman J. 

Hubbard, Henry D. 1901—38 

Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

McAllister, Dr Addáms S. 

Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

Wenner, Dr Frank 

Curtis, Dr Harvey L. 

*Brooks, Dr Herbert B. 

Sanford, Raymond L. 

Meyer, Dr J. Franklin 

Dellinger, Dr J. Howard 

Logan, Kirk H. 

Vinal, Dr George W. 

Wolff, Dr Frank A. 

5Holbreok, Fay S., and 

Bearce, Henry W. 

Judson, Dr Lewis V. 

Pienkowsky, Dr Arthur T. 

Gould, Ralph E. 

Peffer, Elmer L. 

Bean, Howard S. 

Souder, Dr Wihner 

Smith, Ralph W. 

Holbrook, Fay S. 

Miller, David R. 

Dickinson, Dr Hobart C. 

Busse, Miss Johanna 

Wensel, Dr Henry T. 

Mueller, Eugene F. 
APPENDIX 1 601 

III. HEAT AND POWER—Continued 

4. Heat Transfer 

5. Cryogenic Laboratory 

6. Fire Resistance 

7. Automotive Power Plant 

8. Lubrication and Liquid Fuels 

IV. OPTICS 

1. Spectroscopy 

2. Polarimetry 

3. Colorimetry 

4. Optical Instruments 

5. Radiometry 

6. Atomic Physics, Radium, 

X-Ray 

7. Photographic Technology 

8. Interferometry 

V. CHEMISTRY 

0. Physico-chemical Research 

1. Paints, Varnishes, etc. 

2. Detergents, Cement, etc. 

3. Organic Chemistry 

4. Metal and Ore Analysis, 

Standard Samples 

5. Reagents and Platinum 

Metals 

6. Electrochemistry (Plating) 

7. Gas Chemistry 

VI. MECHANICS AND SOUND 

1. Engineering Instruments and 

Mechanical Applicances 

2. Sound 

3. Aeronautical Instruments 

4. Aerodynamical Physics 

5. Engineering Mechanics 

6. Hydraulic Laboratory 

VII. ORGANIC AND FIBROUS MATERIALS 

1. Rubber 

2. Textiles 

3. Paper 

4. Leather 

5. Testing and Specifications 

6. Industrial Utilization of Farm 

Wastes 

VanDusen, Dr Milton S. 

Brickwedde, Dr 

Ferdinand G. 

Ingberg, Simon H. 

Cummings, Herbert K. 

Bridgeman, Dr Oscar C. 

Skinner, Dr Clarence A. 

Meggers, Dr William F. 

Bates, Frederick J. 

Gibson, Dr Kasson S. 

Gardner, Dr Irvine C. 

Coblentz, Dr William W. 

Mohler, Dr Fred L. 

Davis, Raymond 

Peters, Chauncey G. 

*Wa&er, Dr Percy H. 

Smith, Dr Edgar R. 

Hickson, Eugene F. 

Smither, Frederick W. 

Waters, Campbell E. 

Lundell, Dr Gustave E. F. 

Wichers, Dr Edward 

Blum, Dr William 

Weaver, Elmer R. 

Briggs, Dr Lyman J. 

Stutz, Walter F. 

Heyl, Dr Paul R. 

Brombacher, Dr William G. 

Dryden, Dr Hugh L. 

Whittemore, Herbert L. 

Eaton, Herbert N. 

Emley, Warren E. 

McPherson, Dr 

Archibald T. 

Appel, William D. 

Scribner, Bourdon W. 

Bowker, Roy C. 

Wormeley, Philip L. 

Acree, Dr Solomon F. 

1926—57 

1918—50 

5Walker, retired, August 1937; consulting chemist to National Lead Co. subsidiary, 

1937. 

1927—45 

1916—55 

1927—45 
602 APPENDIX / 

VIII. METALLURGY 

1. Optical Metallurgy 

2. Thermal Metallurgy 

3. Mechanical Metallurgy 

4. Chemical Metallurgy 

5. Experimental Foundry 

IX. CLAY AND SILICATE PRODUCTS 

1. Whiteware 

2. Glass 

3. Refractories 

4. Enameled Metals 

5. Heavy Clay Products 

6. Cement and Concreting Materials 

7. Masonry Construction 

8. Lime and Gypsum 

9. Stone 

X. SIMPLIFIED PRACTICE 

1. Wood, Textiles, Paper 

2. Metal Products and Construction Materials 

3. Containers and Miscellaneous 

Products 

4. Handling Equipment and Ceramics 

XI. TRADE STANDARDS 

1. Wood, Wood Products, Oils, 

2. Metal Products 

3. Textiles and Garments 

4. Ceramic and Cement Products 

5. Chemical and Miscellaneous 

Products. 

XII. CODES AND SPECIFICATIONS 

1. Safety Codes 

2. Building Codes 

3. Building Practice and Specifications 

4. Producer Contacts and Certification 

5. Consumer Contacts and LabelRawdon, Dr Herbert S. 

McAdam, Dr Dunlop, J. Jr. 

*Jordan, Louis 

Swanger, William IL 

Thompson, Dr John G. 

Saeger, Charles M., Jr. 

Bates, Phaon H. 

Geller, Roman F. 

Finn, Alfred N. 

Heindl, Raymond A. 

Harrison, William N. 

Stull, Ray T. 

Tucker, John Jr. 

Parsons, Douglas E. 

Wells, Dr Lansing S. 

Kessler, Daniel W. 

Ely, Edwin W. 

Schuster, George 

Schuster, George 

Braithwaite, William E. 

Ely, Edwin W. 

Fairchild, Ihler J. 

Fairchild, Ihier J. 

Fairchild, Ihier, J. 

Ehrman, H. A. 

Reynolds, Floyd W. 

Reynolds, Floyd W. 

McAllister, Dr Addams S. 

Lloyd, Dr Morton G. 

Thompson, George N. 

Phelan, Vincent B. 

Wray, George W. 

McAllister, Dr Addams S. 

*Jordan, to American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering, Jan. 25, 

1936. 

1930—48 

1921—24, 

1930—56 

1930—54 

1918—19, 

1930-NRF 

etc. 

big 
ADMINISTRATIVE, SCIENTIFIC, AND 

TECHNICAL STAFF CHIEFS 

as of May 1, 1940 

DIRECFOR 

Assistant to the Director 

ASSISTANT DIRECTORS 

Assistant Director for Research and 

Testing 

Assistant Director for Commercial Standardization 

I. ELECTRICITY 

1. Resistance Measurements 

2. Inductance and Capacitance 

3. Electrical Instruments 

4. Magnetic Measurements 

5. Photometry 

6. Radio 

7. Underground Corrosion 

9. Electrochemistry 

10. Telephone Standards 

II. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES 

1. Length 

2. Mass 

3. Time 

4. Capacity and Density 

5. Gas Measuring Instruments 

6. Thermal Expansion, Dental Research 

7. Weights and Measures Administration 

8. Large-capacity Scales 

9. Limit Gages 

Briggs, Dr Lyman J. 

Henry D. 

Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

Dr Addams S. 

Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

Dr Frank 

Curtis, Dr Harvey L. 

Silsbee, Dr Francis B. 

Sanford, Raymond L. 

*Meyer, Dr J. Franklin 

Dellinger, Dr J. Howard 

Logan, Kirk H. 

Vinal, Dr George W. 

Dr Frank A. 

Bearce, Henry W. 

Judson, Dr Lewis V. 

5pienkowsky, Dr Arthur T. 

Gould, Ralph E. 

Peffer, Elmer L. 

Bean, Howard S. 

Souder, Dr Wilmer 

Smith, Ralph W. 

Smith, Ralph W. 

Miller, David R. 

*Hubbard, retired Sept. 1, 1938; died 1945. 

*McAllister, retired, Feb. 28, 1945. 

*Wenner, retired, 1943. 

retired, Jan. 31, 1941 (iii health). *Wolff, retired, Apr. 30, 1941. 

*pienkowsky, retired, 1944, and joined staff of Torsion Balance Co.; died Dec. 31, 

1960. 

603 
604 APPENDIX / 

III. HEAT AND POWER 

1. Thermometry 

2. Pyrometry 

3. Heat Measurements 

4. Heat Transfer 

5. Cryogenic Laboratory 

6. Fire Resistance 

7. Automotive Power Plants 

8. Lubrication and Liquid Fuels 

9. Aviation Engines and Accessories 

IV. OPTICS 

1. Spectroscopy 

2. Polarimetry 

3. Colorimetry and Spectrophotometry 

4. Optical Instruments 

5. Radiometry 

6. Atomic Physics, Radium, XRays 

7. Photographic Technology 

8. Interferometry 

V. CHEMISTRY 

1. Paints, Varnishes, etc. 

2. Detergents, Cement, etc. 

3. Organic Chemistry 

4. Metal and Ore Analysis, Standard Samples 

5. Reagents and Platinum Metals 

6. Electrochemistry (Plating) 

7. Gas Chemistry 

8. Physical Chemistry 

9. Thermochemistry and Constitution of Petroleum 

VI. MECHANICS AND SOUND 

1. Engineering Instruments 

2. Sound 

3. Aeronautical Instruments 

4. Aerodynamics 

5. Engineering Mechanics 

6. Hydraulics 

Dickinson, Dr Hobart C. 

Busse, Miss Johanna 

5Wensel, Dr Henry T. 

*Mueller, Eugene F. 

VanDusen, Dr Milton S. 

Brickwedde, Dr Ferdinand G. 

Ingberg, Simon H. 

Cummings, Herbert K. 

Bridgeman, Dr Oscar C. 

*peters, Melville F. 1922—43 

*Skinner, Dr Clarence A. 

Meggers, Dr William F. 

Bates, Frederick J. 

Gibson, Dr Kasson S. 

Gardner, Dr Irvine C. 

*Coblentz, Dr William W. 

Mohler, Dr Fred L. 

Davis, Raymond 

Peters, Chauncey G. 

Lundell, Dr Gustave E. F. 

Hickson, Eugene F. 

Smither, Frederick W. 

*Waters, Campbell C. 

Bright, Harry A. 

Wichers, Dr Edward 

Blum, Dr William 

Weaver, Elmer R. 

Smith, Dr Edgar R. 

Rossini, Dr Frederick D. 

Dryden, Dr Hugh L. 

Stutz, Walter F. 

*Heyl, Dr Paul R. 

Brombacher, Dr William G. 

Dryden, Dr Hugh L. 

Whittemore, Herbert L. 

Eaton, Herbert N. 

*Wensel, to General Staff, USA (Manhattan Project) 1942; acting chief, heat and 

power division 1945; assistant to Director onatomic energy research, 1946. 

*Mueller, retired, 1944. 

*Peters, to Titeflex Metal Hose Co., 1943. 

*Skinner, retired, Jan. 31, 1941; died 1961. 

*Coblentz, retired Jan. 1, 1945; NBS consultant; died Sept. 15, 1962. *Waters, retired, 1942. 

*Heyl, retired, July 1, 1942; died 1961. 

1913—60 

1928—50 
APPENDIX J 605 

VII. ORGANIC AND FIBROUS MATERIALS 

1. Rubber 

2. Textiles 

3. Paper 

4. Leather 

5. Testing and Specifications 

6. Fiber Structure 

7. Organic Plastics 

VIII. METALLURGY 

1. Optical Metallurgy 

2. Thermal Metallurgy 

3. Mechanical Metallurgy 

4. Chemical Metallurgy 

5. Experimental Foundry 

IX. CLAY AND SILICATE PRODUCTS 

1. Whiteware 

2. Glass 

3. Refractories 

4. Enameled Metals 

5. Heavy Clay Products 

6. Cement and Concreting Materials 

7. Masonry Construction 

8. Lime and Gypsum 

9. Stone 

X. SIMPLIFIED PRACTICE 

1. Wood, Textiles, Paper 

2. Metal Products and Construction Materials 

3. Containers and Miscellaneous 

Products 

4. Materials Handling Equipment 

and Ceramics 

XI. TRADE STANDARDS 

1. Wood, Wood Products, etc. 

2. Metal Products 

3. Textiles 

4. Apparel 

5. Petroleum, Chemicals, Rubber 

6. Export Standards 

*Ewdey, Warren E. 

McPherson, Dr Archibald T. 

Appel, William D. 

Scribner, Bourdon W. 

*Bowker, Roy C. 

Wormeley, Philip L. 

Acree, Dr Solomon F. 

Kline, Dr Gordon M. 

Rawdon, Dr Herbert S. 

Rawdon, Dr Herbert S. 

McAdam, Dr Dunlop J., 

Jr. 

*Swanger, William S. 

Thompson, Dr John G. 

*saeger, Charles M., Jr. 

Bates, Phaon H. 

Geller, Roman F. 

*Finn, Alfred N. 

Heindi, Raymond A 

Harrison, William N. 

*Stull, Ray T. 

Tucker, John Jr. 

Parsons, Douglas E. 

Wells, Dr Lansing S. 

Kessler, Daniel W. 

Ely, Edwin W. 

Schuster, George 

Schuster, George 

Braithwaite, William E. 

Ely, Edwin W. 

Fairchild, Ihler J. 

Medley, James W. 

Fairchild, Ihler J. 

Ehrman, H. A. 

Gilbert, L. R. 

Reynolds, Floyd W. 

*Countryman, Milton E. 

*Emley, retired, Oct. 1, 1943; to War Production Board, 1943. *Bowker, to OSRD, 1943. 

*swanger, died Aug. 19, 1942. *Saeger, retired, June 27, 1945. 

*Finn, died Sept. 21, 1942. 

*Stull, died Jan. 5, 1944. *Countryman, to War Production Board, 1942. 

1929—63 

1938-NRF 

1940—42 
606 APPENDIX / 

XII. CODES AND SPECIFICATIONS 

1. Safety Codes 

2. Building Codes 

3. Building Practices and Specifications 

4. Producer Contracts and Certification 

5. Consumer Contracts and 

Labeling 

FIELD STATIONS 

Allentown, Pa. (Cement and Concrete Materials) 

Riverside, Calif. (Cement and 

Concrete Materials) 

San Francisco, Calif. (Cement and 

Concrete Materials) 

Denver, Cob. (Cement and Concrete Materials) 

Seattle, Wash. (Cement and Concrete Materials) 

Clearing, Ill. (Large-capacity 

Scale Testing) 

San Jose, Calif. (Cement and Concrete Maierials) 

Beltsvillc, Md. (Radio Transmitting Station) 

Meadows, Md. (Radio Sending 

Station) 

McAllister, Dr Addams S. 

*Lloyd, Dr Morton G. 

Thompson, George N. 

Phelan, Vincent B. 

Wray, George W. 

Martino, Robert A. 

Moyer, W. N. 

Evans, D. N. 

Furlong, I. 

Cox, 0. H. 

Carison, Elmer T. 

Richard, C. L. 

Foster, Bruce E. 

George, William D. 

*Kirby, Samuel S. 

1928-NRF 

1935-NRF 

1929—63 

1926—41 

*Lloyd, died Apr. 26, 1941. 

*Kirby, died Jan. 26, 1941. 
ADMINISTRATIVE, SCIENTIFIC, AND 

TECHNICAL STAFF CHIEFS 

as of July 1, 1945 

DIRECTOR 

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR 

L ELECTRICITY 

1. Resistance Measurements 

2. Inductance and Capacitance 

3. Electrical Instruments 

4. Magnetic Measurements 

5. Radio 

7. Underground Corrosion 

9. Electrochemistry 

II. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES 

1. Length 

2. Mass 

3. Time 

4. Capacity and Density 

5. Gas Measuring Instruments 

6. Thermal Expansion; 

Research 

7. Weights and Measures Administration 

8. Large-capacity Scales 

9. Limit Gages 

III. HEAT AND POWER 

1. Thermometry 

*Briggs, Dr Lyman J. 

Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

Silsbee, Dr Francis B. 

(Assistant) 

Thomas, Dr JamesL. 

*Curtis, Dr Harvey L. 

Silsbee, Dr Francis B. 

Sanford, Raymond L. 

*Dellinger, Dr J. Howard 

*Logan, Kirk H. 

Vinal, Dr George W. 

*Bearce, Henry W. 

Souder, Dr Wilmer 

(Assistant) 

Judson, Dr Lewis V. 

McCurdy, Lloyd B. 

*Gould, Ralph E. 

*peffer, Elmer L. 

Bean, Howard S. 

Souder, Dr Wilmer 

Smith, Ralph W. 

Russell, H. Haig 1919— 

Miller, David R. 

*Dickinson, Dr Hobart C. 

Cragoe, Carl S. (Assist- 1918—50 

ant) 

*Busse, Miss Johanna 

*Briggs, retired, Nov. 5, 1945; died Mar. 25, 1963. *Curtis, to Ordnance Development Division, 1946; retired late that year. *Dellinger, retired, Apr. 30, 1948; NBS consultant. 

*Logan, to Cast Iron Pipe Research Association, 1944. 

*Bearce, retired Sept. 30, 1945. 

*Gould, retired, 1950. 

*peffer, died July 1948. 

*Dickinson, retired Oct. 31, 1945; died Nov. 27, 1949. *Cragoe, resigned 1950. 

*Busse, Miss, retired, 1949. 

607 

1927— 
608 APPENDIX / 

III. HEAT AND POWER—Continued 

2. Pyrometry *VanDusen, Dr Milton S. 

3. Heat Measurements Cragoe, Carl S. 

4. Heat Transfer Dill, Richard S. 1928—57 

5. Cryogenics Brickwedde, Dr 

Ferdinand G. 

6. Fire Resistance *Ingberg, Simon H. 

7. Automotive Power Plants *Brooks, Donald B. 1922—24, 

1927—49 

8. Lubricants and Liquid Fuels *Bridgeman, Dr Oscar C. 

9. Aircraft Engines *Cummjngs, Herbert K. 

IV. OPTICS *Bates, Frederick J. 

Gibson, Dr Kasson S. 

(Assistant) 

1. Spectroscopy Meggers, Dr William F. 

2. Polarimetry Bates, Frederick J. 

3. Photometry and Colorimetry Gibson, Dr Kasson S. 

4. Optical Instruments Gardner, Dr Irvine C. 

5. Radiometry Humphreys, Dr Curtis J. 1928—53 

6. Atomic Physics Mohler, Dr Fred L. 

7. Photographic Technology Davis, Raymond 

8. Interferometry *Peters, Chauncey G. 

9. Radioactivity Curtiss, Dr Leon F. 1926—61 

10. sX-Rays Taylor, Dr Lauriston S. 1927— 

V. CHEMISTRY *Lundell, Dr Gustave E. F. 

Wichers, Dr Edward (Asst.) 

1. Paints, Varnishes, Bituminous Hickson, Eugene F. 

Materials 

2. Detergents, Cements, Miscel- *Smither, FrederickW. 

laneous Materials 

3. Organic Chemistry Smith, W. Harold 

4. Metal and Ore Analysis; Bright, Harry A. 

Standard Samples 

5. Reagents and Platinum Met- Gilchrist, Dr Raleigh 1918—62 

als 

6. Electrochemistry (Plating) Blum, Dr William 

7. Gas Chemistry Weaver, Elmer R. 

8. Physical Chemistry Smith, Dr Edgar R. 

9. Thermochemistry Rossini, Dr Frederick D. 

10. pH Standards *Acree, Dr Solomon F. 

*VanDusen, retired, 1946. 

*Ingberg, retired, July 1, 1947. 

*BrOOks, retired, 1949. 

*Bridgeman, to Phillips Petroleum Co., 1945. 

5Cummings, section discontinued; NBS consultant, 1948— 

5Bates, F. J., retired, Jan. 31, 1947. 

5Peters, retired, 1949; died 1955. 

*Lundell, retired, June 1948; NBS consultant, 1948—50; died June 8, 1950. 

*Smither, retired, August 1946; died Mar. 8, 1961. 

*Acree, retired, Dec. 31, 1945; died Oct. 23, 1957. 
APPENDIX / 609 

VI. MECHANICS AND SOUND *Dryden, Dr Hugh L. 

*Tuckerman, Dr Louis II. 1919—49 

(Assistant) 

1. Engineering Instruments *Stutz, Walter F. 

2. Sound Cook, Dr Richard K. 1935— 

3. Aeronautical Instruments Brombacher, Dr William 

G. 

4. Aerodynamics Dryden, Dr Hugh L. 

5. Engineering Mechanics *Whittemore, Herbert L. 

6. Hydraulics Eaton, Herbert N. 

7. Special Projects Eaton, Herbert N. 

VII. ORGANIC AND FIBROUS MA- McPherson, Dr Archibald 

TERIALS T. 

*Wormeley, Philip L. 

(Assistant) 

1. Rubber Wood, Dr Lawrence A. 1935— 

2. Textiles Appel, William D. 

3. Paper Scribner, Bourdon W. 

4. Leather Wallace, Everett L. 

5. Testing and Specifications Wormeley, Philip L. 

6. Organic Plastics Kline, Dr Gordon M. 

VIII. METALLURGY *Rawdon, Dr Herbert S. 

Thompson, Dr John C. 

(Assistant) 

1. Optical Metallurgy Rawdon, Dr Herbert S. 

2. Thermal Metallurgy *McAdam, Dr Dunlop 

J. Jr. 

3. Mechanical Metallurgy Roeser, William F. 1920—64 

4. Chemical Metallurgy Thompson, Dr John G. 

5. Experimental Foundry Krynitsky, Alexander I. 1918—50 

IX. CLAY AND SILICATE PROD. *Bates, Phaon H. 

UCTS Parsons, Douglas E. (Asst.) 

1. Whiteware Geller, Roman F. 

2. Glass Hahner, Clarence H. 1929— 

3. Refractories Heindi, Raymond A. 

4. Enameled Metals Harrison, William N. 

6. Cement and Concreting Mate- *Tucker, John Jr. 

rials. 

*Dryden, assistant director, NBS, January 1946; associate director, NBS, June 

1946; to National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics as director of research, Sep- tember 1947; deputy administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 

1958. 

*Tuckerman, retired, Sept. 30, 1949. 

*Stutz, retired, 1947. 

*Whittemore, retired, Oct. 31, 1946. 

*Wormeley, retired, Dec. 31, 1947. 

*Rawdon, retired, Oct. 31, 1945. 

*McAdam, retired, 1947; NBS consultant, 1948— 

*Bates, P. H., retired, Sept. 15, 1945. *Tucker, died, Nov. 20, 1949. 
610 APPENDIX I 

IX. CLAY AND SILICATE PRODUCTS—Continued 

7. Masonry Construction 

8. Lime and Gyprum 

9. Stone 

X. SIMPLIFIED PRACTICE 

1. Wood, Textiles, Paper, Rubber 

2. Metal and Mechanical Products. 

3. Containers and Miscellaneous 

Products. 

4. Materials Handling Equipment and Ceramics. 

5. Electrical Products 

6. Construction Materials 

7. Metal and Wood Working 

XI. TRADE STANDARDS 

1. Wood, Wood Products, Paper 

2. MetaL Products 

3. Textiles 

4. Apparel 

5. Chemical and Miscellaneous 

Products 

6. Export Standards 

7. Petroleum and Rubber Prod. 

XII. CODES AND SPECIFICATIONS 

L Safety Codes 

2. Building Codes 

3. Building Practices and Specifications 

4. Producer Contacts and Certification 

5. Consumer Contacts and LabelParsons, Douglas E. 

Wells, Dr Lansing S. 

Kessler, Daniel W. 

Ely, Edwin W. 

Schuster, George (Asst.) 

Schuster, George 

Umhau, George E. 

Braithwaite, William E. 

Ely, Edwin W. 

*Tait, Andres C. 

*poiesz, Clemens J. 

Umhau, George E. 

*Fairchild, Ihier J. 

Reynolds, Foyd W. (Asst.) 

Medley, J. W. 

*powell, Franklin E. 

Ehrman, H. A. 

Gilbert, L. R. 

Reynolds, Floyd W. 

Thompson, George N. 

*Dickinson, John A. (Asst.) 

Dickinson, John A. 

Thompson, George N. 

*phelan, Vincent B. 

*BoOth, Sherman F. 1939—62 

*Cooley, Paul A. 1943—47 

*Tait, transferred to Treasury Department, 1950. 

*pojesz, to Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1949. 

*Fairchild, retired, 1945; to Plumbing Fixtures Association. 

*powell, transferred to Defense Department, 1950. 

*Gale, reduction in force, 1947. 

*Dickinson, J. A., retired, Sept. 30, 1959. 

*phelan, retired, Aug. 31, 1950. 

*Booth, retired, 1962. 

5Cooley, to Commodity Standards Division, Department of Commerce, 1947; 

to Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, 1951. 

Tools. 

1942—50 

1942—49 

1943—50 

1942—56 

1942—47 

1919—59 

ucts 

Barrett, Edward C. 

*Gale, G. S. 

ing 
APPENDIX 1 611 

ORDNANCE DEVELOPMENT 

Assistant 

Chief Engineer 

1. Proof Operations 

2. Analysis and Recording 

3. Electronic Engineering 

4. Mechanical Engineering 

5. Production Engineering 

6. Control Testing 

7. Basic Engineering 

8. Special Projects 

FIELD STATIONS 

Beltsville, Md. (Radio Transmitting Station). 

Sterling, Va. (Radio Receiving 

Station). 

Clearing, Ill. (Standardization of 

Test Weight Cars). 

Allentown, Pa. (Cement Testing 

and Inspection). 

San Jose, Calif. (Cement Testing 

and Inspection). 

Riverside, Calif. (Cement Testing 

and Inspection). 

Seattle, Wash. (Cement Testing 

and Inspection). 

Denver, Cob. (Cement and Concrete Materials Testing). 

San Francisco, Calif. (Cement, 

Concrete and Miscellaneous 

Materials). 

*Diainond, Harry 

Astin, Dr Allen V. 

unman, Wilbur S. Jr. 

Godfrey, Theodore B. 

*White, Dr Thomas N. 

Page, Dr Chester H. 

Rabinow, Jacob 

Dr Cledo 

5Heilprin, Dr Laurence B. 

5Miller, Dr Bertrand J. 

Silsbee, Dr Francis B. 

George, William D. 

*Pineo, Victor C. 

Russell, H. Haig 

Moyer, W. N. 

Foster, Bruce E. 

Evans, D. N. 

Winblade, F. N. 

Cox, 0.11. 

Bohn, Richard A. 

1927—48 

1932— 

1928—53 

1928—53 

1942—46 

1941— 

1934—53 

1941—49 

1941—51 

1943—48 

*Diamond, died, Mar. 21, 1948. 

*White, to Strategic Air Command, 1946. 

*Brunetti, to Stanford Research Institute as associate director, 1949. 

*Heilprin, to Taut Engineering Co. as consultant physicist, 1951. 

*Miller, to Zenith Radio Corp., June 1948. 

*pineo, to Lincoln Laboratory, M.I.T., 1957. 

1942—57 

1928—NRF 
ADMINISTRATIVE, SCIENTIFIC, AND 

TECHNICAL STAFF CHIEFS 

as of March 1, 1950 

DIRECTOR Condon, Dr. Edward U. 1945—51 

ASSOCIATE DIRECTORS *Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

*Brode, Dr Wallace R. 

Vinogradoff, Dmitri I. 

Golovin, Nicholas E. 

Odishaw, Hugh 

Odishaw, Hugh 

OFFICE OF WEIGHTS AND 5Smith, Ralph W. 

MEASURES 

Bussey, William S. (As. 

sistant) 

Silsbee, Dr Francis B. 

Gibson, Dr Kasson S. 

(Assistant) 

Thomas, Dr James L. 

*Moon, Dr Charles 

Defandorf, Dr Francis 

Souder, Dr Wittner 

*Miller, David R. (As. 

sistant) 

1. Length Judson, Dr Lewis V. 

2. Mass Macurdy, Lloyd B. 

*Crittenden, retired, Dec. 31, 1950; died Mar. 8, 1956. *Brode, at Ohio State University, professor of organic chemistry, 1928—47; guest 

worker 1958 to date. 

*Smith, retired, Nov. 1, 1950; NBS consultant, 1950 to date. 

*Moon, died Jan. 31, 1953. 

*Sanford, retired, 1954; NBS consultant, 1954 to date. 

*Vinal, retired, June 30, 1950. *Miller, retired, 1952. 

612 

ASSISTANTS TO THE DIRECTOR 

OFFICE OF SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS 

1923—28, 

1947—58 

1949—58 

1946—59 

1948— 

1923—53 

1916— 

I. ELECTRICITY AND OPTICS 

1. Resistance Measurements 

2. Inductance and Capacitance 

3. Electrical Instruments 

4. Magnetic Measurements 

5. Photometry and Colorimetry 

6. Optical Instruments 

7. Photographic Technology 

8. Electrochemistry 

II. METROLOGY 

M. 

*Sanford, Raymond L. 

Gibson, Dr Kasson S. 

Gardner, Dr Irvine C. 

Davis, Raymond 

*Vinal, Dr George W. 
APPENDIX J 613 

II. METROLOGY—Continued 

3. Time 

4. Capacity, Density, 

Measures 

6. Thermal Expansion 

7. Dental Materials 

8. Scales 

9. Gages 

III. HEAT AND POWER 

1. Temperature Measurements 

2. Thermodynamics 

3. Cryogenics 

4. Engines and Lubrication 

5. Engine Fuels 

6. Combustion 

IV. ATOMIC AND RADIATION 

PHYSICS 

Assistant 

Consultant on Radioactivity 

Consultant on Stable Tracers 

AEC Coordinator 

Atomic Physics Laboratory 

1. Spectroscopy 

2. Radiometry 

3. Mass Spectrometry 

4. Physical Electronics 

5. Electron Physics 

6. Atomic Physics 

7. Neutron Measurements 

Radiation Physics Laboratory 

8. Nuclear Physics 

9. Radioactivity 

10. X Rays 

*Hidnert, Dr Peter 

Schoonover, Dr Jrl C. 

Russell, H. Haig 

Miller, David R. 

Brickwedde, Dr Ferdi. 

nand G. 

*Wilson, Dr Raymond E. 

Brickwedde, Dr Ferdi. 

nand C. 

Scott, Russell B. 

*McKee, Samuel A. 

Howard, Dr Frank L. 

Fiock, Dr Ernest F. 

Huntoon, Dr Robert D. 

Taylor, Dr Lauriston S. 

Curtiss, Dr Leon F. 

Mohler, Dr Fred L. 

Huntoon, Dr Robert D. 

Huntoon, Dr Robert D. 

Meggers, Dr William F. 

*Humphreys, Dr Curtis 

Mohier, Dr Fred L. 

*Bennett, Dr Willard H. 

Marton, Dr Ladislaus L. 

*Hipple, Dr John A. 

Curtiss, Dr Leon F. 

Taylor, Dr Lauriston 

Fano, Dr Ugo 

Taylor, Dr Lauriston S. 

Wyckoff, Dr Harold 0. 

Koch, Dr Herman W. 

Wyckoff, Dr Harold 0. 

Smith, Dr Scott W. 

1911—57 

1928— 

1947—53 

1928— 

1921—53 

1937— 

1926— 

1941— 

1946—50 

1946— 

1947—53 

1946— 

1941— 

1949— 

1947— 

*Bowman, attached to division 6, sec. 6, Mass and Scale, 1954. *Hidnert, transferred to Office of Weights and Measures, 1954; retired, Mar. 31, 

1957; died June 10, 1964. 

5Wilson, to Emerson Research Laboratories as principal physicist, 1954. 

*McKee, retired, 1953. 

5Humphreys, transferred to Corona Laboratories, September 1951; to Naval 

Ordnance Laboratory, 1953. 

5Bennett, resigned, 1950. 

*Hipple, to Mineral Industries Experiment Station, Pennsylvania State College as director, 1953. 

*Bowman, Horace A. 

Fluid Bean, Howard S. 

1946— 

11. 

12. 

13. 

S. 

Betatron 

Nucleonic Instrumentation 

Radiological Equipment 
614 APPENDIX I 

1. Paint, Varnish, Lacquers 

2. Surface Chemistry 

3. Organic Chemistry 

4. Analytical Chemistry 

5. Platinum Metals and Pure 

Substances 

6. Electrodeposition 

7. Gas Chemistry and pH Standards 

8. Physical Chemistry 

9. Thermochemistry and Hydrocarbons 

10. Spectrochemistry 

VI. MECHANICS 

1. Sound 

2. Mechanical Instruments 

3. Aerodynamics 

4. Engineering Mechanics 

5. Hydraulics 

VII. ORGANIC AND FIBROUS 

MATERIALS 

1. Rubber 

2. Textiles 

3. Paper 

4. Leather 

5. Testing and Specifications 

6. Organic Plastics 

VIII. METALLURGY 

1. Optical Metallurgy 

2. Thermal Metallurgy 

3. Mechanical Metallurgy 

4. Chemical Metallurgy 

Wichers, Dr Edward 

*Blum, Dr William (Assistant) 

*Hickson, Eugene F. 

Hoffman, Dr James I. 

Smith, W. Harold 

Bright, Harry A. 

Gilchrist, Dr Raleigh 

Blum, Dr William 

Weaver, Elmer R. 

Smith, Dr Edgar R. 

Dr Frederick 

D. 

Scribner, Bourdon F. 1927— 

Ramberg, Dr Walter 

Cook, Dr Richard K. 

5Brombacber, Dr William G. 

Schubauer, Dr Galen B. 

Wilson, Bruce L. 

*Eaton, Herbert N. 

McPherson, Dr Archibald T. 

Kline, Dr Gordon M. 

(Assistant) 

5Simha, Dr Robert 

(Consultant) 

Wood, Dr Lawrence A. 

Appel, William D. 

*Scribner, Bourdon W. 

Wallace, Everett L. 

Stiehier, Dr Robert D. 

Kline, Dr Gordon M. 

Thompson, Dr John C. 

Roeser, William F. 

(Assistant) 

Ellmger, George A. 

Digges, Thomas G. 

Roeser, William F. 

*Cleaves, Harold E. 

V. CHEMISTRY 

1918—62 

1931—59 

1936— 

1929— 

1944-51 

1946— 

1929— 

1920—62 

1912—15, 1930—53 

*Blum, retired, Jan. 1, 1952. 

ERickson, retired, 1950. 

5Rossini, to Chairman, Department of Chemistry, Carnegie Institute of Technology. 

1950. 

5Broniuaeher, retired, 1954. 

5Eaton, retired, Jan. 31, 1953; NBS consulting engineer, 1953 to date. 

*Simha, to New York University, 1951; subsequently to University of Southern 

California. 

*Scribner, died Mar. 5, 1952. 

5Cleaves, retired, 1953. 
APPENDIX / 615 

VIII. METALLURGY—Continued 

5. Experimental Foundry 

6. Underground Corrosion 

IX. MINERAL PRODUCTS 

1. Porcelain and Pottery 

2. Glass 

3. Refractories 

4. Enameled Metals 

5. Building Stone 

6. Concreting Materials 

7. Constitution and Microstruc- 

*Krynitsky, Alexander I. 

*Denison, Dr Irving A. 1929—53 

Insley, Dr Herbert 

Geller, Roman F. 

Hahner, Clarence H. 

Heindi, Raymond A. 

Harrison, William N. 

*Kessler, Daniel W. 

Blame, Raymond L. 

McMurdie, Howard F. 

8. Chemistry of Mineral Products 5Wells, Dr Lansing S. 

1. Structural Engeering 

2. Fire Protection 

3. Heating and Air Conditioning 

4. Exterior and Interior Cover 

ings 

5. Codes and Specifications 

XI. APPLIED MATHEMATICS 

1. Numerical Analysis 

2. Computation Laboratory 

3. Statistical Engineering 

4. Machine Development 

XII. COMMODITY STANDARDS 

1. Metal and Ceramic Products 

2. Textiles and Apparel 

3. Mechanical Equipment 

4. Packaging 

5. Chemical Products 

Parsons, Douglas E. 

Thompson, George N. 

(Assistant) 

Parsons, Douglas E. 

*Mitchell, Nolan D. 

Dill, Richard S. 

Snoke, Dr Hubert R. 

Thompson, George N. 

*Curtiss, Dr John H. 

Cannon, Dr Edward W. 

(Assistant) 

*Rosser, Dr J. Barkley 

Alt, Dr Franz L. 

Eisenhart, Dr Churchill 

Cannon, Dr Edward W. 

*Ely, Edwin W. 

Reynolds, Floyd W. 

(Assistant) 

Schuster, George 

Ehrman, H. A. 

Medley, J. W. 

Braithwaite, William E. 

Reynolds, Floyd W. 

1946—53 

1946— 

1949—51 

1948— 

1946— 

ture 

X. BUILDING TECHNOLOGY 

1922—53 

1929— 

1928— 

1922—52 

1920—60 

*Krynitsky, retired, 1950. 

*Denison, to Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories, 1953. 

*Kessler, to Kessler Stone Research Laboratory as materials engineer, 1952; NBS 

consultant, 1952 to date. 

*Wells, died 1954. 

*Mitchell, retired, September 1952; NBS consultant, 1952 to date. 

*Curtiss, assistant to Director, April 1946; National Applied Mathematics Laboratories, 1947; to Institute of Mathematical Science and adjunct professor of math, 

New York University, 1953. 

*Rosser, to Army Ordnance, 1951. 

*Ely, NBS liaison with Commodity Standards Division, Department of Commerce, 

1947—50; transferred with division to Office of Technical Services, Department of 

Commerce, 1950. 
616 APPENDIX / 

Electronics Standards Laboratory 

1. Engineering Electronics 

2. Electron Tubes 

3. Electronic Computers 

Ordnance Development Laboratory. 

4. Ordnance Research 

5. Ordnance Mechanics 

6. Ordnance Electronics 

7. Ordnance Engineering 

8. Ordnance Tests 

Guidance Missile Laboratory 

9. Missile Dynamics 

10. Missile Intelligence 

11. Missile Engineering 

12. Missile Instrumentation 

13. Technical Services 

Ionospheric Research Laboratory 

1. Upper Atmosphere Research 

5, Ionospheric Research 

7. Field Operations 

Systems Research Laboratory 

3. Regular Propagation Services 

4. Frequency Utilization Re. 

search 

6. Tropospheric Propagation Re. 

search 

Measurements Standards Laboratory 

8. High Frequency Standards 

9. Microwave Standards 

AsiAn, Dr Allen V. 

*Hinman, Wilbur S. Jr. 

Skramstad, Dr Harold K. 

Huntoon, Dr Robert D. 

Page, Dr Chester H. 

(Vacant) 

*Reid, J. Gilman Jr. 

White, Dr John E. 

Alexander, Samuel N. 

unman, Wilbur S. Jr. 

*Goldberg, Dr Harold 

*Rabinow, Jacob 

Guarino, P. Anthony 

Domsitz, M. G. 

*Godfrey, Theodore B. 

Lamm, Ralph A. 

Skramstad, Dr Harold K. 

Atchison, Dr F. Stanley 

Lamm, Ralph A. 

Wildhack, William A. 

McLean, J. D. 

*Smith, Dr Newbern 

MeNish, Alvin G. 

Norton, Kenneth A. 

Carroll, T. J. 

McNish, Alvin G. 

Bateman, Ross 

Hutchison, H. P. 

Chadwick, Walter B. 

Norton, Kenneth A. 

Herbstreit, Jack W. 

George, William D. 

*Lyons, Dr Harold A. 

1937—54 

1946— 

1946— 

1947— 

1948— 

1942— 

1947— 

1942- 1935— 

1935—54 

1946— 

1946— 

*Hinman, to Diamond Ordnaijce Fuze Laboratories, September 1953. 

*Reid, to private industry, January 1954. 

*Goldberg, and most of the Ordnance Development and Guidance Missile staffs, 

transferred to Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories, 1953. 

*Rabinow, to Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories, 1953. 

*Godfrey, to Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories as division chief, 1953. 

*Smith, N., to full-time technical work, Aug. 29, 1953, Dr Brode replacing him as division chief; resigned 1954. 

*Lyons, resigned, May 1951. 

XIII. ELECTRONICS AND ORD. 

NANCE 

Assistant Chief for Ordnance 

Assistant Chief for Aerophysics 

Electronics Consultant 

Electronics Consultant 

1935— 

XIV. CENTRAL RADIO PROPAGA. 

TION LABORATORY 

Assistant Chief 

Assistant Chief 

Microwave Research Consultant 
APPENDIX 1 617 

FIELD STATIONS 

Brookline, Mass. (Electricity and Optics—Lamp Inspection) 

Clearing, Ill. (Metrology—Master Scale Depot) 

Allentown, Pa. (Mineral Products—Cement Testing and Inspection) 

Riverside, Calif. (Mineral Products—Cement Testing and Inspection) 

Permanente, Calif. (Mineral Products—Cement Testing and Inspection) 

Seattle, Wash. (Mineral Products—Cement Testing and Inspection) 

Denver, Cob. (Mineral Products—Cement and Concrete Materials) 

San Francisco, Calif. (Mineral Products—Materials Testing Station) 

Los Angeles, Calif. (Applied Mathematics—Institute for Numerical Analysis) 

LaPlata, Md. (Electronics—Blossom Point Proving Ground) 

Tuckerton, N.J. (Electronics—Warren Grove Test Field) 

Anchorage, Alaska (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory—Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Point Barrow, Alaska (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory—Radio 

Propagation Field Station) 

Guam Island (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory—Radio Propagation 

Field Station) 

Puunene Maui, Hawaii (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory—Radio 

Propagation Field Station) 

Honolulu, Hawaii (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory—Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Puerto Rico (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory—Radio Propagation 

Field Station) 

Trinidad, British West Indies (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory— 

Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Las Cruces, N. Mex. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory—Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Fort Belvoir, Va. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory—Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Sterling, Va. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory—Radio Propagation 

Field Station) 

Beltsville, Md. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory—Radio Propagation 

Field Station) 
ADMINISTRATIVE, SCIENTIFIC, AND 

TECHNICAL STAFF CHIEFS 

as of October 1, 1954 

DIRECTOR Astin, Dr Allen V. 

Ass ociate Director for Chemistry *Brode, Dr Wallace R. 

Ass ociate Director for Physics Huntoon, Dr Robert D. 

Ass ociate Director for Testing McPherson, Dr 

Archibald T. 

Asso ciate Director for Administration *Golovin, Nicholas E. 

Consuttants to the Director Crittenden, Dr Eugene C. 

Curtiss, Dr Leon F. 

Page, Dr Chester H. 

*Souder, Dr Wilmer 

McNish, Alvin G. 

OFFICE OF SCIENTIFIC PUBLICA- Brode, Dr Wallace R. 

TIONS 

OFFICE OF WEIGHTS AND MEAS- Bussey, William S. 

URES 

Assistant Jensen, Malcolm W. 1951— 

Consultant Smith, Ralph W. 

OFFICE OF BASIC INSTRUMENTA. Wildhack, William A. 

TION 

I. ELECTRICITY AND ELEC- *Silsbee, Dr Francis B. 

TRONICS 

*Stansbury, Carroll 1948—59 

(Assistant) 

1. Resistance and Reactance Thomas, Dr James L. 

2. Electron Tubes Marsden, Dr 1949— 

Charles P. Jr. 

3. Electrical Instruments Defandorf, Dr 

Francis M. 

4. Magnetic Measurements Cooter, Irving L. 1930— 

5. Process Technology *Tuckerman, Lucien P. 1949—56 

*Brode, Science Advisor to Secretary of State, 1958. 

*Golovin, to White Sands Proving Ground as Chief Scientist, 1958. 

*Souder, retired, 1954. 

*Silsbee, retired, July 31, 1959; NBS consultant. 

*Stansbury, retired for reasons of ill health, October 1958. 

*Tuckerman, transferred to Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory, July 1, 1956. 

618 
APPENDIX J 619 

I. ELECTRICITY AND ELECTRONICS—Continued 

6. Engineering Electronics 

7. Electronic Instrumentation 

8. Electrochemistry 

2. Optical Instruments 

3. Photographic Technology 

4. Length 

5. Engineering Metrology 

1. Temperature Measurements 

2. Thermodynamics 

3. Cryogenic Physics 

4. Engines and Lubrication 

5. Engine Fuels 

6. Free Radicals Research (1956— 

59) 

1. Spectroscopy 

2. Radiometry 

3. Mass Spectroscopy 

4. Solid State Physics 

5. Electron Physics 

6. Atomic Physics 

Radiation Physics Laboratory 

8. Nuclear Physics 

9. Radioactivity 

10. X Rays 

11. Betatron 

12. Nucleonic Instrumentation 

*Selgin, Dr Paul J. 

Stansbury, Carroll 

Hamer, Dr Walter J. 

*Gardner, Dr Irvine C. 

*Gibson, Dr Kasson S. 

(Assistant) 

Gibson, Dr Kasson S. 

Washer, Dr Francis E. 

*Davis, Raymond 

*judson, Dr Lewis V. 

Fullmer, Irwin H. 

*Brickwedde, Dr 

Ferdinand G. 

Brickwedde, Dr 

Ferdinand G. 

Beckett, Dr Charles W. 

Hudson, Dr Ralph P. 

Swindells, James F. 

Howard, Dr Frank L. 

5Broida, Dr Herbert P. 

Taylor, Dr Lauriston S. 

(Vacant) 

5Meggers, Dr William F. 

Plyler, Dr Earle K. 

Mohler, Dr Fred L. 

*Breckenridge, Dr 

Robert G. 

Marton, Dr Ladislaus L. 

Branscomb, Dr Lewis M. 

Wyckoff, Dr Harold 0. 

Fano, Dr Ugo 

Mann, Dr Wilfrid B. 

Wyckoff, Dr Harold 0. 

Koch, Dr Herman W. 

Costrell, Louis 

1950— 

1951— 

1927— 

1949—59 

*Selgin, resigned to take up private consultant work, continuing part-time work 

with NBS. 

*Gardner, retired, July 8, 1959. 

*Gibson, retired, January 1955. 

*Davis, retired, April 1958; NBS consultant. 

*Judson, transferred to Office of Weights and Measures, Mar. 22, 1959. *Brickwedde, to Pennsylvania State Uni*ersity as dean of College of Chemistry and 

Physics, February 1957. 

• Broida, succeeded by Dr Arnold M. Bass, July 1, 1959; program terminated Oct. 

1, 1959; returned as senior research fellow 1961—62. 

*Meggers, retired, July 31, 1958; NBS consultant. 

5Plyler, retired, Oct. 7, 1963. 

5Breckenridge, resigned, May 1, 

II. OPTICS AND METROLOGY 

1. Photometry and Colorimetry 

1947—55 

1935— 

1935— 

1917— 

III. HEAT AND POWER 

IV. ATOMIC AND RADIATION 

PHYSICS 

Atomic Physics Laboratory 

1945—63 

1949—55 

1951— 

1946— 
620 APPENDIX / 

IV. ATOMIC AND RADIATION PHYSICS--Continued 

13. Radiological Equipment 

14. Radiation Instruments Branch, 

AEC 

V. CHEMISTRY 

1. Organic Coatings 

2. SurfaceChemistry 

3. Organic Chemistry 

4. Analytical Chemistry 

5. Inorganic Chemistry 

6. Electrodeposition 

7. Gas Chemistry 

8. Physical Chemistry 

9. Thermochemistry 

10. Spectrochemistry 

11. Pure Substances 

VI. MECHANICS 

1. Sound 

2. Mechanical Instruments 

3. Fluid Mechanics 

4. Engineering Mechanics 

6. Mass and Scale 

7. Capacity, Density, and Fluid 

Meters 

8. Combustion Controls 

VII. ORGANIC AND FIBROUS MATERIALS 

1. Rubber 

2. Textiles 

3. Paper 

4. Leather 

5. Testing and Specifications 

6. Polymer Structure 

Smith, Dr Scott W. 

Butenhoff, Robert L. 

Wichers, Dr Edward 

Hoffman, Dr James I. 

(Assistant) 

Howard, Paul T. 

Hoffman, Dr James I. 

*Smith, W. Harold 

*Bright, Harry A. 

Gilchrist, Dr Raleigh 

Brenner, Dr Abner 

*Weaver, Elmer R. 

*Smith, Dr Edgar R 

Prosen, Edward J. 

Scribner, Bourdon F. 

Saylor, Dr Charles P. 

*Raml3erg, Dr Walter 

Souder, Dr Wilmer 

(Consultant) 

Cook, Dr Richard K. 

Lloyd, Edward C. 

Schubauer, Dr Galen B. 

Wilson, Bruce L. 

Tate, Douglas R. 

*Bean, Howard S. 

*Fiock, Dr Ernest F. 

Kline, Dr Gordon M. 

tAppet, William D. 

(Assistant) 

Wood, Dr Lawrence A. 

Appel, William D. 

Hobbs, Dr Robert B. 

*Wallace, Everett L. 

Stiehler, Dr Robert D. 

Bekkedahl, Dr Norman 

*Smith, W. H., retired, Feb. 1, 1957; NBS consultant; died Apr. 14, 1959. 

*Bright, retired, Feb. 29, 1960; died May 22, 1961. 

*Weaver, retired, May 31, 1957. 

*Smith, E. R., retired, June 30, 1957. 

*Ramberg, to U.S. Embassy in Rome, Department of State, as scientific officer, 

Mar. 1, 1959. 

*Bean, retired, July 1, 1958. 

5Fiock, to Rocket Fuels Division, Phillips Petroleum Co., Texas, as technical 

director, March 1956. 

*4ppel, retired, Jan. 31, 1959. 

*Wallace, retired, Jan. 1, 1955. 

1922— 

1930— 

1936— 

1931— 

1954— 

1930— 

1931— 

P. 
APPENDIX 1 621 

VII. ORGANIC AND FIBROUS MATERIALS—Continued 

7. Organic Plastics 

8. Dental Research 

VIII. METALLURGY 

1. Thermal Metallurgy 

2. Chemical Metallurgy 

3. Mechanical Metallurgy 

4. Corrosion 

IX. MINERAL PRODUCTS 

1. Porcelain and Pottery 

2. Glass 

3. Refractories 

4. Enameled Metals 

6. Concreting Materials 

7. Constitution and MicrostrucX. BUILDING TECHNOLOGY 

1. Structural Engineering 

2. Fire Protection 

3. Heating and Air Conditioning 

4. Floor, Roof, and Wall Coverings 

5. Codes and Specifications 

XI. APPLIED MATHEMATICS 

1. Numerical Analysis 

2. Computation Laboratory 

3. Statistical Engineering 

4. Mathematical Physics 

Reinhart, Frank W. 

Sweeney, William T. 

*Thompson, Dr John G. 

Digges, Thomas C. 

Wyman, Leroy L. 

Bennett, John A. 

Ellinger, George A. 

Schoonover, Dr In C. 

Hahner, Clarence H. 

(Assistant) 

*Geller, Roman F. 

Hahner, Clarence H. 

*Heindl, Raymond A 

Harrison, William N. 

Blame, Raymond L. 

McMurdie, Howard F. 

Parsons, Douglas E. 

*Thompson, George N. 

(Assistant) 

Roeser, William F. 

(Consultant) 

John W. 

(Consultant) 

Parsons, Douglas E. 

Robertson, Dr Alexander 

F. 

*Dill, Richard S. 

*Snoke, Dr Hubert R. 

Thompson, George N. 

Alt, Dr Franz L. 

Cannon, Dr Edward W. 

(Assistant) 

*Todd, John 

*Abramowitz, Dr Milton 

Eisenhart, Dr Churchill 

Cannon, Dr Edward W. 

1937— 

1922— 

1953— 

1936— 

1949—57 

1942—58 

ture 

1935—56 

1950— 

*Thompson, J. G., retired, February 1956. 

retired, December 1955; NBS consultant. 

5Heindl, retired, July 1955; NBS consultant. 

*Thompson, G. N., retired, June 30, 1955. 

*McBurney, retired, May 1956. 

*Djll, died 1957. 

*Snoke, retired, July 31, 1960. 

*Todd, to California Institute of Technology as professor of mathematics, September 

1957. 

*Abramowitz. died July 1958. 
622 APPENDIX J 

XII. DATA PROCESSING SYSTEMS 

1. Components and Techniques 

2. Digital Circuitry and Devices 

3. Digital Systems 

4. Analog Systems 

80. BOULDER LABORATORIES 

Director 

81. Cryogenic Engineering 

1. Cryogenic Equipment 

2. Cryogenic Processes 

3. Properties of Materials 

4. Gas Liquefaction 

82. Radio Propagation Physics 

1. Upper Atmosphere Research 

2. Ionospheric Research 

3. Regular Propagation Services 

83. Radio Propagation Engineering 

4. Frequency Utilization Research 

6. Tropospheric Propagation Research 

84. Radio Standards 

High Frequency Standards Branch 

1. High Frequency Electrical 

Standards 

2. Radio Broadcast Service 

3. High Frequency Impedance 

Standard 

Microwave Standards Branch 

6. Extreme High Frequency and 

Noise 

7. Microwave Frequency and 

Spectroscopy 

8. Microwave Circuit Standard 

FIELD STATIONS 

Alexander, Samuel N. 

bit, A. W. 

Elbourn, Robert D. 

Leiner, A. L. 

Skramstad, Dr Harold 

K. 

Brown, Dr Frederick W. 1954— 

Scott, Russell B. 

Birmingham, Bascom 1951— 

W. 

VanderArend, Peter C. 

Reynolds, Martin M. 

Johnson, Victor J. 

Slutz, Dr Ralph J. 

Gautier, Thomas N. Jr. 

Bateman, Ross 

Chadwick, Walter B. 

Norton, Kenneth A. 

Norton, Kenneth A. 

Herbstreit, Jack W. 1946— 

*Thomas, Dr Harold A. 

*Lyons, Dr Harold 

(Assistant) 

George, William D. 

Selby, Myron C. 

Morgan, Alvin H. 1946— 

(Vacant) 

Lyons, Dr Harold 

Kerns, Dr David M. 1946— 

Birnbaum, George 1946— 

Beatty, Robert W. 1944— 

Brookline, Mass. (Optics and Metrology: Lamp Inspection) 

Arcata, Calif. (Optics and Metrology: Visual Landing Aids) 

Clearing, Ill. (Mechanics: NBS Master Track Scale Depot) 

Allentown, Pa. (Mineral Products: Concreting Materials Section) 

Denver, Cob. (Mineral Products: Concreting Materials Section) 

San Francisco, Calif. (Mineral Products: Concreting Materials Section) 

to John Jay Hopkins Laboratory for Pure and Applied Science (San 

Diego), General Dynamics Corporation, December 1956. 

*Lyons, to staff of Microwave Laboratory, Hughes Aircraft Co., July 1955. 

1947— 

1951— 

1950— 

1949— 

1942— 

1947—56 

1941— 
APPENDIX J 623 

84. Radio Standards—Continued 

FIELD STATIONS—Continued 

Seattle, Wash. (Mineral Products: Concreting Materials Section) 

Kansas City, Mo. (Mineral Products: Concreting Materials Section) 

Anchorage, Alaska (Boulder: Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Point Barrow, Alaska (Boulder: Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Guam Island (Boulder: Radio Propagations Field Station) 

Puunene Maui, Hawaii (Boulder: Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Puerto Rico (Boulder: Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Bluie West—i, Greenland (Boulder: Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Panama Canal Zone (Boulder: Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Colorado Springs, Cob. (Boulder: Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Fort Belvoir, Va. (Boulder: Radio Propagation Field Station) 

Sterling, Va. (Boulder: Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Beltsville, Md. (Boulder: Radio Transmitting Station) 

Front Royal, Va. (Boulder: Radio Noise Recording Station) 
ADMINISTRATIVE, SCIENTIFIC, AND 

TECHNICAL STAFF CHIEFS 

as of December 1, 1960 

DIRECTOR 

Deputy Director 

Associate Director for Physics 

Associate Director for Engineering 

Associate Director for Chemistry 

Associate Director for Planning 

Associate Director for Administration 

Associate Director for Boulder Laboratories 

NBS Reactor Program 

Special Research Assistant to Director 

Special Development Assistant to Director 

Consultant to the Director 

Director Emeritus 

OFFICE OF WEIGHTS AND MEASURES 

Assistant 

Consultant 

OFFICE OF TECHNICAL INFORMATION 

Assistant 

I. ELECTRICITY 

I. Resistance and Reactance 

2. Electrochemistry 

3. Electrical Instruments 

4. Magnetic Measurements 

5. Dielectrics 

II. METROLOGY 

Astin, Dr Allen V. 

Huntoon, Dr Robert D. 

Huntoon,Dr Robert D. 

McPherson, Dr Archibald 'I'. 

Wichers, Dr Edward 

Souder, Dr Wilnier 

(Consultant) 

Schoonover, Dr In C. 

Walleigh, Robert S. 

Brown, Dr Frederick W. 

Muehihause, Dr Carl 0. 

Fano, Dr Ugo 

Wildhack, William A. 

*Cnrtiss, Dr Leon F. 

Schuler, Dr Kurt E. 1955— 

Briggs, Dr Lyman J. 

Bussey, William A. 

Jensen, Malcolm W. 

Smith, Ralph W. 

Tilley, William R. 1946— 

Gautier, William K. 1947— 

Page, Dr Chester H. 

Thomas, Dr James L. 

Hamer, Dr Walter J. 

Defandorf, Dr Francis M. 

Cooter, Irving L. 

Hoffman, Dr John D. 

McNish, Alvin G. 

Judd, Dr Deane B. (Assist. 1927— 

ant) 

Barbrow, Louis E. 1927— 

1942— 

1. Photometry and Colorunetry 

*Curtiss, retired, June 30, 1961. 

624 
APPENDIX 1 625 

H. METROLOGY—Continued 

2. Refractometry 

3. Photographic Research 

4. Length 

5. Engineering Metrology 

6. Mass and Scale 

7. Voluinetry and Densimetry 

Washer, Dr Francis E. 

McCamy, Calvin S. 

*Page, Benjamin L. 

Fuilmer, Irwin H. 

Peiser, H. Steffen 

Collett, Charles T. 

1952— 

1918—61 

1957— 

1943— 

Herzfeld, Dr Charles M. 

Beckett, Dr Charles W. 

(Assistant) 

1955— 

1950— 

1. Temperature Physics 

2. Heat Measurements 

3. Cryogenic Physics 

7. Equation of State 

8. Statistical Physics 

IV. RADIATION PHYSICS 

Scientific Assistant 

AEC Coordinator 

1. X Ray 

2. Radioactivity 

3. Radiation Theory 

4. High Energy Radiation 

5. Radiological Equipment 

6. Nucieonic instrumentation 

7. Neutron Physics 

V. ANALYTICAL AND INORGANIC CHEMISTRY 

1. Pure Substances 

2. Spectrochemistry 

3. Solution Chemistry 

4. Analytical Chemistry 

5. Inorganic Chemistry 

VI. MECHANICS 

1. Sound 

2. Pressure and Vacuum 

3. Fluid Mechanics 

*page, retired, 1961. 

*Howard, died Oct. 15, 1963. 

Swindells, James F. 

Ginnings, Dr Defoe C. 

Hudson, Dr Ralph P. 

Hilsenrath, Joseph 

Green, Dr Melville S. 

Taylor, Dr Lauriston S. 

Ney, Wilbert B. 

Taylor, Dr Lauriston S. 

Wyckoff, Dr Harold 0. 

Mann, Dr Wilfrid B. 

Spencer, Dr Lewis V. 

Koch, Dr Herman W. 

Smith, Dr Scott W. 

Costrell, Louis 

Caswell, Dr Randall S. 

Schoonover, Dr hi C. 

Bates, Dr Roger G. 

(Assistant) 

Saylor, Dr Charles P. 

(Consultant) 

5lloward, Dr Frank L. 

Scribner, Bourdon F. 

Bates, Dr Roger G. 

Hague, John L. 

Gilchrist, Dr Raleigh 

Wilson, Bruce L. 

Brombacher, Dr William G. 

(Consultant) 

Frankiand, Dr John M. 

(Consultant) 

Lloyd, Edward C. (Con. 

sultant) 

Cook, Dr Richard K. 

Johnson, Dr Daniel P. 

Schubauer. Dr Galen B. 

1929— 

1948— 

1954— 

III. HEAT 

1952— 

1939— 

1937—63 

1935— 
626 APPENDIX I 

VI. MECHANICS—Continued 

VII. ORGANIC AND FIBROUS MATERIALS 

1. Rubber 

2. Textiles 

3. Paper 

4. Leather 

5. Testing and Specifications 

6. Polymer Structure 

7. Plastics 

8. Dental Research 

VIII. METALLURGY 

1. Thermal Metallurgy 

2. Chemical Metallurgy 

3. Mechanical Metallurgy 

4. Corrosion 

5. Metal Physics 

6. Electrodeposition 

IX. MINERAL PRODUCTS 

1. Engineering Ceramics 

2. Glass 

3. Refractories 

5. Crystal Growth 

7. Constitution and Microstructure 

X. BUILDING RESEARCH 

1. Structural Engineering 

2. Fire Research 

3. Mechanical Systems 

*Hoffman, retired, 1962. 

*Digges, retired, 1962. 

*Roeser, died June 17, 1964. 

Kline, Dr Gordon M. 

Wood, Dr Lawrence A. 

Schiefer, Dr Herbert F. 

Hobbs, Dr Robert B. 

Kanagy, Dr Joseph R. 

Stiebler, Dr Robert D. 

Bekkedahl, Dr 

Norman P. 

Reinhart, Dr Frank W. 

Sweeney, William T. 

*Hoffman, Dr James I. 

*Digges, Thomas G. 

(Assistant) 

Digges, Thomas G. 

Wyman, Leroy L. 

Bennett, John A. 

Ellinger, George A. 

Kushner, Dr 

Lawrence M. 

Brenner, Dr Abner 

Franklin, Dr Allan D. 

Hahner, Clarence H. 

(Assistant) 

Geller, Roman F. 

(Consultant) 

Lippincott, Dr Ellis R. 

(Consultant) 

Burdick, Milton D. 

Hahner, Clarence H. 

(Vacant) 

Ordway, Dr Frederick 

McMurdie, Howard F. 

Parsons, Douglas E. 

*Roeser William F. 

(Consultant) 

Watstein, David 

Robertson, Dr 

Alexander F. 

Achenbach, Paul R. 

4. Engineering Mechanics 

5. Rheology 

8. Combustion Controls 

Irwin, Lafayette K. 

Marvin, Dr Robert S. 

Caidwell, Frank R. 

1949— 

1949— 

1920— 

1929— 

1930— 

3048— 

1955— 

1931— 

1948— 

1930— 

1937— 
APPENDIX J 627 

X. BUILDING RESEARCH—Continued 

4. Organic Building Materials 

5. Codes and Safety Standards 

6. Heat Transfer 

7. Inorganic Building Materials 

9. Metallic Building Materials 

1. Numerical Analysis 

2. Computation 

3. Statistical Engineering 

4. Mathematical Physics 

5. Operations Research 

XII. PROCESSING SYSTEMS 

1. Components and Techniques 

2. Digital Circuitry 

3. Digital Systems 

4. Analog Systems 

5. Applications Engineering 

XIII. ATOMIC PHYSICS 

1. Spectroscopy 

2. Radiometry 

4. Solid State Physics 

5. Electron Physics 

6. Atomic Physics 

XIV. INSTRUMENTATION 

1. Engineering Electronics 

2. Electron Devices 

3. Electronic Instrumentation 

4. Mechanical Instruments 

5. Basic Instrumentation 

XV. PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY 

1. Thermochemistry 

2. Surface Chemistry 

3. Organic Chemistry 

5LIoyd, to Underwriters' Laboratories, 

*Mohler, retired, 1960; NBS consultant. 

*Plyler, retired, Oct. 8, 1963. 

Walton, Dr William W. 

5Lloyd, Richard L. Robinson, Henry E. 

• Blame, Raymond L. Harrison, William N. 

Cannon, Dr Edward W. 

Alt, Dr Franz L. (Assistant) 

Youden, Dr William J. (Consultant) 

Davis, Dr Philip J. 

Mittleman, Dr Don I. Eisenhart, Dr Churchill 

Pell, Dr William H., Goldman, Dr Alan J. Alexander, Samuel N. 

Skramstad, Dr Harold K. 

(Assistant) 

Rafferty, John F. (SEAC) 

Elbourn, Robert D. 

Greenwald, Sidney 

Alexander, Samuel N. 

Skramstad, Dr 

Harold K. 

Glaser, Ezra 

Branscomb, Dr Lewis M. 

*Mohler, Dr Fred L. (Consultant) 

Kessler, Dr Karl G. 

*plyler, Dr Earle K. 

Frederikse, Dr 

Hans P. R. 

Marton, Dr Ladislaus L. Smith, Dr Stephen J. 

Montgomery, C. Franklin 

Shapiro, Gustave 

Marsden, Charles P. 

Montgomery, 

C. Franklin 

Wexler, Arnold 

Stern, Joshua 

Walleñstein, Dr Merrill B. 1953—55, 

1959— Prosen, Edward J. (Vacant) 

Isbell. Dr Horace S. 1927— 

New York, 1962. 

XI. APPLIED MATHEMATICS 

1929— 

1941—62 

1937— 

1948— 

1952— 

1951— 1956— 

1961— 

1947— 

1948— 

1953— 

1954— 

1946— 

1947— 

1941— 

1951— 
628 APPENDIX I 

XV. PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY—Continued 

4. Molecular Spectroscopy 

5. Molecular Kinetics 

6. Mass Spectroscopy 

7. Molecular Structure and Radiation Chemistry 

80. BOULDER LABORATORIES— 

Director 

CRPL Liaison and Progress 

Development 

Mathematical-Analysis and Computation Facility Group 

Consultant in Mathematical 

Physics 

Consultant in Statistics 

Consultant in Astrophysics 

Consultant in Radio Wave Propagation 

81. Cryogenic Engineering 

1. Cryogenic Equipment 

2. Cryogenic Processes 

3. Properties of Materials 

4. Gas Liquefaction 

Brown, Dr Frederick W. 

Shapley, Alan H. 1947— 

Sopka, Dr John J. 1959— 

Brown, Edmund H. 1952— 

Crow, Dr Edwin L. 

Thomas, Dr Richard N. 

Wait, Dr James R. 

Scott, Russell B. 

Birmingham, Bascom W. 

(Assistant) 

Jacobs, Dr Robert B. 

Birmingham, Bascom W. 

Corruccini, Dr Robert J. 

Johnson, Victor J. 

CENTRAL RADIO PROPAGATION LABORATORY—BOULDER 

1. LF and VLF Research 

2. Ionosphere Research 

3. Prediction Services 

4. Sun-Earth Relationships 

5. Field Engineering 

6. Radio Warning Services 

83. Radio Propagation Engineering 

1. Data Reduction Instrumentation 

4. Radio Noise 

5. Tropospheric Measurements 

6. Tropospheric Analysis 

Smith, Dr Earnest K. Jr. 

Gautier, Thomas N. Jr. 

(Assistant) 

Bailey, Dana K. (Consultant) 

Jeah, Arthur G. Jr 

Davies, Dr Kenneth 

Chadwick, Walter B. 

Knecht, Robert W. 

Sellery, Harry G. 

Lincoln, J. Virginia 

Norton, Kenneth A. 

Herbstreit, Jack W. (Assistant) 

Florman, Edwin F. (Consultant) 

Johnson, Walter E. 

Mann, Dr David E. 

Ferguson, Dr Robert E. 

Dibeler, Dr Vernon H. 

Buckley, Floyd 

1951— 

1952— 

1942— 

1943— 

1951— 

1944— 

82. Ionosphere Research and Propagation 1951— 

1948— 

1949— 

1958— 

1949— 

1946— 

1942— 

1946— 

1953— 

1946— 

1952— 

Crichiow, William Q. 

Peterson, Charles F. 

Rice, Philip L. 1949— 
APPENDIX 1 629 

83. Radio Propagation Engineering—Continued 

7. Propagation-Terrain Ef- Kirby, Robert S. 1947— 

fects 

8. Radio-Meteorology Bean, Bradford R. 1950— 

9. Lower Atmosphere Physics Thompson, Dr Moody C. 1947— 

Jr. 

84. Radio standards Laboratory. Richardson, Dr John M. 1952— 

Ass for Radio George, William D. 

Frequencies 

Assistant Chief for Micro- Kerns, Dr David M. 1946— 

wave Frequencies 

Assistant Chief for Tech- Woizien, Eldred C. 

nical Planning and Coordination 

Consultant Brown, W. W. 

Consultant Wacker, Dr Paul F. 1944— 

1. High Frequency Elec- Selby, Myron C. 1941— 

trical Standards 

2. Radio Broadcast Service Morgan, Alvin H. 1946— 

3. Radio and Microwave Dalke, John L. 1947— 

Materials 

4. Atomic Frequency and Mockler, Dr Richard C. 1954- 

Time Interval Standards 

5. Electronic Calibration Lance, Harvey W. 1948— 

Center 

7. Millimeter-Wave Research Cuishaw, Dr William 1956— 

8. Microwave Circuit Stand- Beatty, Robert W. 

ards 

85. Radio Systems Kirby, Richard C. 1948— 

Patterson, Donald W. 1958— 

(Assistant) 

Haydon, George W. 1959— 

(Consultant) 

1. High Frequency and VHF Silberstein, Richard 1941— 

Research 

4. Modulation Research Koch, J. Wesley 1957— 

5. Antenna Research Cottony, Herman V. 1941— 

6. Navigation Systems Hefley, Gifford 1949— 

7. Space Telecommunications Coombs, William C. 1959— 

87. Upper Atmosphere and Space Little, Dr C. Gordon 1958— 

Physics Gates, Dr David M. 1957— 

(Asst.) 

Slutz, Dr Ralph J. (Cons.) 

Bailey, Dana K. (Cons.) 

1. Upper Atmosphere and Gallet, Roger M. 1955— 

Plasma Physics 

5. Ionosphere and Exosphere Bowles, Dr Kenneth L. 1955— 

Scatter 
630 APPENDIX I 

87. Upper Atmosphere and Space Physics—Continued 

7. Airglow and Aurora Roach, Dr Franklin E. 1954— 

8. Ionospheric Radio Astron- Lawrence, Robert S. 1948— 

omy 

FIELD STATIONS, NBS 

Anchorage, Alaska (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Koloa, Kauai, Hawaii (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Antarctica and Kolb Stations, Boulder (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Barrow, Alaska (Centra' Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Lima, Peru (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Douglas, Wyo. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Lafayette, Cob. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Colorado Springs, Cob. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Havana, Ill. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Fort Belvoir, Va. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Puunene, Maui, Hawaii (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Roblinsville, Cob. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Puerto Rico (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Front Royal, Va. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Schickley, Nebr. (Central Radio Propagation Laboratory) 

Lanham, Md. (Radio Standards Laboratory) 

Puuenene, Maui, Hawaii (Radio Standards Laboratory) 

Brookline, Mass. (Metrology: Lamp Inspection) 

Arcata, Calif. (Metrobogy: Visual Landing Aids Field Laboratory) 

Clearing, Ill. (Metrology: Master Railway Track Scale Depot) 

Allentown, Pa. (Building Technology: Concreting Materials Section) 

Denver, Cob. (Building Technology: Concreting Materials Section) 

San Francisco, Calif. (Building Technology: Concreting Materials Section) 

Wash. (Building Technology: Concreting Materials Section) 
NBS PUBLICATIONS 

• APPENDIX K 

NBS Publications representing 

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS IN SCIENCE 

AND TECHNOLOGY, 1901—1951 

Abbreviations 

Scientific Paper 

Technologic Paper 

Research Paper 

Circular 

Handbook 

Miscellaneous Publication 

Building Materials and Structures Report 

Letter Circular 

Technical News Bulletin 

Am. Mach. 

ASTM Bull. 

Am. Soc. Testing 

Mater. Proc. 

Anal. Chem. 

Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 

Elec. Eng. 

Horological Inst. Am. J. 

Ind. Eng. Chem. 

J. Am. Dental Assoc. 

J. Am. Ceram. Soc. 

J. Appi. Phys. 

J. Dental. Res. 

J. Opt. Soc. Am. 

J. Wash. Acad. Sci. 

Mech. Eng. 

Nat!. Adv. Comm. 

Aeron. Tech. Note 

Nat!. Adv. Comm. 

Aeron. Tech. Rep. 

Machinist 

Society for 

tics Technical Note 

National Advisory Committee 

tics Technical Report 

of America 

Academy of 

S 

T 

RP 

C 

H 

M 

BMS 

LC 

TNB 

NON.NBS PUBLICATIONS 

American 

American Testing Materials 

Bulletin 

Proceedings of the American Society for 

Testing Materials 

Analytical Chemistry 

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 

Electrical Engineering 

Horological Institute of America Journal 

Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 

Journal of the American Dental Association 

Journal of the American Ceramic Society 

Journal of Applied Physics 

Journal of Dental• Research 

Journal of the Optical Society 

Journal of the Washington 

Sciences 

Mechanical Engineering 

National Advisory Committee for Aeronau. 

for Aeronau631 
632 APPENDIX K 

Nat!. Adv. Comm. National Advisory Committee for AeronauAeron. Rep. tics Report. 

Phys. Rev. Physical Review 

Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. Proceedings of the American Philosophical 

Society 

Proc. IRE Proceedings of the Institute of Radio. Engi. 

neers 

Proc. Nati. Acad. Sci. Proceedings of the National Academy of 

Sciences 

Rev. Sci. Instr. Review of Scientific Instruments 

Scripta Math. Scripta Mathematica 

Trans. ASME Transactions; of the American Society of 

Mechanical Engineers. 

Trans. AIEE Transactions of the American Institute of 

Electrical Engineers 

Trans. Soc. Motion Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture 

Picture Eng. Engineers. 

NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

RESEARCH HIGHLWHTS. IN SCIENCE AND 

1. ELECTRICITY Coffin, Construction and. calculation of absOlute standards 

of inductance (S29, 1906) 

Brooks, The deflection. potentiometer: a new for the 

measurement of emi and current 1906) 

Austin, Detector for small alternating currents and dec. 

trical: [racliol wwves €S22, 1905) 

Rosa & A new determination of the. ratio of the 

electromagnetic to the electrostatic unit of electricity 

(S65 and 566, 1907) 

Wolff, The principles involved in the selection and definition of the fundamental electrical units to be proposed 

for international adoption (S102, 1909) 

Burrows, A new permeameter for determination of 

netic induction in straight bars (S117, 1909) 

2. WEIGHTS & Osborne & Veazey, New methods for testing glass voluMEASURES metric apparatus (S92, 1908) 

Standard density and volumetric tables (C19, 1909) 

3. HEAT & Waidner & Burgess, Optical pyrometry (S8 and Sli, 1904) 

THERMOMETRY Burgess, Radiation from platinum at high temperatures 

(S24, 1905; S124, 1909) 

Burgess, Melting points of the iron-group elements by a new radiation method (S62, 1907) 

Wensel, Roeser, Barbrow & Caldwell, The Waidner. 

Burgess standard of light (Elec. World, 52, 625, 1908; 

RP325, 1931) 

Burgess, The estimation of the temperature of copper by means of optical pyrometers (S121, 1909) 

Buckingham, On the definition of the ideal gas (S136, 

1910) 
APPENDIX K 633 

4. OPTICS Nutting, Some new rectifying effects in conducting gases 

[Development with Sperling of the first neon sign tubing] (S6, 1904) 

Coblentz, A vacuum radiomicrometer (A new form of 

radiometer] (S46, 1906) 

Bates, A quartz compensating polariscope with adjusting 

sensibility (S86, 

Nutting, The resolving power of objectives (S122, 1909) 

5. CHEMISTRY Stokes & Cain, On the colorimetric determination of iron 

with special reference to chemical reagents (S53, 1907) 

Noyes, The atomic weight of hydrogen (S77, 1908) 

Douty, Bursting strength. The conditions which influence 

this test of paper considered (Paper Trade J. 50, 271, 

1910) 

NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—1911-1916 

1. ELECTRICITY Agnew, A study of the current transformer - - - (Pioneer 

analysis of the performance of current transformers] 

(S164, 1911) 

Dellinger, High-frequency ammeters (Measurement of 

high-frequency radio current] (S206, 1914) 

Vinal & Bates, Comparison of the silver and iodine voltameters and the determination of the value of the faraday 

[Precise determination of the faraday] (S218, 1914) 

Curtis, Insulating properties of solid dielectrics (S234, 

1915) 

Rosa & McCollum, Electrolysis and its mitigation (T52, 

1915; Logan, C450, 1945) 

Kolster, A direct-reading instrument for measuring the 

logarithmic decrement and wave length of electromagnetic waves [The Koister decremeter] (S235, 1915) 

Brooks & Weaver, A variable self and mutual inductor 

(S290, 1917) 

Rosa & Vinal, Summary of experiments on the silver voltameter - - - and proposed specifications (S285, 1916) 

2. WEIGHTS & Gray, Hidnert & Souder, Development of precision microMEASURES metric thermal expansion equipment (J. Wash. Acad. 

Sci. 2, 248, 1912; S219, 1914; S276, 1916; S410, 1922; 

S524, 1926) 

U.S. standard tables for petroleum oils (C57, 1916; 

C154, 1924; C410, 1936—37) 

3. HEAT & Waidner & Burgess, On the constancy of the sulphur boilTHERMOMETRY ing point (S149, 1911) 

Buckingham & Dellinger, On the computation of the con- stant C2 of Planck's equation by an extension of 

Paschen's method of equal ordinates (S162, 1911) 

Harper, Thermometric lag (S185, 1912) 

Burgess, A micropyrometer (S198, 1913) 

Dickinson & Mueller, New calorimetric resistance thermometers (S200, 1913; Sligh, S407, 1922) 
634 APPENDIX K 

Dickinson, Harper & Osborne, Latent heat of fusion of ice 

(S209, 1914) 

Burgess & Crowe, Critical ranges A2 and A3 of pure iron 

(S213, 1914; Thompson & Cleaves, RP1226, 1939) 

Waidner & Mueller, Industrial gas calorimetry [First com- prehensive study of methods of measuring heating value 

of gases] (T36, 1914) 

Burgess & Foote, Characteristics of radiation pyrometers 

(S250, 1915) 

Buckingham, Model experiments and the forms of empirical equations [in fluid mechanics] (Trans. ASME, 

37, 263, 1915) 

Dickins6n, Combustion calorimetry and the heats of com- bustion of cane sugar, benzoic acid and naphthalene 

(S230, 1915) 

Waidner, Dickinson, et al., Wheatstone bridges for resist- ance thermometry (S241, 1915; S288, 1917) 

Foote & Fairchild, Luminosity of a black body and temperature (S270, 1916) 

4. OPTICS Coblentz, Measurements on standards of radiation in absolute value [Standards of radiant flux and thermal radiation] (S227, 1915; Coblentz and Stair, RP578, 1933) 

Coblentz, A comparison of stellar radiometers and radiometric measurements on 110 stars [Use of vacuum thermopiles with calcium "getter" bulb] (S244, 1915) 

Coblentz & Emerson, Studies of instruments for measuring 

radiant energy in absolute value: an absolute thermopile 

(S261, 1916) 

Coblentz, Present status of the determination of the con- stant of total radiation from a black body [Use of filters 

in combination with thermopiles] (S262, 1915) 

Bates & Jackson, Constants of the quartz-wedge saccharimeter and the specific rotation of sucrose (S268, 1916) 

5. CHEMISTRY McBride, Weaver, et al., Determination of sulphur in 

illuminating gas [Development of apparatus and methods of gas analysis] (T20, 1913; TilO, 1918) 

Standards for gas service [First compilation of 

rules and regulations relating to standards for gas service 

of public utilities] (C32, 1912; 4th ed, 1920) 

Standard methods of gas testing [Fuel gas testing 

and performance testing of gas appliances] (C48, 1914; 

2d ed., 1916) 

NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—1917-1919 

L ELECTRICITY Koister, The radio direction finder and its application to navigation (1917; S428, 1922) 

Wenner,' [Construction of a high precision bridge] . . - for the comparison of precision standard resistors (1918; 

RP1323, 1940) 

Silsbee, 'Note on electrical conduction in metals at low 

temperatures [The Silsbee hypothesis, relating critical 

current and critical magnetic field in superconductors] 

(S307, 1918) 
APPENDIX K 635 

Lowell & Willoughby, Underwater antenna for submerged 

submarines (NBS Radio Laboratory Report, Nov 1918) 

Otild, [Standard variable condenser for radio] (reported 

in C74, 2d ed., 1918) 

2. WEIGHTS & Stillman, A portable cubic-foot standard for gas (T114, 

MEASURES 1918) 

Van Keuren, Manufacture of Hoke precision gages 

(Mech. Eng. 41, 289, 1919; Am. Mach. 50, 625, 1919) 

3. HEAT & Osborne & Van Dusen, The specific heat of liquid ammonia 

THERMOMETRY (S313, 1918) 

Mueller & Burgess, H. A., Standardization of the sulphur 

boiling point (S339, 1919) 

4. OPTICS Jackson, The saccharimetric normal weight and specific 

rotation of dextrose (S293, 1917) 

Method for slip casting large refractory pots; war- time production of optical glass; design of new types of 

optical glass (1917—18; Gardner & Halmer, M194, 1949) 

Coblentz & Kahier, Some optical and photoelectric properties of molybdenite (S338, 1918) 

Coblentz, The spectrophotoelectric sensitivity of thalofide 

[New infrared detection devices] (S380 and S398, 1920) 

Gibson, Photoelectric spectrophotometry by the null 

method [First photoelectric spectrophotometer] (S349, 

1919) 

Bates & Bearce, New Baumé scale for sugar solutions 

(T115, 1918) 

5. CHEMISTRY Edwards, A specific gravity balance for gases [First com- mercial specific gravity balance for gases] (T89, 1917) 

Edwards, Effusion method of determining gas density 

[Instruments and method for determinating gas density] 

(T94, 1917) 

Weaver & Weibel, New forms of instruments for showing 

the presence and amount of combustible gas in the air 

(S334, 1919) 

8. METALLURGY Merica, Waltenberg & Scott, The heat treatment of duralumin [First explanation of the phenomenon of age 

hardening of metals] (S347, 1919) 

9. CLAY PRODUCTS Silsbee, Honaman, et al., [Development of a new type of 

porcelain for aviation spark plugs] (Nati. Adm. Comm. 

Aeron. Rep. 53, 1919) 

NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS IN SCiENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—1920-1930 

1. ELECTRICITY Breit, High-frequency resistance of inductance coils (S430, 

• 1922) 

• Lowell, An electron-tube amplifier using sixty.cycle alter. 

nating current to supply power for the filaments and 

plates [First a.c. radio set] (S450, 1922) 

Dunmore & Engel, Directive radio transmission on a wave- length of 10 meters [First aural radio beacon] (S469, 

1923) 
636 APPENDiX K 

Hund, Theory of determination of ultra-radio frequencies 

by standing waves on wires [Standard of wavelength] 

(S491, 1924) 

Standard frequency and time interval broadcasts 

(no pub!., 1925—1937) 

Pratt & Diamond, Receiving sets for aircraft beacon and 

telephony [Development of stub antenna for aircraft] 

(RP19, 1928; Diamond & Davies RP313, 1931) 

Dunmore, Design of tuned reed course indicators for aircraft radio beacon (RP28, 1928) 

Wenner, A new seismometer . . - (RP66, 1929) 

Diamond and Kear, A 12-course radio range for guiding 

aircraft . - - (RP154, 1930) 

Diamond & Gardner, Engine ignition shielding for radio 

reception in aircraft (RP158, 1930) 

Thomas, A new design of precision resistance standard 

(RP2O1, 1930) 

Diamond & Dunmore, A radiobeacon and receiving system 

for blind landing of aircraft (RP238, 1930) 

2. WEIGHTS & Souder & Peters,. An investigation of the physical properMEASURES ties of dental materials [A new dental interferometer 

for measuring expansion of dental amalgams] (T157, 

1920) 

Danielson & Souder, The causes and control of fish scaling 

of enamels for sheet iron and steel (J. Am. Ceram. Soc. 

4, 620, 1921) 

Peters & Boyd, Interference methods for standardizing and 

testing precision gage blocks (S436, 1922) 

Testing sieves by projection methods (LC72 and 

LC74, 1922; LC584, 1940) 

Bearce, A fundamental basis for measurements of length 

(S535, 1926) 

Bean, Buckingham & Murphy, Discharge coefficients of 

square-edged orifices for measuring the flow of air 

(RP49, 1929) 

Bean, An apparatus and method for determining the com- pressibility of a gas and the correction for "supercompressibility" (RP17O, 1930) 

3. HEAT & POWER Tables of thermodynamic properties of ammonia 

(C142, 1923) 

Osborne, Stimson, Sligh & Cragoe, Specific heat of superheated ammonia vapor (S501, 1924) 

Kanolt, Nonflammable liquids for cryostats (S520, 1925) 

Burgess and Stimson, The International Temperature 

Scale (RP22, 1928; RP1962, 1948) 

Osborne, Stimson & Fiock, A calorimetric determination 

of thermal properties of saturated water and steam from 

00 to 270° C. (RP209, 1930) 

4. OPTICS Jackson & Silsbee, C. C., The solubility of dextrose in 

water (S437, 1922) 

Meggers, Kiess & Stimson, Practical spectographic analysis (S444, 1922) 

Gibson & Tyndall, The visibility of radiant energy (S475, 

1923) 
APPENDIX K 637 

Judd, Contributions in colorimetry to the development of 

the ICI standard observer (1924; J. Opt. Soc. Am. 23, 

359, 1933) 

Gardner & Bennett, A modified Hartman test based on interference (J. Opt. Soc. Am. 11, 441, 1925) 

Gardner & Case, Camera for photographing the interior of a rifle barrel (J. Opt. Soc. Am. 12, 159, 1926) 

Jackson, C. G. Silsbee & Proffitt, The preparation of levulose (S519, 1925) 

Peters & Phelps, Color [and color nomenclature] in the 

sugar industry (T33&, 1926) 

Gardner, Application of the algebraic aberration equations 

to optical design (S550, 1926) 

Meggers & Burns, Hyperfine structures of lanthanum lines 

Opt. Soc. Am. 14, 449, 1927) 

Davis & Walters, Sensitometry of photographic emulsions 

and a survey of the characteristics of plates and films of 

American manufacture (S439, 1922) 

Davis, A special camera for photographing cylindrical 

surfaces (S517, 1925) 

Davis, Artificial sunlight for photographic sensitometry 

(Trans. Soc. Motion Picture Eng. 12, 225, 1928) 

Taylor, Analysis of diaphragm system for the X.ray standard ionization chamber (RP119, 1929; Taylor & Singer 

RP211, 1930) 

Taylor, The precise measurement of X-ray dosage [The 

first X-ray dosage standards] (RP56, 1929) 

Mohier, Relative production of negative and positive ions 

by electron collisions (Phys. Rev. 26, 614, 1926) 

Mohier & Boecker, Photo-ionization of caesium by line 

absorption (RP186, 1930) 

5. CHEMISTRY Holler, A method of studying electrode potentials and 

polarization ( (S504, 1924; Darnielle, RP1336, 1940) 

Palmer & Weaver, [First U.S. publication of] Thermal. 

conductivity method for the analysis of gases (T249, 

1924) 

Weaver, Relation between the heating value of gas and its 

usefulness to the customer (T290, 1925) 

First industrial recording instrument based on thermal conductivity (constructed for Navy plant at 

Indian Head, Md., 1924— no pubi.) 

Weaver, Eiseman & Shawn, [First program based on] A 

method for testing gas appliances to determine their 

safety from producing carbon monoxide (T304, 1926) 

Swanger, [First analytical methods for] The analysis of 

dental gold alloys (S532, 1926) 

Souder et al., [First standards and certification system 

for dental materials] (J. Dental Res. 7, 173, 1927; 

C433, 1942) 

Coleman, Physical properties of dental materials [First 

accurate determination of casting shrinkage of dental 

inlay gold] (RP32, 1928) 
638 APPENDIX K 

Washburn, Bruun & Hicks, Apparatus and methods for 

the separation, identification, and determination of the 

chemical constituents. of petroleum (RP45, 1929) 

Washburn, On the determination of the empirical formula 

of a hydrocarbon (RP236, 1930) 

6. ENGINEERING Eckhardt, Karcher & Keiser, Electron tube drive for tuning 

PHYSICS forks (Phys. Rev. 17, 535, 1921) 

Heyl & Briggs, The earth inductor compass (Proc. Am. 

Phil. Soc. 61, 15, 1922) 

Tuckerman, [The Tuckerman optical strain gage] (Am. 

Soc. Testing Mater. Proc. 23, 602, 1923) 

Heck, Eckhardt & Chrisler, Radio-acoustic method of position finding in hydrographic surveys (no publ., 1924) 

Quayle, Spark photography and its application to some 

problems in ballistics [First spark shadow photographs 

of bullets in flight] (S508, 1924) 

Zobel & Carroll, A hot-wire anemometer for measuring air 

flow through engine radiators (T287, 1925) 

Briggs, Hull & Dryden, Aerodynamic characteristics of 

airfoils at high speeds (Nati. Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. 

Rep. 207, 1924; Nat!. Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. Rep. 

319, 1929; Nati. Mv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. Rep. 365, 

1930) 

Tuckerman, Keulegan & Eaton, A fabric tension meter for use on aircraft [for testing rigid airship envelopes] 

(T320, '1926) 

Buckingham, Theory and . . . experiments on the transmission of sound through partition walls (S506, 1925) 

Dryden, Heald, et a!., Investigations in turbulence in wind 

tunnels (Nati. Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. Rep. 231, 1926; 

Natl. Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. Rep. 342,. 1930, et seq.) 

Whittemore, Petrenko, et al., Proving rings for calibrating 

testing machines (patents, 1926; C454, 1946) 

Heyl, A redetermination of the constant of gravitation 

(RP256, 1930) 

Tuckerman, Whittemore & Petrenko, A new dead-weight 

testing machine of 100,000 pounds capacity (RP147, 

1930) 

Dryden & Hill, [Studies of wind pressure on structures] 

(Proc. Nati. Acad. Sci., Nov 1930; RP3O1, 1931; RP545, 

1933) 

7. ENGINEERING, Holt & Wormeley, Dynamometer [equipment and] tests 

STRUCTURAL of automobile tires (T240, 1923) & MISC. Holt & Wormeley, [Equipment for] Endurance tests of 

MATERIALS tires (T318, 1926) 

Holt, Wormeley, et al., The testing of rubber goods (C38, 

5th ed., 1927) 

Kline & Acree, Consumption of nitric acid in the oxidation of xylose (md. Eng. Chem. 22, 975, 1930) 

Kline & Acree, A study of the method for titrating aldose 

sugars with standard iodine and alkali (RP247, 1930) 

8. METALLURGY Merica & Waltenberg, [Pioneer work on the] Malleability and metallography of nickel (T281, 1925) 

French & Klopsch, Initial temperature and mass effects in 

quenching ,T295, 1925; French & Hamill, RP1O3, 1929) 
APPENDIX K 639 

French & Tucker, Flow in a low-carbon steel at various 

temperatures [Pioneer work on creep of metals at 

elevated temperatures] (T296, 1925; Geil & Carwile, 

RP2329, 1952) 

Jordan & Eckman, Gases in metals [Pioneer work on the 

effects of oxygen and hydrogen on the properties and 

behavior of metals] (S514, 1925) 

Herschman, Air-hardening rivet stcels (T358, 1927) 

Rawdon, [The prevention of corrosion in duralumin] 

Nail. Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. Note 284, 1928) 

Saeger and Ash, [Practical methods of determining the 

quality of metals in the foundry] (LC252, 1928; RP399, 

1932) 

Logan, Soil-corrosion studies (First explanation of the 

mechanism of corrosion in soils] (RP95, 1929) 

French & Digges, Turning with shallow cuts at high 

speeds [and method for testing high-speed tool steels] 

(RP12O, 1929) 

Freeman, Scherer & Rosenberg, Reliability of fusible tin 

boiler plugs in service [Cause and remedy for their 

failure in marine boilers] (RP129, 1930; see also 

Burgess & Merica, T53, 1914) 

9. CERAMICS Finn, Making the glass disk for a 70-inch telescope reflector [The first reflector this large made in the United 

States] (RP97, 1929) 

NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—1931--1940 

1. ELECTRICAL Sanford, A method for the standardization of permeameters at high magnetizing forces (RP279, 193].) 

Kear & Wintermute, A simultaneous radiotelephone and 

visual range beacon for the airways (RP341, 1931) 

Diamond, The.cause and elimination of night effects in 

radio range-beacon reception (RPSJ3, 1933) 

Brooks, The standard-cell comparator [Design and con- struction of a specialized potentiometer for exact com- parison of standard cells] (RP586, 1933) 

Harris, A new cathode-ray oscillograph and its application 

to the study of power loss in dielectric materials 

(RP636, 1934) 

Dunmore, Unicontrol radio receiver for ultra high frequencies, using concentric lines as interstage couplers 

(RP856, 1935) 

Dellinger, Sudden disturbances of the ionosphere [Discovery of the Dellinger effect] (RP1O16, 1937) 

Curtis, Moon & Sparks, An absolute determination of the 

ohm (RP857, 1936; RP1137, 1938) 
640 APPENDIX K 

Brooks, Defandorf & Silsbee, An absolute electrometer 

for the measurement of high alternating voltages 

(RP1078, 1938) 

Diamond, Hinman, Dunmore, et al., A method for the 

investigation of upper-air phenomena and its application 

to radio meteorography [The radiosonde] (RP1082, 

1938; RP1329, 1940) 

Dunmore, An electric hygrometer and its application to 

radio meteorography (RP11O2, 1938; RP1265, 1939) 

Astin, Measurement of relative and true power factors of 

air capacitors (RP1138, 1938) 

George, Production of accurate one-second time intervals 

(RP1136, 1938) 

Curtiss, Astin, et al., An improved radio meteorograph on the Olland principle (RP1169, 1939) 

2. WEIGHTS & Design of flexible steel gages for control of mesh 

MEASURES size of gill nets (LC372, 1933) 

Peffer, Device for testing haemacytometers and other 

pipettes of small capacity [The Peffer pipette tester] 

(RP1O19, 1937) 

Knoop, Peters & Emerson, A sensitive pyramidal-diamond 

tool for indentation measurements [The Knoop hard- ness indenter] (RP1220, 1939) 

3. HEAT & POWER Roeser, Caidwell & Wensel, The freezing point of platinum 

(RP326, 1931) 

Van Dusen & Shelton, Apparatus for measuring thermal 

conductivity of metals up to 600° C (RP668, 1934) 

Wensel, Judd & Roeser, Establishment of a scale of color 

temperature (RP677, 1934) 

Wensel, International Temperature Scale and some re- lated physical constants (RP1189, 1939) 

Osborne, Stimson & Ginnings, Thermal properties of saturated water and steam (RP1229, 1939) 

4. OPTICS Taylor, L. S., X-ray protection [The first X-ray protection 

code] (H15, 1931; H20, 1936, et seq.) 

Davis & Gibson, Filters for tEe reproduction of sunlight 

and daylight and the determination of color temperature [International standards for converting artificial 

light to daylight quality and for determining color 

temperature] (M114, 1931) 

Taylor, International comparison of X-ray standards 

(RP397, 1932) 

Mohler, Collisions of the first and second kind in the 

positive column of a caesium discharge (RP485, 1932) 

Boeckner & Mohler, Scattering of electrons by ions and 

the mobility of electrons in a caesium discharge (RP535, 

1933) 

Taylor, Radium protection [The first radium protection 

code] (H18, 1934; H23, 1938, et seq.) 

Tilton & J. K. Taylor, Refractive index and dispersion of 

normal and heavy water (RP703, 1934) 

Curtiss, Deflection of cosmic rays by a magnetic field 

(RP509, 1932) 

Hoffman & Scribner, Purification of gallium by fractional 

crystallization of the metal (RP823, 1935) 
APPENDIX K 641 

Gardner, Design and construction of eclipse apparatus 

[Application of telephoto lenses to eclipse photographyl 

(1936; reported in Nat. Geo. Soc. Solar Expedition 

Papers, No. 2, 1942, pp. 4, 95) 

Gardner & Case, Precision camera for testing lenses 

(RP984, 1937) 

Mohier, Cesium discharge under conditions of nearly com- plete ionization (RP115O, 1938) 

Gardner, Relation of camera error to photogrammetric 

mapping (RP1177, 1939) 

Saunders, Improved interferometric procedure with appli. 

cation to expansion measurements (RP1227, 1939) 

Gibson & Haupt, Standardization of the luminous.transmission scale used in the specification of railroad signal 

• glasses (RP1209, 1939) 

Judd & Kelly, Method of designating colors [Development 

of the ISCC—NBS method of designating colors] 

(RP1239, 1939; C553, 1955) 

Washer & Gardner, Studies of the resolving power of 

camera lenses (1939—1950; C428, 1940; RP1636, 1945; 

C533, 1953) 

Scribner, Spectrographic detection of rare earths in plants 

(Proc. 6th Summer Conf. on Spectroscopy, 1939, pp. 

10—13) 

Curtiss, Astin, et a!., Cosmic-ray observations in the 

stratosphere with high-speed counters (RP1254, 1939) 

Judd, Hue, saturation, and lightness of surface colors with 

chromatic illumination (RP1285, 1940) 

Carroll & Hubbard, The photographic emulsion - (RP340, 1931 . . - RP622, 1933) 

5. CHEMISTRY Smith, W. H., Saylor & Wing, The preparation and 

crystallization of pure ether-soluble rubber hydrocarbon 

(RP544, 1933) 

Washburn, Standard states for bomb calorimetry (RP546, 

1933) 

Washburn, E. R. Smith & Frandsen, The isotopic fractionation of water (RP6O1, 1933) 

Gilchrist, Methods for the separation of platinum, palladium, rhodium, and iridium [First systematic method 

of separating the platinum metals] (RP655, 1934) 

Washburn, E. R. Smith & F. A. Smith, Fractionation of 

the isotopes of hydrogen and of oxygen in a commerical 

electrolyzer (RP729, 1934) 

Hoffman, Preparation of pure gallium (RP734, .1934) 

Brickwedde, Scott, & F!. S. Taylor, The difference in vapor 

pressures of ortho- and paradeuterium (RP841, 1935) 

Brenner, Magnetic method for measuring the thickness of 

nickel coatings on non-magnetic base metals [The Magnegage] (RP994, 1937) 

Knowlton & Rossini, Method and apparatus for the rapid 

conversion of deuteriuni oxide into deuterium (RP1O5O, 

1937) 
642 APPENDIX• K 

Gilchrist, New procedure for the analysis of dental gold 

alloys (RP11O3, 1938) 

Wildhack & Goerke, Formulas for diaphragm and diaphragm capsules (Nail Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. Note 

738, 1939; Nat!. Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. Note 876, 

1942) 

Thompson, Methods of measuring pH in alkaline cyanide 

plating baths (RP1291, 

6. MECHANICS Lyon, Whittemore, et a!., Strain measurement in reinforce. & SOUND ment - . - [The Whittemore hand strain gage] (RP268, 

1931) 

Snyder, An automatic reverberation meter for the measure- ment of sound absorption (RP457, 1932) 

Peterson & Womack [The aviation superheat meter] 

(Nati. Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. Rep. 606, 1937) 

Cordero, A vibrometer for measuring amplitude in a single 

frequency (patent, 1934) 

Heald, [Ground effect tests and air forces on automobiles] 

(RP748 and RP749, 1934) 

Snyder, Recent sound-transmission measurements [Threshold standards for audiometry] (RP800, 1935) 

Wright, [Pioneer hydraulic model studies] (RP907, 1936; 

Keulegan, RP1488, 1942) 

Hey! & Cook, The value of gravity at Washington (RP946, 

1936) 

Briggs, [The flight performance of golf balls and baseballs] (TNB, No. 252, 1938; RP1624, 1945) 

Keulegan & Beij, Studies of turbulent flow in pipes and 

open channels (RP965, 1937; RP111O, 1938; RP1151. 

1938; RP1488, 1942) 

Golden & Hunter, Backflow prevention in over-rim water 

supplies [Cross-connection flow in plumbing systems) 

(BMS28, 1939) 

Greenspan, Approximation to a function of one variable 

from a set of its mean values [Method of measurement 

of strain at a point] (RP1235. 1939) 

Keulegan & Patterson, Mathematical theory of irrotational 

translation waves [Research on the theory of wave mo- tion] (RP1272, 1940; RP1544, 1943) 

7. ORGANIC & Schiefer & Best, Carpet wear testing machine (RP315, 

FIBROUS 1931) 

MATERIALS Schiefer, The flexometer . . - for evaluating the flexural 

properties of cloth and similar materials (RP555, 1933) 

Schiefer, The compressometer - . - for evaluating the 

thickness - - - and compressional resilience of textiles 

and similar materials (RP561, 1933) 

Becker, Spectral reflectance of - . - abacá [manila rope] 

fiber (RP628, 1933) 

Schiefer & Appel, Hosiery testing machine (RP679 and 

LC466, 1934) 

Carson, A sensitive instrument for measuring the air permeability of paper and other sheet materials (RP681, 1934) 

Bekkedahl, [Volume dilatometer for studying phase 

changes in liquids and solids] (RP717, 1934; RP2016, 

1949) 
APPENDIX K 643 

Kline & Malmberg, Suitability of various plastics [especially cellulose acetate butyrate] for use in airplane 

dopes (RP1098, 1938) 

Taylor, R. H., & Holt, Small inertia-type machine for 

testing brake lining (RP1297, 1940) 

Launer, Apparatus for the study of the photochemistry of 

sheet materials (RP1300, 1940) 

8. METALLURGY Rosenberg & Jordan, Influence of oxide films on the wear 

of steels (RP708, 1934) 

Buzzard & Wilson, Anodic coating of magnesium alloys 

[for aircraft use] (RP964, 1937) 

Krynitsky & Saeger, Elastic properties of cast iron [Optical 

method for measuring deflection of cast iron bars under 

pressure] (RP1176, 1939) 

9 CLAY & Geller & Creamer, "Moisture expansion" of ceramic white 

SILICATE ware [Discovery of effect of moisture expansion on PRODUCTS crazing of glasses] (RP472, 1932) 

Kessler & Sligh, Physical properties and weathering 

characteristics of slate (RP477, 1932) 

Swenson, Wagner & Pigman, Effect of the granulometric 

composition of cement on the properties of pastes, mor- tars, and concretes [New method for determining fine- ness of Portland cement] (RP777, 1935) 

Theuer, Effect of temperature on the stress-deformation 

of concrete [Sonic methods for measurement of modules 

of elasticity of concrete] (RP970, 1937) 

Stull & Johnson, Relation between moisture content and 

flow-point pressure of plastic clay [First comprehensive 

study of cause of white-coat plaster failures] (RP1186, 

1939) 

NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 1N SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—1941-1945 

1. ELECTRICITY [Development of workable perchloric and fluoboric 

acid batteries] (1941; TNB 30, 76, 1946) 

Astin, Radio reporters for proximity fuse testing [Telemetering from missiles in flight] (Classified NDRC 

Rep. A—53, 1942) 

Hinman & Brunetti, Radio proximity fuze design (1941; 

RP1723, 1946) 

Silsbee, Static electricity [Nature, origins, and mitigation 

of static electricity in industrial processes] (C438, 1942) 

[Development of first guided missile, the BAT] 

(1944; TNB 31, 30, 1947) 

Code for protection against lightning (H40, 1945) 

Franklin, NBS casting resin for potting electronic circuitry (1945; TNB 31, 78, 1947) 
644 APPENDIX K 

2. WEIGHTS & Hidnert, Thermal expansion of electrolytic chromium [ExMEASURES planation of cracking of chromium plating] (RP1361, 

1941) Absolute collimeter for testing range and height 

finders (no publ., 1942) Schoonover & Dickson, [Development of mold lining ma- terial for, processing resin dentures] (J. Am. Dental 

Assoc. 29, 1349, 1942) 

Schoonover, Souder & Beall, [First explanation of delayed] 

Excessive expansion of dental amalgam (J. Am. Dental 

Assoc. 29, 1825, 1942) 

[Development of] Elastic dental impression com- pounds with an alginate base (J. Am. Dental Assoc. 30, 

565, 1943) 

Peters, Nefflen & Harris, Diamond cutting by an electric arc (RP1657, 1945) 

4. OPTICS Scribner, Spark spectrographic analysis of commercial tin 

(RP1451, 1942) Coblentz & Stair, A daily record of ultraviolet solar and 

sky radiation in Washington, 1941 to 1943 (RP1593, 

1944) 

Seribner & Mullin, Carrier-distillation method for spectrographic analysis and its application to the analysis of 

uranium-base materials (Manhattan Project Report 

A—2907, Sep 1945; RP1753, 1946) 

Washer, Region of usable imagery in airplane-camera 

lenses (RP1636, 1945) 

Gibson, Haupt & Keegan, Specification of railroad signal 

colors and glasses (RP1688, 1946) 

Meggers, Microscopy, past, present, and future (J. Opt. 

Soc. Am. 36, 431, 1946) 

5. CHEMISTRY Branham, Shepherd & Schuhmann, Critical study of the 

determination of carbon monoxide by combustion over platinum - . . [First sensitive colorimetric indicator for 

carbon monoxide] (RP1396, 1941) 

Mair, Glasgow & Rossini, Separation of hydrocarbons by 

azeotropic distillation (RP1402, 1941) 

Gilchrist, Analytical separations by means of controlled 

hydrolytic precipitation (RP1519, 1943) 

Flint, Clarke, et aL, Extraction of alumina from clays 

and high-silica bauxites (RP1691, 1945-46; Hoffman, 

Leslie, et al., RP1756, 1946) 

6. MECHANICS Hunter, Water-distributing systems for buildings (BMS79, & SOUND 1941) 

Hey! & Chrzanowski, A new determination of the constant 

of gravitation (RP1480, 1942) 

Wildhack & Iberall, [Linear flowmeter for measuring oxygen regulator characteristics] (TNB 28, 68, 1944) 

Cordero, Waterproof and shockproof standby compass 

(no publ., 1943) Ramberg & Osgood, Description of stress-strain curves by 

three parameters (Natl. Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. Note 

902, 1943) 
APPENDIX K 645 

McPherson, Adaptor for measuring principal strains with 

Tuckerman strain gage (Nati. Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. 

Note 898, 1943) 

Keulegan, Laminar flow at the interface of two liquids 

[Research on density currents] (RP1591, 1944) 

Brueggman, Mayer & Miller, Devices for testing thin sheet 

metals in compression tests (Nati. Adv. Comm. Aeron. 

Tech. Note 931, 1944; Nati. Adv. Comm. Aeron. Tech. 

Note 1022, 1946) 

Tate, Solenoid compensating device for hardness testing 

machines (patent, 1944) 

Womack & Orbach, [Carbon monoxide indicators for aircraft] (1941; TNB 30,73, 1946) 

Womack & Cordero, Yaw meter for aircraft (no publ., 1945) 

Greenspan & Sweetman, A transfer strain gage for [meas. 

urement of] large strains (RP 1658, 1945) 

Cook & Chrzanowski, Absorption and scattering by soundabsorbent cylinders [Acoustic impedance of the human 

earJ (RP1709, 1946) 

Ramberg, Vacuum-tube acceleration pickup (RP1754, 

1946) 

Womack & Cordero [A portable wind speed and direction 

indicator] (TNB 31, 97, 1947) 

7. ORGANIC & Dreby, The planoflex . . . for evaluating the pliability of 

FIBROUS fabrics (RP1434, 1941) 

MATERIALS Kline & Schiefer, An instrument for estimating tautness of 

doped fabrics on aircraft [Tautness meter] (Natl. Adv. 

Comm. Aeron. Tech. Note 729, 1942) 

Schiefer, Mizell & Mosedale, [Thermal transmission apparatus for testing textiles] (RP1528, 1943) 

Dreby, A friction meter for determining the coefficient of 

kinetic friction [in testing the smoothness] of fabrics 

(RP1562, 1943) 

Kanagy, Charles, et al., [Prevention of mildew of leather] 

(RP1713, 194.6) 

Plastic housing for binoculars (TNB 28, 30, 1944) 

Schiefer, Machines and methods for testing cordage fibers 

(RP1611, 1944) 

Standard fading lamp (LC785, 1945) 

8. METALLURGY Ellinger, Bissell & Williams, [Development of] The teebend test to compare the welding quality of steels 

(RP1444, 1942) 

9. CLAY & Geller, A resistor furnace . . . [Development of ceramic 

SILICATE oxide resistors for high-temperature furnaces] (RP1443, PRODUCTS 1941) 

Harrison & Moore, [Mechanism of] Weather resistance of 

porcelain-enameled iron structural units (RP1476, 1942) Hoffman, J. I., Leslie, et al., Development of a hydrochloric acid process for the production of alumina from clay (RP1756, 1946) 

Harrison, Moore & Richmond, Ceramic coatings for high. 

temperature protection of steel (RP1773, 1947) 
646 APPENDIX K 

NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS 

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—1946-1951 

1. ELECTRICITY Washer & Scott, Influence of the atmosphere upon the pre- & OPTICS cision of telescope pointing (RP1829, 1947) 

Washer, Sources of error in and calibration of the f-number 

of photographic lenses (RP1927, 1948) 

Gardner & Hahner, Research and development in applied 

optics and optical glass at the NBS (M194, 1949) 

Washer & Case, Calibration of precision airplane mapping cameras (RP2108, 1950) 

Electrochemical constants: a symposium (C524, 

1953) 

Optical image evaluation: a symposium (C526, 

1954) 

2. METROLOGY Peters, Emerson, et aL, Electrical methods for diamonddie production (RP1787, 1947) 

Bowman, An automatic correction-computing chronograph 

[A method for making precision isochronism measure- ments] (Horological Inst. Am. J. 6, 13, 1951) 

Frequency-monitoring device for interval timers 

(TNB 33, 99, 1949) 

Gravity waves: a symposium (C521, 1952) 

3. HEAT & POWER Woolley, Scott & Brickwedde, Compilation of thermal prop. 

erties of hydrogen in its various isotopic and ortho-para 

modifications (RP1932, 1948) 

Scott, [New helium liquefier for studies in superconductivity] (TNB 33, 13, 1949) 

Low-temperature physics: a symposium (C519, 

1952) 

Mechanical properties of metals at low tempera. 

tures: a symposium (C520, 1952) 

Energy transfer in hot gases: a symposium (C523, 

1954) 

4. ATOMIC & Singer, Braestrup & Wyckoff, Absorption measurements 

RADIATION for broad beams of 1- and 2-million-volt X-rays [Use of 

PHYSICS concrete as a high-energy radiation shield] (RP1735, 

1946) 

Meggers & Westfall, Lamps and wavelengths of mercury 

198 [New standard of length, the Hg198 lamp] (TNB 

31, 133, 1947; Sci. Mo. 68, 3, 1949; RP2091, 1950) 

Marton & Belson, Tracer micrography [with radioactive 

isotopes] (Science, 106, 2742, 1947) 

A non-magnetic radio-frequency mass spectrometer 

(TNB 32, 1, 1948) 

Marton & Lachenbruch, Electron optical observation of 

magnetic fields [The electron optical shadow method for 

field mapping] (RP2033, 1949) 

Curtiss & Carson, Reproducibility of photo-neutron standards (Phys. Rev. 76, 1412, 1949) 

Hipple, Sommer & Thomas, A precise method of determining the faraday by magnetic resonance [The omegatron] 

Phys. Rev. 76, 1877, 1949) 
APPENDIX K 647 

Thomas, Driscoll & Hipple, Measurement of the proton 

moment in absolute units (Phys. Rev. 75, 902, 1949; 

1950) 

Driscoll, Thomas & Hipple, The absolute value of the 

gyromagnetic ratio of the proton (Phys. Rev. 78, 339, 

1950) 

Huntoon & Fano, Atomic definition of primary standards 

(Nature, 166, 167, 1950) 

Electron physics: a symposium (C527, 1954) 

Mass spectroscopy in physics research: a symposium (C522, 1953) 

5. CHEMISTRY Shepherd, Analysis of a standard sample . . . [First na- tion-wide effort to standardize gas analysis] (RP1704, 

1946) 

Brenner & Riddell, Nickel plating on steel by chemical 

reduction (RP1725, 1946) 

Rossini, Pitzer, et aL, Tables of selected values of properties of hydrocarbons (C461, 1947) 

Glasgow, Murphy, et aL, Purification, purity, and freezing 

points of 31 hydrocarbons of the API—NBS series 

(RP1734, 1946) 

Schwab & Wichers, [Benzoic acid cells as thermometric 

standard] (TNB 31, 116, 1947) 

Brenner, Couch & Williams, Electrodeposition of alloys of 

phosphorus with nickel or cobalt (RP2061, 1950) 

Scribner & Corliss, Emission spectrographic standards 

(Anal. Chem. 23, 1548, 1951) 

Electrodeposition research: a symposium (C529, 

1953) 

6. MECHANICS Carson & Worthington, Apparatus for determining watervapor permeability of moisture barriers (C453, 1946) 

Wildhack & Goalwin, [Compact liquid-to-gas oxygen converter] (TNB 33, 65, 1949) 

Wexier, Divided flow, low-temperature humidity test apparatus [for radiosonde hygrometers] (TNB 32, 11, 1948; 

RP1894, 1948) 

Levy, A. E. McPherson & Hobbs, Calibration of accelerometers [for aircraft] (RP1930, 1948) 

Cordero, Johnson & Womack [Development of the Pfund 

sky oompass] (TNI3 33, 53, 1949) 

Cordero, Stick-force indicator for aircraft (TNB 34, 6, 

1950) 

French, Stack venting of plumbing fixtures (BMS118, 

1950) 

Characteristics and application of resistance strain 

gages: a symposium (C528, 1954) 

7. ORGANIC & Schiefer, et al., Solution of problem of producing uniform 

FIBROUS abrasion and its application to the testing of textiles 

MATERIALS (RP1807, 1947; RP1988, 1949) 

Holt, Knox & Roth, Strain test for rubber [Vulcanizates] 

(RP1907, 1948) 

Axi]rod, Thiebeau & Brenner, Variable-span flexure test 

jig for plastic specimens (ASTM Bull. 148, 96, 1947) 
APPENDIX K 

Hobbs, [Luggage testing and fatigue tester for luggage 

handles] (TNB 32, 134, 1948) 

Hanks & Weissberg [The osmometer] (1948; RP2377, 

1952) 

Newman, Borysko & Swerdlow, Ultra-microtomy by a new method (RP2020, 1949) 

O'Leary, et aL, Paper from glass fibers (TNB 35, 177, 

1951; TNB 39, 82, 1955) 

Polymer degradation mechanism: a symposium 

(C525, 1953) 

8. METALLURGY Digges, Reinhart, et al., Influence of boron on some properties of experimental and commercial steels [Substitution 

of boron for carbon in hardening steels] (RP1815, 1947; 

RP1938, 1948) 

Rosenberg & Darr, Stabilization of austenitic stainless steel 

[Prevention of corrosion in certain stainless steels] 

(RP1878, 1948) 

9. MINERAL [Preparation of very thin] Ceramic dielectrics for 

PRODUCTS electronic signal devices (TNB 33, 142, 1949) 

Harrison, Moore & Richmond, Ceramic coatings for high. 

temperature protection of steel (RP 1773, 1947) 

11. APPLIED Lowan, The computation laboratory of the NBS [MatheMATHEMATICS matical tables program, 1930—1950] (Scripta Math. 15, 

33, 1949) 

13. ELECTRONICS Brunetti & Curtis, NBS. printed circuit techniques (TNB & ORDNANCE 31, 1946; C468, 1947) 

DEVELOPMENT Rabinow, Magnetic fluid clutch (TNB 32, 54, 1948) 

Computer development at the NBS [SEAC, SWAC, 

and DYSEAC] (C551, 1955) 

14. CENTRAL RADIO Ionospheric radio propagation [Basic radio propaPROPAGATION gation predictions] (C462, 1947) 

LABORATORY Husten & Lyons, Microwave frequency [measurements and 

standards] (Elec. Eng. 67, 436, 1948) 

Kerns, Determination of efficiency of microwave bolometer 

mounts from impedance data (RP1995, 1949) 

Lyons, et al., The atomic clock: an atomic standard of 

frequency and time (TNB 33, 17, 1949) 

Lyons, Microwave spectroscopic frequency and time standards [The atomic clock] (Elec. Eng. 68, 251, 1949) 

Birnbaum, A recording microwave refractometer (Rev. Sci. 

Instr. 21, 169, 1950) 

Greene & Solow, Development of very-high-frequency fieldintensity standards (RP2100, 1950) 

Birnbaum, Kryder & Lyons, Microwave measurements of 

the dielectric properties of gases (J. Appl. Phys. 22, 95, 

1951) 

Selby, Radio-frequency micropotentiometer [and measure- ment of accurate rf microvoltages] (TNB 35, 33, 1951; 

Trans. AIEE 72, 158, 1953) 

Huston, Improved NBS ammonia clock (Proc. IRE 39, 

208, 1951) 

Lyons, Spectral lines as frequency standards [NBS Model 

Ill .of the ammonia clock] (Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 55, 

831. 1952) 
LAND PURCHASES 

for the National Bureau of Standards 

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE 

WASHINGTON. D.C. SCALE 100 0 100 

APPENDIX L 

Cl) I-. Cl) .1d U) 200 300L.400FT. 

I-. U) 10 II-, I- Cl) z 

('J •l— 

0.85 ACRES 

1942 

8th PURCHASE 

12.52 ACRES 

1941$ Harry Diamond Laboratories 

I.- C,) z 

IC, a -J ndustr,al ' I Mineral Products 

SCHEDULE OF PURCHASES 

Source: PLANT DIVISION, NBS 

1901 7.46 ACRES 1913 8.76 ACRES 1918 10.80 ACRES 1918 1.47 ACRES 1920 6.60 ACRES 1925 7.95 ACRES 1930 15.01 ACRES 1941 12.52 ACRES 1942 .085 ACRES 

$25,000 

66,034 

81,500 

7,000 

47,260 

173,117 

400,000 

125,000 
APPENDIX M 

SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON 

Founder and First Director of the 

National Bureau of Standards 1 

It is no exaggeration to say that Dr. Stratton's whole life was the National Bureau of 

Standards and that every formative influence in his early years was a preparation for his 

founding and direction of the Bureau. The Bureau is his monument, and the ideals of 

service that Stratton built into the edifice he raised in the age of commerce and industry 

survive intact into the present space age. 

The name "Stratton" goes back to l2th.century Scotland, the surname of families 

who dwelt in a walled village by a paved road. The first Stratton on record in this 

country came from England in 1628. Dr. Stratton himself is believed to have descended 

from a Thomas Stratton who received a patent of land in Pittsylvania County, Va., in 

1764. Thomas's great grandson Robertson Stratton moved from Virginia to Kentucky, 

where his fifth child, the father of Samuel Wesley Stratton, was born in 1832. 

Upon the death of Robertson in 1832, his widow and children moved to Illinois. 

Dr. Stratton's father, Samuel, grew up in Litchfield, Ill., went into stock farming and 

later lumbering, and married a widow, Mrs. Mary Webster Philips. It was on the farm 

just outside Litchfield that Samuel Wesley was born on July 18, 1861. 

Young Samuel Wesley grew up with little taste for farm life or for the stocks 

of Jersey cattle, Shetland ponies, Brahma chickens, and other new breeds of farm 

animals introduced into the State by his father as a result of periodic trips East and one voyage he made for new stock to England and the Channel Islands. Instead, he took an early interest in tinkering with the farm machinery, clocks, and other devices in the 

house, and in devising mechanical ways of taking the drudgery out of soapmaking, 

making apple butter, and similar farm chores. An annual treat was the stock show in 

St. Louis, 50 miles away, where his father exhibited his livestock and where young Samuel 

explored the exhibits of farm machinery, tools, and new mechanical inventions on display. 

Determined on more education than provided by the district school and the high 

school in Litchfield, 2 miles away, Stratton sold a colt he had raised and announced his 

intention of going for a year to the Illinois Industrial University at Urbana, the future 

University of Illinois. In 1880 land.grant Illinois Industrial was almost 12 years old, a citadel of learning offering courses in "such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, and military studies, without excluding other 

scientific and practical studies." 

The course Samuel Wesley set his heart on was that in "Machine shop practice," 

and he persuaded the registrar to let him take it in his freshman year. He was then 19, 

Except as otherwise noted, the present sketch is based on the manuscript fragment of a biography of Stratton written by Dr. Samuel C. Prescott of the Massachusetts Institute 

of Technology in 1933—34 and on the materials collected for that biography that now comprise the Stratton Papers in the Archives Library at M.I.T. The biographical frag. 

ment and other documents in that collection used in this sketch have been reproduced 

for the NBS Historical File. 

651 
652 APPENDIX M 

probably early in his 3d 

year at Illinois Industrial 

University, about the 

time he entered the home 

of Dr. Peabody, president of the university. 

Stratton as brevet captain, "Co. C., I.!.U. Battalion, Champagne, Ill., 2/25—84," as he 

wrote on the back of the picture. Fourteen years later, his fledgling moustache fully 

grown, he was in uniform again, serving under Commodore Remey during the SpanishAmerican War. 

a stockily built boy of slightly less than average height, with gray-blue eyes and light 

brown hair, his serious face concealing a shyness that, except in the company of close 

friends, was to last all his life. 

With little money from home, he found work in the college machine shops where 

he repaired farm machinery at 10 cents an hour. He also, with a wet-plate camera he had 

brought from home, took pictures of the buildings and classrooms for sale to students 

and visitors, and in the absence of satisfactory textbooks, began blueprinting the notes of 

professors at the university, at 2 cents a sheet. The notes, which he copied neatly from 

often illegible scrawls and then printed, sold well and enabled him to continue into his 

second year. That second year also he secured a room rent free in the chemical laboratory building in exchange for serving as fireman and janitor. 

Stratton's last 2 years at the university were assured when the president and head 

of the department of mechanical engineering, Dr. Delim H. Peabody, offered him room, 

board, and a small salary in exchange for tending the farm and grounds of the presiSamuel W. Stratton at 21, 
4PPENDIX M 653 

dent's house and acting as a sort of personal secretary. He became, a daughter of Dr. 

Peabody later recalled, a member of the family, and the training he received in the social 

graces, in household management, and in meeting and entertaining visitors and guests of 

the university was to prove almost the most valuable part of his college education. 

It was about this time that he seems to have felt his youthful appearance belied 

his new responsibilities, for in his 22d year he began to grow the short, full mustache 

he wore the rest of his life. 

Beginning in his second year, young Stratton took "Military," as required in 

supported universities, and demonstrated marked skill as a drillmaster. Of his other 

studies a contemporary was to say that his scholarship was fair but not brilliant, but 

"in some matters he did excel—shop work, draughtsmanship, and work in the physics 

laboratory * * * his work a model of neatness and accuracy." 

Upon his graduation in 1884, Stratton received a completion certificate for his 

work in mathematics, physics, and mechanical engineering, his grades, according to 

the college record, consistently those expected of a "superior student"; a commission as brevet captain in the State military; and an invitation to return to the university as a member of the faculty. He presented his thesis, "The design of a heliostat," in 1886 

and received his B.S. degree that year. 

In his only extant autobiographical fragment, a four-page note on his military 

and naval service, Stratton said he once asked President Peabody why he been selected 

to teach at the university. The president replied that he had observed Stratton at drill 

and was impressed with the fact that he seemed to know how to get along with men. 

"I enjoyed the systematic way of doing things," Stratton commented, "and that experience. 

especially the discipline, has been of great value to me in most of the things I have been 

called upon to do later." 

After a summer of engineering work in a Chicago factory, Stratton began 

in mathematics and physics in the preparatory department of the university. 

He continued in the rank of instructor until 1889, when he was made assistant professor 

of physics. Upon his organization of a course in electrical engineering a year later, he 

occupied the chair of professor of physics and electrical engineering. In 1892, through a member of the faculty who preceded him, Stratton was called to the new University 

of Chicago as assistant professor of physics.2 

The Ryerson Physical Laboratory at Chicago was under construction and Prof. 

Albert A. Michelson, brought from Clark University to head the new department, 

spent most of that year at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures outside 

Paris. There he demonstrated the practicability of a wavelength (light wave) standard, 

which was destined to replace the standard meter bar as the standard of length. 

Stratton, as senior in Michelson's absence, therefore had the principal task of 

organizing the department and overseeing the construction and equipping of the new physics laboratory. He was then 26. 

Stratton's 7 years under Michelson served him well, for the highly irascible master 

of the spectroscope and interferometer was a stickler for perfection and champion of the 

sixth decimal point. Disciplined in the measurement method of science, Michelson did 

not foresee its replacement by mathematical and theoretical physics, and like many of 

his scientific colleagues he continued to believe that the future of physics was strictly a matter of further precision and improved instrumentation. 

2 Stratton's salary of $2,000 was $500 less than that of Amos Alonzo Stagg (1862—1965), 

brought to. the university that same year as athletic director and given the rank of 

associate professor. Time, Mar. 26, 1965, p. 45. 
654 APPENDIX M 

Sometime after settling into the routine of teaching and research with Michelson, 

Stratton was asked by Michelson, who had a strong interest in the Navy, to assist in 

organizing a volunteer naval militia at Chicago. A naval vessel on the Great Lakes was available for training in the operations of a warship, 'and Stratton accepted command 

of one 'of the four units constituting the naval militia battalion that was formed. At full 

strength his unit comprised a hundred men, consisting of trained engineers as officers 

and skilled artisans as crew. At the outbreak of the war with Spain in the spring of 1898, Stratton was commissioned a lieutenant, put in charge of the battalion, expanded with additional volunteers 

to 705 men, and all were formally inducted into the U.S. Navy. The battalion was sent 

to Key West where it was distributed among the ships preparing to put to sea. Stratton saw most of his original unit detailed to the battleship Oregon when it arrived in late 

May after its famous 16,000-mile voyage around the Horn. 

Many of his men saw action, but not Stratton. He had from the beginning of 

his naval service demonstrated marked executive ability and could not be spared. 

He was first attached to the naval base, then as watch and division officer on Commodore 

George C. Remey's flagship at the base, and finally attached to' 'the battleship Texas, 

sister ship of the Maine, when she came north after the battle of Santiago. Mustered 

out in November 1898, Stratton kept up his naval connections, and from 1904 to 1912 

held the rank of Commander in the District of Columbia Naval Militia. The Bureau 

laboratories were never to be without research projects for the Navy and he maintained a strong attachment to that service all his life. 

His trip to the Nation's Capital late in 1898, to invite Admiral Dewey and 

Secretary of the Treasury Gage to give talks at the University of Chicago, led to Stratton's 

survey of the Office of Weights and Measures in the Coast Survey and the invitation to 

form and head the new National of 

The originals of the Treasury Department appointment of Dr. Stratton as Inspector 

of Standards, effective date of oath Oct. 28, 1899, and the U.S. Civil Service certificate 

formally'appointing him dated Dec. 12, 1899, are in the Stratton Papers, 

MIT, Box 11. 

A communication from Dr. Leonard B. Loeb, emeritus professor of physics, University 

of California, who studied and later taught under Michelson at Chicago, to Mrs. Dorothy 

Michelson Stevens, daughter of the great physicist, suggests that Michelson himself 

was very much interested in the position as Director of the new Bureau and, as plans 

for its establishment matured, hoped Stratton would make that known in Washington. 

Stratton had been Inspector of Standards for 6 months, working on the bill to be 

presented to Congress, when on Apr. 25, 1900, Michelson telegraphed Stratton asking 

him to return at once to Chicago, to help reorganize the local naval militia. Stratton, 

he said, was to be his chief of staff. (Telegram in Stratton Papers, MIT, copy in NBS 

Historical File.) But Stratton was now fally committed to his task in Washington. 

One of Stratton's first duties upon becoming Director on Mar. 3, 1901, was to recom- mend to Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage suitable members for the Visiting 

Committee to the Bureau. A letter in April 1901 to Stratton from Dr. Henry 

S. Pritchett, former head of the Coast and Geodetic Survey who had recently become. 

President of MIT, agreed with Stratton on the wisdom of asking Elihu Thomson, as well as Michelson, to join the Visiting Committee. "I think it wise to ask Michelson also as a member * * * because of his reputation and standing; no doubt we shall be able to 

keep him in good order." (Letter, Apr. 13, in Stratton Papers, Box 5.) The letter of 

invitation to Michelson was sent on June 6, 1901. No answer has been found. The letters 
APPENDIX M 655 

Prior to his appointment in March 1901 as the Bureau Director, Stratton lived 

at a boardinghouse at the corner of 18th and I Streets. Later that year he moved 

into an apartment in The Farragut, then nearing completion, a block away on 17th 

Street. His famous perfect and faithful maid Cordelia who came at this time was to run his bachelor household and delight his frequent dinner guests with her good cooking 

for the next 25 years in Washington and in Cambridge. 

As Director of the Bureau, Dr. Stratton had considerable entertaining to do 

and learned to do it well. He streamed with charm and even his slight air of haughti- ness was engaging. If he was somewhat formal and shy with strangers and acquaintances, 

with those who became friends he was wholly at ease, merry, and playful. He enjoyed 

most of all friends with large families, whose children he could spoil with presents and 

confections. They were sometimes unusual presents, such as the piglet he brought 

to one house, the great white goose he carried to another. As a treat for the Parris 

children on P Street, one of whom, Morris, was many years later to become his personal 

secretary and assistant at MIT, Stratton on one occasion secured the private car of 

the president of the Washington Railway & Electric Co. and for an afternoon and 

evening took them and a swarm of their friends on a picnic trip around the city and out 

into the suburbs. 

Without a family, he made the Bureau family his own, presiding over their 

welfare, their education, and even their marriages, a number of which were held in his 

home at the Farragut. As the Bureau grew and the children of the staff members 

multiplied, Stratton began his custom of putting on elaborate Christmas parties and summer games and picnics for them. At the annual summer party in June, each child was weighed and measured and the new figures compared with those previously recorded. 

For their amusement he had swings erected on the Bureau lawn, brought up an organ 

grinder and monkey, a merry-go-round with a caliope, and hired a clown, and ponies to ride. There was a toy for each child, balloons were everywhere, and all the ice cream, 

lemonade, cake, and cookies the youngsters could eat. And to keep their parents happy 

out on Connecticut Avenue, Stratton held frequent receptions for their entertainment and 

arranged dances, lectures, and musicals, the latter often by members of the staff— 

events unheard of in a Government bureau before that time.4 

He tried golf briefly and occasionally played tennis during his first years at the 

Bureau but never really cared for such organized exercise. The tennis ended when in 

1905 Stratton and Louis A. Fischer, his chief of weights and measures, bought a 25-foot 

motor launch which they kept moored at a boat club on the Potomac. They spent many 

evenings and Sundays on the river, and made new friends along the waterway, among 

them James C. Courts, clerk of the Appropriations Committee, who became a great 

help to Stratton in getting Bureau bills through Congress. Not that he needed much 

help, for Stratton had a way with Congress, of interesting and exciting its committees 

in the research work of the Bureau, that was famous. As commander of the District 

Naval Militia, Stratton also had access to the monitor Puritan and a steam yacht, the 

to those who were to form the first Visiting Committee, including both Thomson and 

Pritchett, were sent on June 18 (see ch. II, p. 61). 

Mrs. Stevens, Michelson's daughter, presently engaged in writing a biography of her 

father, acknowledges that the introspective physicist, with his almost complete lack 

of interest in adminstration, would probably not have been happy as Director of the 

Bureau. But that his standing as a scientist and metrologist made him unquestionably 

the best qualified man in the Nation, and otherwise the obvious choice, for the position 

is beyond question. 

'G. K. Burgess, "Dr. Samuel Wesley Stratton," The Tech Engineering News (MIT), 

3,146 (1922). 
Scenes at the summer picnics that Dr. Stratton planned and presided over on the Bureau lawn between North and South buildings. Dr. Stratton appears in two of the scenes. The picture with the cameraman is dated 1922; the others are probably somewhat earlier. 
APPENDIX M 657 

Oneida, the latter a training ship whose crews on weekend outings and picnics frequently 

included some of Stratton's friends. 

As Director of the Bureau and also a highly eligible bachelor, Stratton was in 

constant demand at official functions and private dinners. He was a frequent guest at 

the White House, beginning with the McKinleys. Later, the houseful of young Roose. 

velts became a recurring delight, as were his visits to the home of Commerce Secretary 

Hoover with its two enterprising youngsters. But his entertainment ranged far beyond 

official circles. For an inherently shy person Stratton had, Dr. Burgess was to say, 

"probably as wide an acquaintance among men of science, industry, engineering, and 

business as any single American." Among his hundreds of acquaintances and friends, 

the two most intimate and longlasting were, not surprisingly, in the instrument industry, 

John Bashear, the great instrumentmaker, and Ambrose Swasey, manufacturer of machine 

tools and astronomical instruments, including the Lick, Naval Observatory, and Yerkes 

telescopes. 

One chore that Dr. Stratton had all his professional life and could not evade was making speeches. Through the years he was called on more and more for talks and 

dedications and addresses, yet never learned to enjoy the prospect or effort. Even late 

in his career the thought of making an informal speech at the Bureau, on the occasion 

of its 25th anniversary, was daunting. As he wote to Dr. Burgess, "Of course, you 

know speaking is rather difficult for me." 6 As the Bureau grew larger and the responsibilities greater, Dr. Stratton took less 

and less time off, until the yearly trips to Paris, mostly for meetings at the International 

Bureau of Weights and Measures, often became his only real vacation. It was during 

one of these Atlantic crossings shortly after World War I that he met Francis R. Hart of 

Boston, banker and member of the executive committee of the Massachusetts Institute 

of Techology, who is said to have submitted Stratton's name to the committee when that 

institution was looking for a new president.7 He was invited to Cambridge in the spring 

of 1922 but deferred the decision to accept the office until he had discussed it with 

Secretary Hoover. Besides his concern for the Bureau, he had just bought an old house 

in Georgetown and was in the midst of remodeling it. Friends of 20 years were in 

Washington and its environs, and his roots were deep in the Bureau he had founded. 

But more visits to Cambridge followed, and on January 2, 1923, after receiving with the 

Hoovers at their annual New Year's day reception, Stratton arrived at the president's 

house on Charles River Road in Cambridge to stay. 

Returning to the Bureau late in 1926 to take part in the celebration of its 25th 

anniversary, Stratton recalled as the greatest accomplishments of the Bureau under his 

direction, not its many achievements in science and technology, but its impact on Amer. 

ican industry. Its most significant accomplishments for the advance of industry, promised 

when the Bureau was founded, were "the influence upon manufacturers, of the introduction of scientific methods of measurements and methods of research * * * [and] 

the training of men for industry." 8 They were also the objectives he had raised to new 

heights in his administration of MIT. 

Dr. Stratton was summering at the home of friends in Manchester, Mass., in June 

1927 when Gov. Alvan T. Fuller asked President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard 

University, Judge Robert A. Grant of the Probate Court of Suffolk County, and Dr. 

5lbid. 6 Letter, Oct. 28, 1926 ("General Correspondence files of the Director, 1945—1955") - Undocumented account in Prescott's manuscript. Hart may have been partly 

mental, hut for a better documented account of the invitation, see ch. V. pp. 233—235. 8 Speech, Dec. 4, 1926 (NBS Blue Folder Box 3, APW3O1c). 
a' 

The Bureau of Standards Orchestra, fostered by Dr. Stratton to keep his staff happy, played at all social functions and from time to time attempted 

concerts. 

Dr. Paul D. Foote, a regular member of the group, recalls "with embarrassment" that this picture was taken during the performance on the evening of April 17, 1918, when "the rendition of a quartet encore [of 'Moment llusicale'] failed to indicate sufficient coordination and practice." Identified in the ensemble are Mr. and Mrs. IV. F. C. Swann, C. G. Peters, P. D. Foote, H. F. Stimson, R. F. Jackson, IV. F. Meggers F. L. Mohler, IV. Skogiand, L. E. IVhittemore, I. H. Dellinger, 0. Lytle, Miss G. Neidig, and P. 
APPENDIX M 659 

Stratton to serve on an advisory committee in the Governor's investigation of the 

Sacco-Vanzetti case. 

Seven years before, in May 1920, Nicolb Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, one a shoe worker, the other a fish peddler, were arrested and subsequently charged with the 

murder of a shoe factory paymaster and his guard at South Braintree, near Boston. 

They bore the stigma of being unnaturalized foreigners, wartime draft dodgers, admitted 

anarchists and atheists. These crimes might have convicted them but in truth they were tried for murder and on July 14, 1921, found guilty. 

Immediately after their arrest, Socialist and anarchist friends formed a SaccoVanzetti.Defense Committee that was soon joined by a civil liberties committee and many 

of the dissident groups that flourished in the troubled years after the war. For 6 years 

the committee delayed execution of the sentence by successive motions for new trials, and 

created a worldwide cause célèbre in which law professors and students, lawyers, college 

professors, editors, journalists, preachers, poets, playwrights, publicists, authors, labor 

unions, church councils, the radical press, volunteer agitators, and simple citizens, labored 

in the atmosphere of the hysteria provoked by the case.. Two respites were granted by Governor Fuller after the sentence of execution, 

pronounced on April 9, 1927, was set. On June 1 the Governor appointed his advisory 

committee of three to make a. final review of the evidence. Lowell, Grant, and Stratton 

studied the amassed records and held hearings and interviews with Judge Webster 

Thayer, the district attorney, the defense attorneys, the jury members, police, and 

many of the witnesses. A recommendation for commutation of the death sentence would 

have relieved them from the threats of violence and the abuse they were to suffer, but in 

their report to the Governor on July 27 they unanimously adjudged the trial fair and 

upheld the jury's verdict that the defendents were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. 

Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927. 

It was a harrowing experience. Tempers were high and threatening letters 

bombarded the committee. An armed guard sat Dr.. Stratton's office at the State 

House and in his car wherever he went. At Manchester a policeman followed his car 

and another patroled his house at night. When the ordeal was over Stratton sailed for 

Europe under secrecy imposed by the uneasy steamship company. He spent the hours 

before sailing in the port captain's office and boarded the ship only at the last minute. 

His name was omitted from the passenger list. In London the American Embassy took 

over, and in that city and in Paris there were demonstrations, but Stratton was not 

recognized and he continued his tour without event. 

Stratton's trips to Europe by then had become frequent, and besides visiting the 

friends he had everywhere, he spent much time in antique shops, collecting old silver 

in shops in Glasgow and at Mallets in Bath, rare china in Kings Street, London, old 

furniture in Rubgy, tapestries wherever they were to be found in France, and new pieces 

of china from the Sèvres factory outside Paris and in the Rive Gauche. No new. or idle 

pastime, this connoisseurship was quite in keeping with his long years of interest in 

ceramics, in textiles, and metalworking. 

His love of fine instruments and working with tools never diminished. As he 

had furnished a workshop next to his office at the Bureau, so one of the first things he set 

up in Cambridge was a nearly perfect shop, with great stores of material and extra 

tools, in the basement below his office at the Institute. Only slightly less complete 

another shop downstairs in the president's house. His zeal for acquisition of "stock," as he called it, extended to his food supplies and linens for the house, to clothing and 

everything else that could be bought ahead. 

He was as lavish, within his means, toward others as toward himself, and never 

made a visit without a shower of presents for his hosts and their children. After visiting 
660 APPENDIX M 

the American consul and his wife in Dresden one summer he mailed them great hampers 

of food unobtainable in postwar Germany. To friends he visited on Norway's North 

Cape he sent two barrels of fruit. Besides his good company, he was always a welcome 

and useful guest, for he willingly mended toys and broken household machines brought 

to his attention. 

A poor sleeper and avid reader from youth onward, Stratton carried books with 

him when he visited and collected them abroad. At home he kept his bedroom shelves 

filled with current scientific periodicals and books and often read from midnight to 3 or 4 in the morning. 

In his 8 years at MIT he introduced at that institution many of the innovations he 

had set going at the Bureau, extending its research in engineering and industrial processes, in pure science, and expanding the Institute's work into new fields of applied 

science. Under him new laboratories and dormitories rose, lecturers were brought from 

the universities of Europe to make available the best research and teaching in science 

and technology abroad, and advisory committees of men eminent in professional or business life were appointed to counsel the departments of the Institute. 

As at the Bureau, Stratton was everywhere overseeing, counseling, and directing 

the affairs of the Institute and the student body, and as his 70th birthday approached 

the effort became overtaxing. Acting on his suggestion, the corporation of MIT divided 

the heavy administrative responsibility in 1930, making Dr. Stratton chairman of the 

corporation. Dr. Karl T. Compton, who had been head of the physics department at 

Princeton, came to assume the presidency of the Institute. 

Stratton's birthday on July 18, 1931, was celebrated by an avalanche of letters, 

almost 200 of them later mounted in a great gleaming leather birthday book. Beginning 

with a warm letter from Herbert and Lou Hoover, the book remains a remarkable index to the world circle of Stratton's friends and acquaintances. 

Four months before his birthday, Stratton, still hale, in excellent health, and full 

of memories of his years at the Bureau, came as guest of honor to a party held in East 

building to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its founding. On the evening of October 18, 

3 months after his birthday and a week after returning from England where he had 

attended the international Faraday celebration, he died suddenly of a coronary occlusion 

at his home in Beacon Street. He was dictating a tribute to Thomas Edison, whose 

death had occurred that same morning, when his own came. Dr. Stratton's greatest achievement was in founding and establishing the National 

Bureau of Standards and gaining for it international respect and fame. It was a superlative feat and called for a high and specialized talent. Dr. Compton of the Institute spoke for all in paying tribute to those distinguishing traits of Dr. Stratton's that 

had served the Bureau and the Institute and marked the man: his fundamental kind- ness of character, his wholehearted absorption in his work, and the consistency of 

his life and thought in pursuit of his ideals and objectives. Unsympathetic perhaps 

and certainly impatient with people or things that ran contrary to his ideal, he gave 

the full measure of his support and force to that which advanced his ideal, first of the 

Bureau and later of the Institute. Few men's lives have been so consistent, straightforward, and unswerving in their devotion to public service as Stratton's, and with so complete an absence of self-interest. 

The intense admiration that Dr. Stratton inspired in his friends led two of them 

to attempt his biography. Shortly after his death, Morris A. Parris, his personal 

retary, and Prof. Samuel C, Prescott, his closest friend at the Institute, chairman of 

the Department of Biology and Public Health, and soon to become Dean of Science, 

began collecting records, reminiscences, and memoranda for the biography. The 
APPENDIX M 661 

materials gathered over the next 3 years were to form the shelf of Stratton papers 

located in the Archives Library at MIT. 

Several outlines of the proposed work and preliminary drafts of three chapters, 

through Stratton's early teaching career at Urbana, were completed when certain 

difficulties arose. Sufficient details and documents of Stratton's forebears could not 

be found and the early pages were thin. The complete absence of self-interest, and 

hence self-revelation, in Stratton's life and career gradually became evident. Then 

Parris left the Institute and Prescott assumed the additional duties of Dean of Science. 

But almost certainly the crowning difficulty, stifling further work on the biography, was the prospect of attempting to record the history of Stratton's directorship of the 

Bureau.° 

Professor Prescott undoubtedly relinquished his project under the pressure of his 

administrative and teaching duties, but it is more than likely that he also came to 

realize that the heart of any possible biography of Dr. Stratton could not be a record 

of his life so much as a history, the history of his greatest single accomplishment, 

the National Bureau of Standards. 

° The final correspondence in Prescott's search for biographical materials is that with 

Dr. Briggs of the Bureau in December 1934, which resulted in Prescott receiving nine 

items. These included copies of extracts from the report of the Electrical Conference 

of 1884, a chart of the funds and staff of the Bureau since its founding, the Rureau's 

brief biographical sketch of Dr. Stratton, and the program of the Bureau's farewell 

reception for him. 
• APPENDIX N 

BOOKS by Staff Members 

of the National Bureau of Standards 

1912_1960* 

Alt, Franz L., Electronic digital com- puters: their use in science and 

engineering. New York: Academic Press, 1958, 336 p. 

Bates, Roger Gordon, Electrometric 

pH determinations: theory and 

practice. New York: Wiley, 1954, 

331 p. 

Bichowsky, Francis Russell, Industrial research. Brooklyn, N.Y.: 

Chemical Publishing Co., 1942, 

126 p. 

Blum, William, and G. B. Hogaboom, Principles of electroplating 

and electroforming (electrotyping) - New York: McGraw-Hill, 

l924,356p.; 2ded., 1930, 424p.; 

3d ed., 1949,455 p. 

Bogue, Robert Herman, The chemistry and technology of gelatin 

and glue. New York: McGraw. 

Hill, 1922,644 p. 

Bogue, Robert Herman, The chemistry of portland cement. New 

York: Reinhold, 1947, 572 p.; 2d 

ed., 1955, '793 p. 

Brode, Wallace Reed, Chemical spec. 

troscopy. New York: J. Wiley & 

Sons, 1939, 494 p.; 2d ed., 1943, 

677 p. 

Burgess, George Kimball, and H. 

LeChatelier, The measurement of 

high temperatures. 3d ed., rewritten and enlarged, New York: 

i. Wiley & Sons, 1912, 510 p. 

Burgess, George Kimball, Die Messung hoher Temperaturen. Nach 

der dritten amerikanischen Auflage übersetzt und mit Ergänzungen versehen, von Prof. Dr. G. 

Leithauser. Berlin: J. Springer, 

1913,486p. 

Burgess, George Kimball, Precision 

machines and instruments for the 

measurement of length. Paper 

presented at the International Engineering Congress, Tokyo, 1930, 

48 p., np., n.d. 

Cleaves, Harold E., and J. G. 

Thompson, The metal-iron. New 

York & London: Published for the 

Engineering Foundation by McGraw-Hill, 1935, 574 p. 

Coblentz, William Weber, From the 

life of a researcher. New York: 

books that had their inception or were largely or entirely written or revised 

while the author was a member of the staff, or were written in retirement, appear in this 

compilation. Books edited by Bureau members or to which Bureau members con- tributed, unless theirs was the major contribution, have been omitted. 

663 
664 APPENDIX N 

Philosophical L i b r a r y, 1951, 

Coblentz, William Weber, Investigations of infra-red spectra. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution 

of Washington Publication Nos. 

35, 65, 97, 1905—1908, 3 v. Coblentz, William Weber, A physical 

study of the firefly. Washington, 

D.C.: Carnegie Institution of 

Washington Publication No. 164, 

1912,47 p. 

Cohen, Louis, Formulae and tables 

for the calculation of alternating 

current problems. New York: 

McGraw-Hill, 1913, 282 p. 

Cohen, Louis, Heaviside's electrical 

circuit theory, with an introduction by Prof. M. I. Pupin. New 

York: McGraw.Hill, 1928, 169 p. 

Condon, Edward Uhier, arid Hugh 

Odishaw, eds., Handbook of 

physics. New York: McGrawHill, 1958, 1,459 p. 

Condon, Edward Uhier, and G. H. 

Shortley, The theory of atomic 

spectra. Reprint of 1935 ed. with 

corrections, Cambridge (England) University Press, 1951, 

441p. 

Curtis, Harvey L., Electrical meas- urements: precise comparisons of 

standards and absolute determination of the units. New York & London: McGraw-Hill, 1937, 302 

p. 

Curtis, Harvey L., Recollections of a scientist: an autobiography. 

Privately printed at Bonn, Germany: L. Leopold Press, 1958, 

l28p. 

Curtiss, Leon Francis, An introduc. 

tion to neutron physics. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1959, 

380 p. 

Dorsey, Noah Ernest, The physics 

of Eadioactivity. Baltimore, Md.: 

Williams & Wilkins, 1921, 223 p. 

Dorsey, Noah Ernest, Properties of 

ordinary water-substance in all its 

phases: water-vapor, water, and 

all the ices. New York: Reinhold, 1940,673 p. 

Eaton, Herbert Nelson, K. H. Beij, 

and W. G. Brombacher, Aircraft 

instruments. New York: Ronald 

Press, 1926, 269 p. 

Eisenhart, Churchill, and 

Techniques of statistical analysis. 

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947, 

473 p. 

Fano, Ugo, and L. Fano, Basic 

physics of atoms and molecules. 

New York: Wiley, 1959, 414 p. 

Fano, Ugo, and G. Racah, Irreducible tensorial sets. New York: 

Academic Press, .1959, 171 p. 

Foote, Paul Darwin, and Fred L. 

Mohler, The origin of spectra. 

New York: Chemical Catalog Co., 

1922, 250 p. 

Gillett, Horace W., The behavior of 

engineering metals. New York: 

Wiley, 1951, 395 p. 

Gillett, Horace W., An engineering 

approach to the selection, evaluation, and specification of metallic 

materials. Cleveland: Penton, 

1944, 140 p. 

Gillett, Horace W., and E. L. Mack, 

Molybdenum, cerium and related 

alloy steels. New York: Chemical 

Catalog Co., 1925, 299 p. 

Hamer, Walter Jay, The structure 

of electrolytic solutions. New 

York: Wiley, 1959, 441 p. 
APPENDIX N 665 

Harriman, Norman Follett, Principles of scientific purchasing. 

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1928, 

301 p. 

Harriman, Norman Follett, Standards and standardization. New 

York: McGraw.Hill, 1928, 265 p. 

Harris, Forest K., Electrical meas- urements. New York: Wiley, 

1952, 784 p. 

Hersey, Mayo Dyer, On the laws of 

lubrication of journal bearings. 

New York: n.p., 1915, 37 p. 

Hersey, Mayo Dyer, Theory of lubrication. New York: Wiley; London: Chapman & Hull, 1936, 152 

p. 

Heyl, Paul Renno, The common 

sense of the theory of relativity. 

Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 

1924, 44 p. 

Heyl, Paul Renno, Electronics. Indianapolis: P. R. Mallory, 194.3, 

5 parts, np. 

Heyl, Paul Renno, The fundamental 

concepts of physics in the light of 

modern discovery. Baltimore: 

Williams & Wilkins, 1926, 112 p. 

Heyl, Paul Renno, The philosophy 

of a scientific man. New York: 

Vanguard Press, 1933, 182 p. 

Hillebrand, William Francis, and 

G. E. F. Lundell, Applied 

ganic analysis, with special reference to the analysis of metals, 

minerals and rocks. New York: 

Wiley, 929 p.; 2d ed., re- vised by Lundell, H. A. Bright, 

and J. I. Hoffman, 1953, 1,034 p. 

Hilsenrath, Joseph, M. Klein, and 

dynamic properties of air. New 

York: Pergamon, 1960, 148 p. 

Hilsenrath, Joseph, and G. G. Zieg. 

ler, Tables of Einstein functions: 

vibrational contributions to the 

thermodynamic functions. 

ington, D.C., 1962, 258p. 

Hudson, Claude Silbert, The col. 

lected papers of C. S. Hudson [in 

sugar research] - New York: 

Academic Press, 1946, 2 v., np. 

Hund, August, Frequency modulation. New York & London: Mc. 

Graw-HilI, 1942, 375 p. 

Hund, August, High-frequency 

measurements. New York & Lon. 

don: McGraw.Hill, 1933, 491 p.; 

2d ed., 1951, 676 p. 

Hund, August, Hochfrequenzmess. 

technik: ihre wissenschaftlichen 

und practischen grundlagen. Ber. 

un: J. Springer, 1922, 526 p; 2 

aufi., 1928. 

Hund, August, Phenomena in high 

frequency systems. New York & London: McGraw-Hill, 1936, 642 

p. 

Hund, August, Short-wave radiation 

phenomena. New York: McGraw. 

Hill, 1952, 2 v. Insley, Herbert, and V. D. Frechette, 

Microscopy of ceramics and Cements, including glasses, slags and 

foundry sands. New York: Academic Press, 1955, 286 p. 

Ives, Herbert Eugene, Airplane 

photography. Philadelphia & London: J. B. Lippincott, 1920, 

422 p. 

Jacobs, Donald Harry, Fundamen. 

tals of optical engineering. New 

York & London: McGraw-Hill, 

H. W. Woolley, Tables of thermo- 1943,487 p 
666 APPENDIX N 

Judd, Deane Brewster, Color in business, science, and industry. New 

York: Wiley, 1952, 401 p. 

Ledley, Robert Steven, Digital com- puter and control engineering. 

Written with the assistance of 

Louis S. Rotolo and James B. 

Wilson. New York: McGraw. 

Hill, 1960, 835p. 

Levin, Ernest M., with Howard F. 

McMurdie and F. P. Hall, Phase 

diagrams for ceramists. Columbus, Ohio: American Ceramic Society, 1956, 286 p. 

Lundell, Gustave Ernst Frederick, 

James Irvin Hoffman, and Harry 

A. Bright, Chemical analysis of 

iron and steel. New York: Wiley, 

1931, 641 p. 

Lundell, Gustave Ernst Frederick, 

and James Irvin Hoffman, Out. 

lines of methods of chemical 

analysis. New York: Wiley, 1938, 

250 p. 

Mann, Wilfrid Basil, The cyclotron. 

With a foreword by E. 0. 

Lawrence. New York: Chemical 

Publishing Co., 1940; London: 

Methuen, 2d ed., 194.5; London: 

Methuen, 3d ed., 1948, 92 p. 

Meggers, William Frederick, and 

Bourdon F. Scribner, Index to 

the literature of spectrochemical 

analysis, 192Q—37. Sponsored by 

Committee E—2 on Spectrographic 

Analysis of the American Society 

for Testing Materials. Philadelphia: American Society for Testing Materials, 1939, 59 p.; 2d ed., 

1941, issued in 4 parts of a con- tinuing series. 

Nutting, Perley Gilman, Outlines of 

applied optics, Philadelphia: P. 

Blakiston's Son, 1912, 234 p. 

Page, Chester Hall, The algebra of 

electronics. Princeton, N.J.: Van 

Nostrand, 1958, 258 p. 

Page, Chester Hall, Physical mathematics. Princeton, N.J.: Van 

Nostrand, 1955, 329 p. 

Phelan, Vincent B., The American 

home book of repairs: the care 

and repair of the home. Garden 

City, •N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 

l93l,3Q6p. 

Rawdon, Henry S., Protective metallic coatings. American Chemical 

Society Monograph Series, No. 

403. New York: Chemical Catalog Co., 1938, 277 p. 

Rossini, Frederick Dominic, Chemical thermodynamics. New York: 

Wiley, 1950, 514 p. 

Rossini, Frederick Dominic, B. J. 

Mair, and A. J. Streiff, Hydro. 

carbons from petroleum: the 

fractionation, analysis, isolation, 

purification, and properties of 

petroleum hydrocarbons. An ac- count of the work of American 

Petroleum Institute Research 

Project 6. American Chemical 

Society Monograph series, No. 

121. New York: Reinhold, 1953, 

556 p. 

Rossini, Frederick Dominic, and 

others, Properties of titanium 

compounds and related substances. Washington, . DC.: Office of Naval Research, ONR Report ACR—17, 1956, 448 p. 

Rossini, Frederick Dominic, and 

others, Selected values of physical 

and thermodynamic properties of 
APPENDIX N 667 

hydrocarbons and related com- pounds, comprising the tables of 

American Petroleum Institute Research Project 44 as of December 

31, 1952. Pittsburgh: Published 

for the American Petroleum Institute by the Carnegie Press, 1953, 

1,050 p. 

Rossini, Frederick Dominic, Thermodynamics and physics of 

matter. Vol. 1, High speed aerodynamics and jet propulsion. 

Princeton University Press, 1955, 

812 p. 

Ruark, Arthur Edward, and H. C. 

Urey, Atoms, molecules and 

quanta. International series in 

physics. New York: McGrawHill, 1930. 790 p. 

Sasuly, Max, Trend analysis of statistics: theory and technique. 

Washington, D.C.: The Brookings 

Institute, 1934, 421 p. 

Scott, Russell Burton, Cryogenic 

engineering. Prepared for the 

Atomic Energy Commission. 

Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 

1959, 368 p. 

Vinal, George Wood, Primary batteries. New York: Wiley, 1950, 

336 p. 

Vinal, George Wood, Storage batteries: a general treatise on the physics and chemistry of secondary 

batteries and their engineering applications. New York: Wiley, 

1924, 402 p; 2d ed, 1930, 427 

p; 3d ed., 1940, 464 p; 4th ed., 

1935, 446 p. 

Whittemore, Herbert Lucius, Ideas on specifications. C o 1 u m b i a, 

Conn.: Columbia Graphs, 1952, 

l28p. 

Youden, William John, Statistical 

design: a collection by the editors 

of the bimonthly articles by Dr. 

W. J. Youden, National Bureau of 

Standards, during his 6 years as contributing editor 

for Industrial and Engineering 

Chemistry. Washington, D.C.: 

American Chemical Society, 1960, 

n.pYouden, William John, Statistical 

methods for c h e m i s t s - New 

York: Wiley, 1951, 136 p. 
APPENDIX 0 

BUILDINGS AND STRUCTURES 

of the National Bureau of Standards 1 Washington, D.C. 

Estimated Estimated 

Bldg. Construction Replacement Replacement No. Name Year Built Cost Cost—1947 Cost—1960 1 South 1905 J $864, 000 $1, 620, 000 

3 North 1905—32 2 f $400, 000 323, 000 1, 430, 000 

2 East 1914 430, 000 767, 000 1, 906, 000 

4 West 1910 350, 000 665, 000 1, 538, 000 

5 Chemistry 1918 386, 000 750, 000 1, 932, 000 

6 Power Plant 1930 200, 000 330, 000 845, 000 

7 Northwest 1919 285, 750 540, 000 1, 656, 000 

8 Dynamometer 1919—33 96, 480 197, 400 828, 000 

9 Hydraulic Lab. 1932 350, 000 705, 000 2, 200, 000 

10 Radio (later Computer 

Lab.) 1919—42 200, 000 300, 000 825, 000 

11 Industrial 1920 1, 090, 000 1, 600, 000 5, 636, 000 

12 High Voltage 1939 400, 000 550, 000 1, 282, 000 

13 Materials Testing 1942 540, 000 900, 000 2, 168, 000 

14 Kiln House Mineral 1920 

Products) 116, 500 171, 000 1, 461, 000 

15 Glass Plant 1941 100, 000 145, 000 650, 000 

16 Service (later Electronics) 1942—45 70, 000 100, 000 855, 900 

17 The Manse (3) (3) 40, 000 150, 000 

18 Low Temperature 1906 23, 375 71, 000 261, 000 

19 South Wind Tunnel 1918 16, 440 31, 500 60, 000 

20 Far West 1915—42 96, 300 374, 000 480, 000 

21 Utility (later Stucco) 1918—47 105, 000 94, 000 300, 000 

22 Sound 1921—44 (4) 63, 000 120, 000 

23 Reverberation 1929 4, 000 5, 600 35, 000 

24 Meter Rating 1914 16, 240 53, 700 75, 000 

25 Lamp Test 1941—49 10, 000 10, 000 30, 000 

26 Telephone 1914—23—41 (4) 30, 870 40, 000 

27 Chemistry Annex 1924—45—48 (4) 21, 900 75, 000 

28 Scale House 1939 6, 000 9, 300 50, 000 

29 Utility (later Boiler 

Test) 1943 (4) 7, 500 20, 000 

30 Sterrett House (3) (3) 7, 500 35, 000 

31 Test Bungalow (later 

Plasma Res.) 1941 (4) 52, 000 80, 000 

32 Fuel Synthesis #1 (later 

Surface Chem.) 1945 15, 336 20, 000 28, 000 

Footnotes at end of table. 

669 
670 APPENDIX 0 

Bldg. No. 

33 

34 

35 

36 5 37 

38 

Construction 

Cost 

(4) 

(4) 

(4) 

(4) 

4,460 

(4) 

1,513 

(4) 

4, 300 

4,300 

1, 500 

6, 520 

(4) 

(4) 

(4) 

25,219 

(4) 

24, 974 

(4) 

Estimated 

Replacement 

Cost—1947 

4, 500 

11, 000 

14, 000 

H, 500 

2, 000 

7, 100 

2,200 

2,200 

7, 500 

6,250 

1, 500 

8,200 

1,260 

(8) 

(7) 

27, 500 

1, 000 

(7) 

34, 000 

3, 750 

3, 750 

18, 000 

(7) 

(7) 

(7) 

3, 900 

7, 000 

Estimated 

Replacement 

Cost—1960 

12, 000 

12, 800 

60, 000 

65, 000 

10, 000 

10, 000 

10, 000 

9, 800 

75, 000 

75, 000 

4, 000 

12, 500 

60, 000 

3, 500 

200, 000 

25, 000 

24, 000 

6, 800 

5, 000 

Name 

Fuel Synthesis #2 

Oil Storage 

Refrig. Plant 

Dynamometer Annex 

West Guard Office 

Plant Div. Storage 

(later Central Guard 

Office) 

39 Plant Div. Storage 

40 Greenhouse 

41 Radio Annex (later 

Microwave Spectroscopy) 

42 Utility Quonset 

43 Utility Quonset 

44 Central Guard Off. 

45 Volatile Liquid Vault #1 

46 Northwest Annex 

47 East Guard Office 

48 Combustion Res. 

49 Storage Battery 

50 Storage (later Corrosion Lab. Annex) 

Construction Off. 

Supply Warehouse 

Std. Sample Storage 

Shipping Warehouse 

Storage Warehouse #1 

North Guard Off. 

Chemistry Storage 

Quartz Storage Ann. 

Utility (later Ultra 

Centrifuge Lab.) 

60 Volatile Liquid Vault #2 

61 Utility (later Mineral 

Products Shop) 

62 Utility (later Heat 

Transfer Lab.) 

63 Warehouse (later Plant 

Div. Shops) 

64 Fire Resistance Lab #1 

65 Fire Resistance Lab #2 

66 Paint Storage 

67 Fire Resist. Lab #3 

68 Fire Resist. Lab #4 

69 Fire Resistance 

70 Storage 

71 Storage 

Year Built 

1943 

1925 

1925—45 

1925—47 

1950 

1929—52 

1933 

1946 

1943 

1943 

1943 

1927 

1943 

1945 

1942 

1943—44 

1941 

1944 

1943 

1943 

1942 

1942 

1944 

1944 

1944 

1926 

1925 

1945 

1929 

1924—27—58 

1943 

1930 

1925—30 

8 51 8 52 8 53 8 54 8 55 

56 

57 

58 

59 

8, 000 13, 100 20, 000 

8, 000 10, 000 

17, 000 

111, 000 

(4) 

(4) 

(4) 

(4) 

3, 800 

1, 500• 

600 

17, 000 

177, 000 

30, 500 

1, 500 

12, 500 

20, 000 

(7) 

(7) 

(7) 

24, 000 

125, 000 

97, 000 

80, 000 

5, 000 

45, 000 

77, 000 

Footnotes at end of table. 
APPENDIX 0 671 

Estimated Estimated 

Bldg. Construction Replacement Replacement 

No. Name Year Built Cost Cost—1947 Cost—1960 

72 High Voltage Annex 1939 100, 000 155, 500 130, 000 

73 North Wind Tunnel 1944 110, 000 142, 000 215, 000 

74 Open Wind Tunnel 1923 20, 000 (7) 

75 Storage (Bomb Shelter) 1942 1, 500 (7) 

76 Hangar (later Supersonic 

Wind Tunnel) 1930 15, 000 24, 700 81, 000 

77 Barracks (7) 

78 Canteen 2, 000 19, 000 

79 Volatile Liquid Vault #3 1944 7, 000 9, 000 10, 000 

80 Electronics Lab. Annex 1930—44 9, 500 22, 500 25, 000 

81 Test Shed (7) 

82 Explosives Vault 600 800 

83 Electronics Lab. (later 

Ordnance Hqs.) 1944-52 40, 141 52, 000 

5 84 Electronic Tube Lab. 1944 20, 812 27, 000 5 85 Optical Test Lab. (4) 21, 000 

86 Test Shed (7) 

87 Alumina Res. Bldg. (3) (3) 15, 000 

88 Explosive Components 1944-58 5, 195 6, 400 

89 Grounds Maintenance 200 22, 650 

90 Fire Prevention 400 3, 500 

91 Utility Quonset #3 1944 15, 000 115, 000 

92 Ordnance Laboratory 1939—43 513, 000 795, 000 

93 Fire Resist. Lab. #5 1939 (4) 3, 000 15, 000 

94 Hydrogenation Vault 1947 3, 300 4, 500 10, 000 

95 Vibration Test 1946 2, 935 3, 700 75, 000 

Tunnels 194, 000 

96 Combustion Research 1947 15, 722 17, 500 86, 000 

97 Fire Resistance 1947 1, 000 (7) 

98 Storage shed 400 

99 Ordnance Refrigeration 

100 Storage Warehouse #2 1948 19, 664 67, 000 

101 Storage Warehouse #3 1948 19,708 67, 000 

102 Carpenter shop 1948 32, 798 . 85, 000 

103 Ordnance Annex #1 1948 20, 000 

104 Betatron 1949 282,000 375, 000 

105 Ordnance Annex #2 1949 6, 500 

106 Battery Shelter 1949 2, 557 800 

107 Labor Office 1949 7, 184 10, 000 

108 Radio Systems Lab. 1949 20, 000 80, 000 

111 Aggregate Storage 1951 5, 000 15, 000 

112 Air Gun Bldg. 1951—58 32; 000 

113 Refrigeration 1951 6, 800 

114 Ordnance Rd. Guard 

Office 1950 2, 000 4, 000 

115 Acoustics Lab. 1950 19, 300 35, 000 

Footnotes at end of table. 
672 APPENDIX 0 

Estimated Estimated 

Bldg. Construction Replacement Replacement No. Name Year Built Cosi Cost—1960 

116 Ordnance Plating Shop 1950 5, 000 

118 Timber Storage 1951 5, 000 45, 000 

119 Sand Bins 1950 2, 000 9, 500 

120 Tire Test 1952 20, 000 175, 000 

121 Polymer Lab. 1952 22, 000 95, 000 

122 Gamma Ray Lab. 1953 55, 000 85, 000 

123 DOFL Storage 1956—58 

124 High Pressure Test 1956 13, 485 20, 000 6 126 Fuze Laboratory 1957 

127 Pneumatics Annex 1958 1, 500 6, 000 

129 Tempo A 1957 8, 000 14, 000 

130 Tempo B 200 1, 000 

132 New Guard Hq. 1957 24, 761 

133 Regional Training Center 1959 50, 209 

134 Industrial Engineering 

Laboratory 1959 40, 800 

135 Radioactive Material 

Storage 1959 16, 990 

136 Plasma Power Supply 1961 10, 495 

137 Gas Viscosity Lab. 1955 14, 156 18, 000 

138 Gas Cylinder Storage 1961 5, 529 

1 Based on Puldic Buildings Administration (FWA) appraisal dated July 11, 1947, 

correlated with Public Buildings Administration survey data of Oct. 1, 1948; NBS 

Plant Division inventory of 1960; and addenda supplied by Plant Division, January 

1963 (NBS Historical File). Note.—Original construction costs in the chart are in some instances higher than those reported in the history since they include special 

facilities, equipment, structural changes, and other costs above the original 

appropriation. 

2 Second date indicates major modification or addition to the structure. The 

additional story on North Building, for example, cost $138,687. 3 Acquired with land. 

Experimental structure, erected with research project funds. 

Occupied by Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories (DOFL), 1953. 

Razed 1948. 

Razed. 

8 Erected by Reconstruction Finance Corporation and transferred to NBS. 
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE 

Predecessors of this history have been the formal study of the aciministration of the Bureau by Gustavus A. Wéber, The Bureau 'of Standards: Its 

History, Activities and Organization (1925), a sound reference book about 

the Bureau during its first quarter century, and the highly readable popularization by John Perry, in The Story of Standards (1955). The more 

complex plan of the present history and the range of its sources require some description of its documentation. 

Following the bibliographical information given here for each work is 

the page reference to its first citation in the text. The latter I have given 

not only as a convenience to the interested reader seeking to track the abbreviated form of subsequent citations to their source, but in some instances 

to direct the bibliographic-minded to such additional information about 

the work as its location or library catalog number. 

PUBLISHED SOURCES 

NBS PUBLICATIONS 

The range of Bureau publications and a brief account of their history 

of publication appear in the notes to appendix I. Detailed information on the publications from 1901 to 1947 is given in NBS Circular 460, from 

1947 to 1957 in the Supplem'etnt to C460, and from 1957 to 1960 in NBS 

M240. 

The Annual Reports of the Bureau (since 1958 entitled Research Highlights of the National Bureau of Standards) provide an indispensable 

guide to the framework of the history. I have however kept in mind the 

natural inclination to prepossession and party spirit inherent in any such 

publication, wherever issued. The Annual Reports of the Bureau are com- plete. except for the years 1943—45, when manuscript copies only, noted 

on p 369n, were prepared. 

A number of useful summary histories of the work of the Bureau, of weights 

and measures, laws relating to weights and measures, and the development of 

standards and standardization in industry, appear in NBS Miscellaneous Publications. Included in this series is the excellent survey of Bureau research 

during World War I (M46, 1921), but not Dr. Briggs's 188-page report 

673 
674 PUBLISHED SOURCES on World War II research, which is available only in multilith form (copy 

in NBS Historical File). 

A complete set of NBS publications is maintained in the NBS Library, as are the files of mimeographed Bureau Orders, Director's Memoranda to 

Division and Section Chiefs, Administrative Bulletins, and Administrative 

Memoranda. An exception are the NBS Letter Circulars, presently located 

in the Office of Technical Information and Publications (see p. 251n, above). 

OTHER GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS 

No series of Government documents has been more important to the animation of the history than the annual hearings before the Subcommittee of the 

House Committee on Appropriations (first cited on p. 46n), on which occasions the Director of the Bureau seeks to justify his requests for funds and 

support for his research programs, new construction, additional staffing, and 

the housekeeping operations of the Bureau. The give and take of the sessions 

provides valuable insights into the personalities of the participants and a wealth of informal information on Bureau affairs nowhere else to be found. 

Except for those preceded by the word "Senate" in brackets (p. 130n), all 

hearings cited are those of the House. 

Extensive use has also been made of a half-century of House and Senate 

reports and of their miscellaneous and executive documents, of hearings before 

special committees of both the House and Senate, and of the Congressional 

Record. They have provided much primary source material, particularly 

concerning the progress of science in the Federal Government. 

Consulted for material pertinent or peripheral to the operations of NBS 

have been the annual reports and other publications of the Department of 

Commerce, its Coast and Geodetic Survey, Census Bureau, and its Office of 

Publications Management (formerly Bureau of Publications) ; also of the 

Treasury Department, Department of the Interior, Department of Labor, the 

Interstate Commerce Commission, the National Aeronautics and Space Ad. 

ministration (formerly National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), and 

the Council of National Defense, 1917—19. 

Two other series of annual reports may be mentioned here, those of the 

Smithsonian Institution, and the reports from the Bureau's counterpart in 

Great Britain, the National Physical Laboratory. Both series have furnished 

important and useful information. 

BACKGROUND SOURCES 

Histories: The history of the Bureau could not be written without tracing 

the progress of science and of American business and industry in the 20th 
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE 675 

century, and relating it to the social and political climate of the nation. Set 

pieces, evoking the local and national scene, have been resorted to, often 

illuminated by recollections of Bureau staff members, as background for the 

changing activities of the Bureau. For these pieces, as well as for direct and 

indirect information on Bureau operations and research, my indebtedness to 

histories of science, industry, and the social scene is extensive. The histories 

that I have quoted or paraphrased, with the page reference to their first 

appearance in the text, include: 

Allen, Frederick L., The Big Change (1952)—p. 19. 

Baruch, Bernard M., American Industry in the War: A Report of the War Industries 

Board (1921, new ed., 1941)—p. 178. 

Baxter, James P., Scientists Against Time ('946)—p. 360. 

Bailey, Stephen K., and Howard D. Samuel, Congress at Work (l952)—p. 492. 

Bernstein, Jeremy, The Analytical Engine: Computers—Past, Present and Future 

• (l964)—p. 53. 

Bining, Arthur C., The Rise of American Economic Life (1943)—p. 159. 

Boyd, Julian P. (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. XVI ('961)—p. 21. 

Brown, Percy, American Martyrs to Science Through the Roentgen Rays ('936)—p. 146. 

Campbell, Persia, Consumer Representation in the New Ded (1940)—p. 328. 

Clarkson, Grosvenor B., Industrial America in the World War ('924)—p. 178. 

Cochran, Thomas C., and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of In. 

dustrial America ('942)—p. 222. 

Cochrane, Charles H., Modern Industrial Progress (l904)—p; 10. 

Crowell, Benedict, America's Munitions, 1917—1918 (1919)—p. 172. 

Dupree, A. Hunter, Science in the Federal Government (1957)—p. 17. 

Freiclel, Frank, America in the 20th Century (1960)—p. 412. 

Futterman, Robert A., The Future of Our Cities (1961)—p. 119. 

Gaibraith, John K., The Great Crash, 1929 (l9t5l)—p. 298. 

Gardner, Brian, The Big Push (l96l)—p. 162. 

G'oldman, Eric F., The Crucial Decade: America, 1945—1955 (1956)—p. 427. 

Gowing, Margaret, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939—1945 (1964)—p. 379. 

Gray, George W., The Frontiers of Flight: The Story of NACA Research (1948)—p. 283. 

Halle, Ernst von, Trusts or Industrial Combinations and Coalitions (1895) —p. 7. 

Hallock, William, and Herbert T. Wade, The Evolution of Weights and Measures and the 

Metric System ('906)—p. 209. 

Halsey, Frederick A., and Samuel Dale, The Metric Fallacy (1904)—p. 209. 

Hammond, John W., Men and Volts: The Story of General Electric ('941)—p. 136. 

Hewlett, Richard G., and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939—1946: A History 

of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission ('962)—p. 362. 

Hicks, John D., The Republican Ascendancy, 1921—1933 (l960)—p. 255. 

Hindle, Brooke, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735—1789 (1956)— 

app. A. 

Hiscox, Gardner D., Horseless Vehicles, Automobiles and Motor Cycles (1901)—p. 5. 

Keating, Paul W., Lamps for a Brighter America ('954)—p. 257. 

Kenney, William, The Crucial Years, 1940—1945 (1962)—p. 294. 

Lawrence, Samuel A., The Battery Additive Controversy (1962)—p. 487. 

Leuchtenburg, William E., The Perils of Prosperity, 1914—1932 ('958)—p. 159. 

Lord, Walter, A Night to Remember (l9S5)—p. 141. 

'Maclaurin, W. Rupert, Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry (1949)—p. 198. 
676 PUBLISHED SOURCES 

Marshall, Logan, Sinking of the Titanic . . . (1912)—p. 141. 

Mendenhall, Thomas C., A Century of Electricity (1887)—p. 6. 

Miller, John A., Men and Volts at War (1947)—p. 419. 

Nelson, Donald M., Arsenal of Democracy: The Story of American War Production 

(1946)—p. 366. 

Paxson, Frederic L., American Democracy and the World War (3 v., 1936—1948)—p. 161. 

Peck, Henry T., Twenty Years of the Republic: 1885—1905 (1906)—p. 110. 

Perry, John, The Story of Standards (1955)—p. 36. 

Reinhardt, George C., and William R. Kintner, The Haphazard Years: How America Has 

Gone to War (1960)—p. 181. 

Robinson, Edgar E., The Roosevelt Leadership, 1933—1945 (1955)—p. 367. 

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: Crisis of the Old Order, 1919—1933 

(1957)—p. 309. 

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal, 1933— 

1934 (1958)—p. 320. 

Schubert, Paul, The Electric Word: the Rise of Radio (1928)—p. 142. 

Schurr, Samuel H., and Bruce C. Netschert, Energy in the American. Economy, 1850— 1935 (1960)—p. 103. 

Sherwood, Robert E., Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (1948)—p. 363. 

Schiosson, Preston W., The Great Crusade and After: 1914—1928 (1930)—p. 221. 

Smyth, Henry D., Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (l945)—p. 363. 

Sorenson, Helen, The Consumer Movement (1941)—p. 328. 

Sullivan, Mark, Our Times: The United States, 1900—1925, V. Over Here, 1914—1918 

('933)—p. 177. 

Tolland, John, Ships in the Sky (1957)—p. 285. 

Weber, Gustavus A., The Bureau of Standards: Its History, Activities and Organization 

(1925)—p. 23. 

Wector, Dixon, The Age of the Great Depression, 1929—1941 (1948)—p. 309. 

Wiley, Harvey W., History of a Crime against the Food Law (1929)—p. 306. 

Williams, Harold A., Baltimore A/Ire (1954)—p. 86. - Wilson, J. Tuzo, I.G.Y.: The Year of the New Moons (1961)—p. 355. 

Yerkes, Robert M. (ed.), The New World of Science: Its Development during the War 

(1920)—p. 160. 

Miscellaneous.° The more important special studies, textbooks, hancthooks, 

yearbooks, statistical reference books, and industrial and technical studies 

cited include: 

Aircraft Year Book, 1929 (1930)—p. 294. 

Astin, Allen V., (ed.), Bomb, Rocket, and Torpedo Tossing (NDRC Technical Report, 

l946)—p. 398. 

Astin, Allen V., (ed.), Radio Proximity Fuzes for Fin-stabilized Missiles (NDRC Technical Report, 1946)—p. 398. 

Astin, Allen V., (ed.), Photoelectric Fuzes and Miscellaneous Projects (NDRC Tech. 

nical Report, 1946)—p. 393. 

Ayres, Leonard R., The War with Germany: A Statistical Summary ('919)—p. 180. 

Boyce, Joseph C., (ed.), New Weapons for Air Warfare (OSRD, 1947)—p. 390. 

Boylston, H. M., An Introduction to the Metallurgy of Iron and Steel (2d ed., 1936)— 

p. 240. 
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE 677 

IBrady, Robert A.,] Industrial Standardization (1929)—p. 260. 

Burchard, John E., (ed.), Rockets, Guns and Targets (OSRD, 1948)—p. 416. 

Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (1960)—p. 8. 

Directorate of Tube Alloys (Great Britain), Statements Relating to the Atomic Bomb 

(1945)—p. 379. 

Dorsey, N. Ernest, Physics of Radioactivity (1921)—p. 144. 

Gilchrist, H. L., A Comparative Study of World War Casualties from Gas and Other Weapons (1931)—p. 203. 

Federated American Engineering Societies, Waste in Industry (1921)—p. 253. 

Harriman, Norman F., Standards and Standardization (1928)—p. 254. 

Hart, A.B., and William Schuyler (eds.), The American Year Book, 1929 (1930)—p. 222. 

[Hinman, Wilbur S., Jr.] The radio proximity fuzes for bombs, rockets, and mortars 

(1945)—p. 389. 

Irving, James R., The Scientific Instrument Industry (1959)—p. 269. 

Morey, George W., The Properties of Glass (1938)—p. 187. 

National Industrial Conference Board, The Metric versus the English System of Weights 

and Measures (l92l)—p. 212. 

National Resources Committee, Research—A National Resource (1938) —p. 327. 

National Science Foundation, Federal Funds for Research, Development, and other Sci. 

entific Activities (1964)—p. 505. 

National Science Foundation, Reviews of Data on Research and Development (1963)— 

p. 505. 

Newman, James R., (ed.), What Is Science? (1961)—p. 357. 

Newman, James R., and Byron S. Miller, The Control of Atomic Energy (1948)—p. 438. 

Noyes, William A., Jr., (ed.), Chemistry (OSRD, l948)—p. 423. 

Office of Naval Research, A Survey of Automatic Digital Computers (1953)—p. 456. 

Owen, Catherine, Ten Dollars Enough: Keeping House Well on Ten Dollars a Week 

(188fl—p. 8. Price, Don K., Government and Science: Their Dynamic Relation in American Govern. 

ment ('954)—p. 430. 

Reck, Dickson, (ed.), National Standards in a Modern Economy (1956)—p. 254. 

Ryan, John A., A Living Wage (l9O6)—p. 8. 

Schlink, Frederick J., and Stuart Chase, Getting Your Money's Worth: a Study in the 

Waste of the Consumer's Dollar (1927)—p. 305. 

Scholes, Samuel R., Modern Glass Practice (1946)—p. 187. 

Science Advisory Board, Report, 1933—1934 (1934)—p. 321. 

Science Advisory Board, Report, 1934—1935 (1935)—p. 324. 

Scientific Research Board, Science and Public Policy. II. The Federal Research Pro. 

gram (1947)—p. 441. Smith, F. Langford, The Radiotron Designer's Handbook (3d ed., '940)—p. 197. Stewart, Irvin, Organizing Scientific Research for War (OSRD, 1948)—p. 368. 

Suits, C. G., G. R. Harrison, and L' Jordan (eds.), Applied Physics, Electronics, Optics, 

Metallurgy (OSRD, 1948)—p. 403. 

White, Frederick A., American Industrial Research Laboratories (1961)—p. 275. 

White, Frederick A., Scientific Apparatus (1960)—p. 269. 

Woodworth, Joseph V., American Tool Making and Interchangeable Manufacturing 

(1911)—p. 77. Woodworth, Joseph V., Gages and Gaging Systems (1908)—p. 200. Zeuner, Frederick E., Dating the Past: an Introduction to Geochronology (1952)—p. 470. 
678 PUBLISHED SOURCES 

Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs: Ten former members of 

the Bureau are the subjects of essays in the Biographical Memoirs series of 

the National Academy of Sciences: Lyman J. Briggs, George K. Burgess, 

William W. Coblentz, William F. Hillebrand, Claude S. Hudson, Herbert E. 

Ives, Paul D. Merica, Edward B. Rosa, Samuel W. Stratton, and Edward 

W. Washburn. Invaluable collective biographical works have been the 

Dictionary of American Biography, with its supplements; the Year book of 

the American Philosophical Society series; and the successive editions of 

American Men of Science. 

Besides the manuscript memoirs of Bureau staff members noted below 

in Unpublished Sources, two splendidly frank autobiographies are available in print, those of William W. Coblentz and Harvey L. Curtis. Al. 

though his recollections of the Bureau are brief, another former staff member, George C. Southworth, offers good background material in his published memoirs. Five Secretaries of Commerce have left memoirs with 

commentaries on their terms of office: William C. Redfield, Herbert C. 

Hoover, Daniel C. Roper, Jesse H. Jones, and Lewis L. Strauss. These and 

other biographical and autobiographical works providing primary sources 

for the history of the Bureau, with the page reference to their first citation 

in the text, are as follows: 

Cajori, Florian, The Chequered Career of Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler (1929)—app. A. 

Coblentz, William W., From the Life of a Researcher ('951)—p. 196. 

Curtis, Harvey L., Recollections of a Scientist: An Autobiography (1958)—p. 101. 

Eve, A. S., Rutherford ('939)—p. 139. 

Farley, James A., Jim Fancy's Story (1948)—p. 333. 

Fessenden, Helen M., Fessenden: Builder of Tomorrows (1940)—p. 139. 

Flexner, Abraham, Henry S. Pritchett: A Biography (1943)—p. 53. 

Groves, Leslie R., Now It Can Be Told (1962) -—p. 340. 

Hassler, Ferdinand R., Documents Related to the Construction of Standards of Weights 

and Measures . . . (1835)—app. A. 

Hoover, Herbert C., The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 

1920—1933 (1952)—p. 229. 

Hoover, Herbert C., The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 

('952)—p. 333. 

Jones, Jesse H., Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the RCF, 1932—1945 

(1951)—p. 408. 

Lindbergh,/,Charles A., The Spirit of St. Louis (1954)—p. 284. 

Lord, Russell, The Wallaces of Iowa ('947)—p. 446. 

Lyons, Eugene, Our Unknown Ex-President (1948)—p. 229. 

Millikan, Robert A., The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan (1950) —p. 13. 

Moley, Raymond, 27 Masters of Politics, in a Personal Perspective 446. 

Pershing, John J., My Experiences in the War (1931)—p. 161. 

Redfield, William C., Glimpses of Our Government (series in the Saturday }vening l'ost, 

May 1944)—p. 154. 

Redfield, William C., With Congress and Cabinet ('924)—p. 160. 

Roper, Daniel C., Fifty Years of Public Life (1941)—p. 319. 
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE 679 

Schmidt, Karl M., Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948, ('960)—p. 446. 

Southworth, George C., Forty Years of Radio Research (1962)—p. 144. 

Strauss, Lewis S. Men and Decisions (1962) —-p. 381. 

Tully, Grace, F.D.R.—My Boss ('948)—p. 319. 

Vanderlip, Frank A., From Farm Boy to Financier ('935)—p. 54. 

Zschokke, Emil, Memoirs of Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler (1882) —app. A. 

Periodicals and Newspapers: The periodical literature of science, social 

and political affairs, philosophy, and current events that has been consulted is so extensive that reference can only be made to its direct citation in the history. 

Singled out, however, must be the magazine Science, scarcely a single issue of 

which since its founding in 1883 has not had a reference to weights, measures, 

or standards, and which since 1900 has reported every event of note relating 

to individual members of the Bureau staff and to the affairs of the Bureau itself. 

The New York Times and the Washington, D.C., newspapers have since the 

turn of the century, provided useful background details of NBS and Department of Commerce concerns, and with other newspaper accounts of Bureau 

events (many of them preserved in the NBS correspondence files in the National Archives) give useful sidelights on the scientific and social milieu of 

the Bureau. 

UNPUBLISHED SOURCES 

ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS 

The National Archives is the repository for the main body of NBS correspondence since the founding of the Bureau. Located in National Archives 

Record Group (NARG) 167, the correspondence f'or the years 1901— 45 fills 

512 consecutively numbered boxes, each bqx containing approximately a thousand document sheets, or more than half a million pages of document 

history. The first citation to these boxes appears on p. 5 of the history. 

NARG 167 also includes the Blue Folder collection of Bureau correspond- ence (first cited on p. 40), comprising 87 boxes, for the years 1902—52. 

Containing correspondence about significant transactions of recurring interest and identified, for ready reference, by blue folders, these files have been 

kept until recently at the Bureau. 

In contrast to the amount of material in these two correspondence files, 

of which full use was made, little that was pertinent to the history of the Bureau 

was found in the special collection in NARG 167 of 57 volumes of the cor- respondence of the Office of Standard Weights and Measures for the years 

1830—1900. With a few exceptions (i.e., p. 30), other sources adequately 

covered this background material. 
680 UNPUBLISHED SOURCES 

Seventeen other collections of NBS records in NARG 167, comprising a total of 1,703 boxes, volumes, and trays, and containing miscellaneous papers 

relating to weights and measures, manuscripts of research papers, computations, laboratory notebooks, and test records were surveyed for possible 

papers or marginalia of historical interest. The sampling indicated that the 

amount to be found would not justify the time required for a full search. 

Much useful information was found in the General Records of the Department of Commerce, located in NARG 40, particularly the correspondence of 

the Office of the Secretary of Commerce (first cited on p. 135), that of the 

Secretary's Visiting Committee to the Bureau (p. 311), and in the general 

records of the Department of Commerce (p. 314). 

Correspondence of the Secretary of the Treasury relating to the early his. 

tory of the Bureau appears in NARG 56 (p. 61), of the Secretary of Agriculture in NARG 16 (p. 152), that of the Bureau of the Budget in NARG 51 (p. 

307), and of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 

NARG 227 (p.369). 

Employment records of former Bureau staff members were made available 

by official transcript from the Federal Records Center in St. Louis, Mo. 

Biographical files on former members, which also contain news releases on their careers, records of achievement, copies of their publications, and other 

memorabilia, were forwarded on loan from the Federal Records Center at 

Alexandria, Va. 

One other archival collection, the Stratton Papers (p. 49), comprising 

more than 25 boxes of materials, is located in the Archives Library at the 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The preservation and availability of 

these Papers made possible the biographical sketch of Dr. Stratton in the 

appendix of the history. 

DIRECTOR'S FILES 

A recent assembly of correspondence and other materials, long maintained 

in the Office of the Director, is that temporarily designated "General Correspondence Files of the Director, 1945—55" (first cited on p. 62). The dates 

are misleading, since the material includes correspondence of as long ago as 

1902 and as recently as 1960. 

Much of this material comprises NBS policy memoranda, correspondence 

of recurring interest and importance, and papers of historical concern. The 

equivalent of almost 30 National Archives boxes, it is presently being organized in the NBS Office of Records Management for transfer to the National 

Archives. 

Other Bureau correspondence to which I have had access, and similar in 

nature to the "General Corespondence," is that currently maintained in the 

Office of the Director and so designated where cited in the history. 
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE 681 

NBS HISTORICAL FILE 

The assemblage of historical documents and other materials by members 

of the Bureau staff beginning in 1956 and extended by the author and his 

assistants during the course of research for the history forms the basis for the 

NBS Historical File. It will be maintained provisionally in the NBS Library 

at Gaithersburg. 

Of special interest in the File are the brief manuscript memoirs by N. Ernçst 

Dorsey (p. 65) and Hobart C. Dickinson (p. 240), and the manuscript mem- oir-histories of Elmer R. Weaver (p. 114), Raleigh Gilchrist (p. 175), 

J. Howard Dellinger (p. 292), William W. Coblentz (p. 338), and Galen B. 

Schubauer (p. 376). 

Besides two extended historical accounts of Bureau administration and 

operations prepared by the individual section and division chiefs in 1949 and 

again in 1961, the NBS Historical File also contains the records of more than 

fifty personal interviews or conversations which I held with former and present 

members of the staff. My correspondence with other than Bureau members 

that is cited in the history will also be found in this File. 

Letters and documents reproduced from the Stratton Papers at MIT, with 

other Stratton materials collected at the Bureau, have been designated in the 

NBS Historical File as the NBS Stratton Papers. Similar collections of ma- terials not available in archival records have been tentatively set up and 

designated by reason of their principal source as the Briggs Papers, Condon 

Papers, Gilchrist Papers, Crittenden Papers (scarce publications and personal 

correspondence he preserved), Lowell Papers (relating to NBS patent history), and Silsbee Papers (largely concerning electrical matters). 
INDEX 

Note: Only those members of the Bureau staff mentioned in the text or singled out in 

the footnotes are indexed. Authors of NBS publications in the footnotes are not 

indexed, nor are the names of division and section chiefs from 1901 to 1960, listed 

in Appendix J. Akron (dirigible), 285 ALEXANDER, John Henry, 34—35 ALEXANDER, Samuel, 454 alidade, 189 ALLEN, Frederick Lewis, 19 Allentown, Pa., field laboratory, 96, 333 

ALLISON, Samuel K., 363 ALLISON, William B. (Congressman), 18 Allison Commission, 18, 19, 20, 23 alloy of 1874, 30 

alloy research, 173—174, 272, 414—415 alternating.current measurement, 58, 60, 61, 67, 80 

altimeter (see aeronautical instruments) 

Altitude Laboratory building (see Dynamometer Lab' 

oratory building) 

alumina extraction, 417 aluminum and aluminum products, 173—174, 185 aluminum research, 416—417. See also bauxite. America in 1900, 1—9 after World War I, 221—222 in the l920a, 297—298 in the depression, 308—309, 326—327, 332 on the eve of World War II, 366—367 during Wcrrld War II, 425-426 after World War II, 427—429 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 16 American Asaociation for the Advancement of Science, 

16, 41 American Ceramic Society, 496n American Chemical Society, 41, 93, 255n, 496n American Committee on Electrolysis, 120 American Dental Association, 272 American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC), 

122n, 255—256, 258, 273, 303—305. See also Amer. ican Standards Association. American Foundrymen's Association, 93 American Gas Association, 264 American Gas Institute, 112, 172 American Home Economics Association, 330 American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), 

37, 41, 47, 60, 116, 255n, 280, 496n American Institute of Physics, 496n American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engi- neers, 496n American Institute of Weights and Measures, 211, 307 American Instrument Company, 419 American Medical Association, 301, 302, 33%, 341 American Men of Science, 9% 683 

A 

ABBOT, Charles G., 205-206 ABELSON, Philip H., 378, 380 

Aberdeen Proving Ground, 399 absolute units (see CGS and individual units by 

absolute zero, 467n acoustic fuze (see proximity fuze) 

acoustical research, 231, 263, 481 ACREE, Solomon F., 268, 443n ADAMS, John Quincey, 21, 25, app. A, app. B ADAMSON, Keith F., 362 Ad Hoc Committee, NAS, 495—500, 503, 505, 507 Advisory Committee on Uranium (later, S—I Section, 

NDRC; S—I Committee, OSRD), 362, 363—364, 365, 368, 377, 379, 381—382, 384, 437 AD—X2, 483—487, 493, 495. See also battery additives. 

AEF (American Expeditionary Forces), 161, 184, 189, 

203, 207, 211—212 aerial photography (see photographic research, mili- tary) 

aerodynamic research, 159—160, 182, 282 "Aerodynamics of Aircraft Bombs" (Dryden), 400 aeronautical instruments, 181, 217, 282, 285—286 aeronautical research, 159, 162, 179—186, 282, 314, 370 Aeronautics Division (Commerce), 231, 282, 286, 295 AGNEW, Paul G., 100, 101, 109, 115, 255, 304, 305 Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 321, 329 Agriculture, Department of, 17, 73, 81, lOOn, 151, 152, 155, 156n, 182, 215, 218n, 219, 267, 305, 314, 

316, 326n, 328n, 349, 431 "Aid for Over the Counter Buyers," 330 Air Force, U.S., 390, 395, 398, 399, 421, 454, 472, 497, 502, 508 Air Service, Army (Air Corps), 190, 282, 283, 285, 

293, 295, 348n, 355, 420 aircraft covering materials, 176, 185 airmail service, radio beacon for, 196, 295 

airplane: development, 179—180, 182 "dopes," 185—186 

engine research and testing, 167, 180, 182—185, 217, 282. See also aeronautical research. 

fire-resistant (fireproofing), 185—186, 370 metal, 185, 206 program, U. 5., 181, 182, 185 airspeed indicator (see aeronautical instruments) 
684 American Mining Congress, 121, 152 American Petroleum Institute, 277, 420, 466n 

American Philosophical Society, 16, 41 American Physical Society, 41, 437 

American Railroad Association, 255n American Roentgen Ray Society, 339n American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM), 125, 

251n, 255n, 341, 419, 501 American Society of Chemical Engineers, 255n American Society of Civil Engineers, 125, 496n American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 86, 200, 

255n, 496n American Society of Mining and Metallurgy, 255n American Society of Refrigerating Engineers, 130 American Standards Association (ASA), 251n, 256, 

304, 305, 324, 328, 331, 336, 345n, 346—347, 449, 

462, 501, app. B. See also American Engineering 

Standards Committee. American Telephone & Telegraph Company, 160, 294n 

Ames, Iowa, field laboratory, 310n AMES, Joseph S., 100, 235—236, 237n, 314 

ammeter, 115, 140 ammonia, properties, 246 ampere, 32, 80 

absolute, 337 international, 105, 107, 24.5, 337 ANDERSON, John A., 101 aneroid barometer (see barometer) 

ANGSTROM, Anders Jonas, 463n angstrom, 463n Antarctic expeditions (1933—1934), 355 antifreeze solutions, 277, 303, 414 

209n, 211 apothecaries' weights, 27n APPEL, William, 423 APPLETON, Sir Edward Victor, 404 appliances, household, 222 Applied Mathematics division, NBS, 454 applied (industrial, technological) research (see under NBS research) 

apprentice system, 99 Appropriations, House Subcommittee of the Commit. 

tee, 46, 47, 98, 107. 148, 149, 155n, 214, 215, 216, 241—242, 307, 324n, 326n, 435, 438, 439, 441—442, 446—448, 488, 502—503 "Aquella" incident, 482—483, 487 Arago kilogram, 28n, app. B Arctic expedition (1941), 356 Arlington, Va., field laboratory, 310n armor plate steel, investigation, 213 ARMSTRONG, Edwin H., 286 Army, Department of the (see War Department) 

Army Air Corps (see Air Service, Army) 

Army Ordnance Corps (see Ordnance, Army) 

ARNALL, Ellis (Governor of Georgia), 483 Arthur D. Little, Inc., 307 Association of American Steel Manufacturers, 61, 93 

astronomical objective, design of telephoto, 345 ASTIN, Allen V., 225n. 353, 389, 390, 393, 397, 454, 

485, 486n, 493, 495, 504. 508, app. B ASTON, Francis W., 358 Atlantic City, N. I., field laboratory, 94, 126 stomic bomb project, 357—364. 368, 377—388. See also nuclear fission. 

INDEX 

atomic clock, 75n, 464, 469, 476—477 atomic constants, 467, 468—469 atomic emission spectra, 341 atomic energy, early estimates of accessibility, 381, 384 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 429, 431, 437o, 

445, 450, 456, 467, 469, 470, 471, 472, 491, 492, 496 Atomic Energy Levels, 471 Atomic Energy, Special Senate Committee (Mc. Mahon Committee), 437, 444, 491n atomic physics, 248, 249 Atomic Physics division, NBS, 445, 467, 469 Atomic Physics section, NBS, 249, 358 atomic standards, 462, 463, 469 atomic structure, 357 ATWATER, Wilbur 0., 62 Auburn, Ala., field laboratory, 310n audion tube (see electron tube) 

AUSTIN, Louis W., 13, 99n, 138, 139, 140, 192, 293 automobile industry, 5, 11, 221, 276 

automobile speeds, 277, 414 automobile tire testing (see tire testing) 

automotive engine research, 244, 263, 277—279, 345, 346 Automotive Research section, NBS, 331 aviation gasoline (see petroleum research) 

aviation, progress, 355, 357. Sec also airplane develop. ment. Aviation Physics section, NBS, 237, 314 

aviation research (see aeronautical research) 

avoirdupois pound (see pound) 

B Btu (British thermal unit), 114, 115 BACHE, Alexander D., 28, 30n, 34, 35, app. A BAEKELAND, Leo H., 160 BAKER, Newton D., 187n BAKER, Ray Stannard, 88 ballistics, 202, 317 Baltimore Fire (1904), 84, 86 

BARBROW, Louis E., llln 

barometer, 37, 78 BARUCH, Bernard, 159, 177, 233, 320, 327 baseball curve and spin, 317, 413 basic (pure, fundamental) research (see under NBS research) 

"Bat" (see guided missile research) 

BATES, Frederick 1., 74, 79, 99, 186, 247, 265, 409 BATES Phaon H., 94, 443n Foundation, 349 batteries, dry cell, 281 battery additives, 281, 303. See also AD—X2. battery, (see storage battery) Bausch & Lomb Inc., 187, 274n, 417 

bauxite, 417 bazooka (see rocket weapons) beacon system (see radio direction finder) 

BEAL, Arthur F., 16% BEAMS, Jesse W., 363, 380 BEAN, Howard S., 169n BEARCE, Henry W., 433n BECQUEREL. Antoine Henri, 12, 139, 146, 357 

BEKKEDAHL, Norman P., 411 
INDEX 685 

BELL, Alexander Graham, 210 Bell Telephone Laboratories, 14, 99n, 393, 401, 495 Beltaville, Md., field station, 291, 310n, 350, 375 

bench standards, 58 beta-ray chamber, 249n betatron, 441, 451 Bethlehem Iron and Steel Company, 14, 46n, 61 Better Business Bureau, 303, 483, 484 

Better Homes in America movement, 250, 253n, 299 "bible": "Buyers' Bible," 258—259 industrial pyrometry, 269 "radio engineers' bible," 192, 287 rubber products testing "bible," 279 binoculars, 187, 189, 190 

blackbody radiation, 245 "blackbody" standard, ilin, 245 "blackout' 'investigations, 372—373 blasting machine, 202 BLEININGER, Albert V., 94, 99n, 188, 196n blind landing system, 295—297, 407 BLUM, William, 99n, 128, 415 Board of Economic Warfare, 423 Board of Visitors (see NBS Visiting Committee) 

BOECKNER, Carl, 249 BOHR, Niels, 13, 236, 248, 357, 360, 365, 478n 

BOK, Edward, 135, 136n bolometer (see thermopile) bomb director device, 397—398, 415 bomb fuze, 393—397 bomb sights, 189 bone char research, 370 BOOTH, N. 13., 225n BORN, Max, 357, 435 

boron, 379, 380, 382, 415 

Boston, Mass,, field laboratory, 310n bougie décimale, ill 

Boulder, Cob., laboratories, NBS, 406n, 445, 467, 

472, 487, 497, 502 Boulder (Hoover) Dam, 326 BOYD. Hunter, 401 BRAID, Andrew, 56 brake and brake lining research, 477, 479 

brand namrs (see under NBS policy, products en- dorsement) BRANSCOMB. Lewie M., 619, 627 brass and brass products, 173 brass standards, Hassler'o, 26, 35 

BRATTON, Sam G. (Congressman), 319 Brazilian expedition (1947), 357 BREIT, Gregory, 363, 385, 404, 437 BRICKWEDDE, Ferdinand G., 255n, 358, 471 BRIDGEMAN, Oscar C., 443n Bridgeport, Conn., field laboratory, 165, 199 BRIGGS, Clarence A., 286n BRIGGS, Lyman J., 99n, lOOn, 169n, 182, 206, 237, 

242, 262n, 283, 320n, 322n, 326, 332, 342, 345n, 

346, 347, 350, 362, 365, 367, 372, 377, 381, 387, 

417, 419, 429, 433, 434, 435, 440, 443 appointed Director, 311, 313, 314 background, 313—314 described, 316 as administrator, 317, 438 

interest in National Geographic Society, 316, 355— 357 

baseball research, 316—317, 413 chairman, S—I (Uranium) Committee, 362—363, 368, 

377, 379, 380—381, 382—383, 437 relations with Congress, 438, 439n retires, 434 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 342 British Broadcasting Corporation, 406 British Weights and Measures Association, 2lln 

BRODE, Wallace R., 443 BROIDA, Herbert P., 478n BRONK, Detlev W., 486 Brooklyn College, 342 BROOKS, Donald B., 443n BROOKS, Herbert B., 74, 99n, 109, 115 

BROWN, Fay C., 99n, 237 BUCKINGHAM, Edgar, 99n, 101, l47n, 205—206, 24.5, 282—283, 413 building codes, 130—131, 133, 250, 373 

Building and Housing division, NBS, 131, 230, 232. 250, 253, 331 building materials research, 79, 92, 263 Building Technology division, NBS, 334, 480 building technology research, 131, 244, 250, 273, 334, 

346, 373—374, 480—481 building and construction industry, 221—222, 250, 253, 273. See also housing program. BULLOCK, William E., 307 Buna rubber (see rubber research) Bureau International des Poids et Mésures (see In. 

ternational Bureau of Weights and Measures) Bureau of Aeronautics (Navy), 282, 353, 418, 420, 453. 502 Bureau of Aircraft Production (Signal Corps), 180 Bureau of Animal Industry (Agriculture), 152 Bureau of the Budget, 64, ll2n, 228, 241, 257, 441, 

448, 449 Bureau of the Census (Commerce), 230, 435, 454, 458 Bureau of Chemistry (Agriculture), 151, 155, 258n, 

306, 328n Bureau of Corporations (Commerce). See Federal 

Trade Commission. Bureau of Engraving and Printing (Treasury), 128, 431 Bureau of Fisheries (Commerce), 230 Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (Commerce), 217n, 232 Bureau of Lighthouses (Commerce), 142, 143, 230 Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation (Corn. 

nierce), 343 Bureau of Markets (Agriculture), 289—290 Bureau of Mines (Interior), l2ln, 152, 173, 203, 230, 

258n, 328n Bureau of Navigation (Commerce), 142, 230, 287, 295 Bureau of Ordnance (Navy), 343, 362, 400, 401 Bureau of Plant Industry (Agriculture), 152, 266, 314 Bureau of Public Roads (Commerce), 501 Bureau of Ships (Navy), 443 Bureau of Soils (Agriculture), 313 BURGESS, George K., 74, 78, 99, 101, 128, 213, 236. 237, 254n, 255, 26ln, 262, 269, 304, 307, 310—311, 313, 314, 316, 335, 440, app. M as researcher, 111, 127—128, 239, 240, 245 appointed Director, 237, 314 
686 

background, 237. 239 BURGESS—Continued as administrator, 240—241, 242, 303 described, 239 relations with Congress, 241—242 death, 311 - Burgess Battery Co., 392 buried treasure locator, 301 BURROWS, Charles W., 100, 128—129 BUSH, Vannevar, 363, 368, 430, 433, 453 

bushel, 25, 27, 28 

"Bushey House," 67 Business Advisory and Planning Council (Commerce), 

322, 323, 348n BUSSE, Miss Johanna, 170, 443n Butler building, 59, 65 byproducts research (see utilization of waste mate• risis) 

BYRD, Admiral Richard E., 355 C CGS (centimeter.gram.second) system, 104, 105, 109, 337. See also electrical measurement, absolute. 

cadmium red line, 61n, 335—336, 463 CADY, Francis E., 74 CAIN, John R., 225n CAJORI, Florian, app. A CALDWELL. F. R., 111 calibration services, 501—502 California, University of, 74, 239, 361, 378, 380. 382, 

430, 435, 437, 454, 462, 497, app. A California Institute of Technology, 9% 

calorimeter, 465 Cambridge University, 13, 54, 139, 358. 359 cameras (see photographic research, military). 

camouflage material, 418 CAMPBELL, Levin H. Jr., 429 candle (unit), 37, 81, 111, 112 CANNON. Joseph G. (Congressman), 47 Canton Island expedition (1937), 356 capacitance, electrical (see farad) 

capacitance measurements and standards. 101, 104, 140. 196 capacity measures, 77—78 carbohydrate chemistry. 268, 449, 470 carbon 14, 470—471 carbon monoxide deaths, 264 carbon monoxide indicator, 421 carbon.filament lamp (see GEM lamp; lamps, mean. descent) 

"Care and repair of the house" (BH15, C489), 251, 

302, 481—482 CARHART, Henry S.. 60—61, 92n, 100 Carnegie Institution of Washington, 188, 294n, 345n, 

355, 363, 380, 385, 389—391, 406, 466n 

CARNEGIE, Andrew, 9 CARROLL, Burt H., 344-345 CARTY, John J., 160 CARVER, George Washington, 267n CASSEN, B., 437 cathodic protection. 121 Catholic University. 101 Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge), 60, 358 cement kiln, NBS. 165, 167 cement plant, experimental, NBS, 126 

INDEX Cement Reference Laboratory. NBS. 501 cement sieve measurements, 126 cement specifications, 257 Cement testing, 37, 125—126, 165, 501 

Central Chamber of Weights and Measures (Russia), 44 Central Radio Propagation Laboratory, NBS, 472-475, 511—513. See aLso Interservice Radio Propagation 

Laboratory. A Century of Electricity (Mendenhall), 34 Ceramic division, NBS, 180. See aLso Clay Products 

division. 

ceramic research, 466 cesium atom resonance, 75n, 477 

CHADWICK, Sir James. 357, 359, 385 chain reaction (see nuclear fiasion) Chamber of Commerce, U. S., 307 CHANUTE, Octave, 182 CHAPIN, Roy D. (Secretary of Commerce), 313, 434 

Charleston, S. C., field laboratory, 126 CHASE, Stuart, 305, 327, 329 chemical apparatus, 38, 59-60, 162 chemical reagents, standardization, 81—82 chemical warfare (see gas warfare) 

Chemical Warfare Service (CWS), 203, 344 Chemistry building, 62n, 165, 182. 344 Chemistry division, NBS, 75, 81, 93—94, 115, 127, 128, 

130, 131, 155, 250. 358, 421 Chicago, University of, 40, 51—52, 54, 61, 65, 74, 9%, 

186, 190, 363, 382. 384, 385. 430, 435, 444, app. M Civil Aeronautics Administration 472 Civil Service reform, need for, 227, 228 Civil War, 28n, 62, 161n CLACEY. John, 275 CLARK, John Bates. 11 Clark standard cell (see standard cell) 

Clark University, 74, 140, 205, app. M classified projects (sce security, wartime) 

Clay Products division, NBS, 250 clay and clay products research, 170, 263 

CLEVELAND, Grover, 68n Cleceland. Ohm, field laborxtory, 165, 199 

clinical thermometers (see thermometer) 

clutch, electromagnetic, 458—460 Coast and Geodetic Survey, 16, 18, 20, 24, 26, 28, 30, 

32, 34, 37, 45, 48, 52. 53, 54, 68, 73, 144. 155n, 

230, 305, 355, 511, app. A, app. B Coast and Geodetic Survey building, 56, 59, 65, 67 Coast Guard, 295. 431, 472 COBB, Henry Ives, 37 COBLENTZ, William W., 99, 186, 196n, 240n, 245, 300, 

337—338, 487n COCKCROFT, Sir John, 357, 359 COFFIN. J. C., 105 coinage, 16, 23 coins, composition, 416 coke byproducts, 173 COLBY, Albert Ladd, 46n, 61, 93 cold war, 428—429, 434 

College Park, Md., field laboratory, 297, 3lOn, 347 color dictionary, 271 color photometry. 116 color and colorimetry research and standards, 170, 

245, 270—27l, 488n 
iNDEX 

Colorimetry section, NBS, 170, 171, 270 

Columbia University, un, 74, 99n, 128, 160, 235, 328, 

358, 360, 361, 363, 369, 378, 379, 380, 382, 435 Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 32, 79 

Columbus, Ohio, field laboratory, 310n, 331 Commerce, Department of, 19, 68, 142, 153, 173, 179, 

187n, 200, 229—231, 233, 250, 253, 261, 262, 272, 

287, 297, 319, 326n, 327n, 346, 348n, 369, 432, 44.8, 449, 450, 482, 485 Commerce Science Committee, 487 Commerce, Secretary of, 489, 490, 499, app. D. See also under flosses: Chapin, Harriman, Hoover, 

Hopkins, Jones, Lamont, Redfield, Roper. Saw- yer, Wallace, Weeks. 

Commerce and Labor, Department of, 48, 68, 153 Commerce and Labor, Secretary of (see under Cor. telyou, Nagel, Straus) 

Commercial Economy Board (see Conservation Divi. 

sion) 

commercial scales, 23 commercial standards, 33, 260, 323, 424, 425. See also Trade Standards division, NBS. Commission on Economy and Efficiency, 152 Committee on Uultimate Consumer Goods (ASA), 328 commodity standards and specifications, 258, 260n, 

370, 450 communication, radio (see radio research and engineering) 

COMPTON, Arthur H., 382, 383 

COMPTON, Karl T., 321, 444, app. M Comptroller-General, Office of the, 305 Computation section, NBS, 461 computers, electronic, 342, 451—454, 456. See also ENIAC; SEAC; SWAC. CONANT, James B., 363, 368, 383 

concrete, 421—422. See also ships, concrete. condensers, 58, 80 CONDON, Edward U., 363-364, 387, 434—445, 447-448, 

482, 487-488, 499—500 appointed Director, 435 background, 435—437 described, 440—441 as administrator, 438—439, 440—445, 447—449, 454, 456—457, 479 relations with Congress, 438—439, 491—492 amends organic act, 488—490 resigns, 486n, 492—493 CONELRAD, 351 Congress of Radiology and Electricity (Brussels, 

1910), 146 conservation of materials, 174, 179 

Conservation Division (War Industries Board), 177, 233 Consolidated Gas and Electric Co., Baltimore, 264. constants (see atomic, nuclear, physical constants) 

Constitution of the United States, 335 Consumer Bulletin, 137 Consumer Contacts section, NBS, 447n consumer, NBS and the (see under NBS relations with consumer public) 

Consumer Reports, 137, 329 consumer, Federal department of the, 328, 330n consumer standards, 133, 432, 434 consumer testing, 329—330, 447n 

687 

"consumerism," 320, 327—331 Consumers' Advisory Board, 327—330 Consumers' Guide, 329 Consumers' Research Bulletin, 329 Consumers' Research, Inc., 170, 305, 329 

Consumers Union, 329 techniques (radio), 144 COOLIDGE, CALVIN, 266 COOLIDGE, William David, 136, 444 copper substitutes, 416 copper wire tables, 116 Cornell University, 61, 74, 99n, llln, 170n, 289, 338n, 364 Corona, Calif., field laboratory, 445, 487, 497 Corn Products Refining Co., 265 Corning Glass Works, 14, 274n, 492 corrosion, electrolytic (see electrolysis) Corrosion Laboratory, NBS, 121 corrosion, soil, 121 CORTELYOU, George B. (Secretary of Commerce and Labor), 68. 69, 103 cosmic ray research, 13, 355. See also radiometeor. 

ography. 

cost of living, 225, 228. See also living standards. cotton research (see textile research) 

cotton mill, NBS, 165, 217, 331 

coulometer, silver (see voltameter) 

coulomb, 32 Council of National Defense, 159, 160, 161, 175, 177, 367 CRAGOE, Carl S., 169n - CRAMM, E. C., 140 crime and fraud detection, 302n critical materials research,' 175, 371, 410-418, 424 See also alloy research; aluminum; antifreeze; 

copper; optical glass; quartz crystal; rubber. 

critical tables (see International Critical Tables . 

. .). 

criticism of NBS (see under NBS research). 

CRITTENDEN, Eugene C., 99n, llln, 271, 300, 338, 

434, 438, 439n, 443, 488n, app. B crucible, glass.making, 187—188, 417 "crusade for standardization," 253—262, 299, 302 

crusade, weights and measures (see under weights and measures) 

Cryogenic Laboratory, NBS, 358 cryogenic research, 15, 84, 445—446, 466, 471—473 CURIE, Mme. Marie, 139, 146 CURIE, Pierre, 291n CURIE-JOLIOT, Frédéric, 357 currency counter, electronic, 460 current, electrical (see ampere; alternating.current 

measurement; direct-current measurement) current measurement, high-frequency, 140 CURTIS, Corporal Frederick A., 16% 

CURTIS, Harvey L., 99n, 100, 101, 109, 202, 337, 443n 

CURTISS, John H., 443 CURTISS, Leon F., 339, 353 customhouses, 21, 24—26, 27—28, 58, 79, 81 D 

DALE, Samuel, 209n, 211 DANIELS, Josephus, 160 DAVIS, Raymond, 24.0, 302n DAVY, Sir Humphrey, 121 

iNDEX 

electromagnetic units, 105 electrometer, absolute, 340n electromotive force, 38, 58, 61, 65, 79, 104, 107. See al.so volt. 

electron and electronics, 12, 13, 249, 451 electron microscope, 450 electron tube, 15, 139, 191—192, 194n, 197, 214, 286 

Electron Tube Laboratory, NBS, 451 Electronic Computing Machine Development Laboratory, NBS, 461 Electronics division, NBS, 454, 460 electrostatic units, 105 elements, transmutation of, 357, 359, 462 elevator safety code, 273 ELLETT, Alexander, 389, 390, 397 

ELY, Edwin W., 259 EMERSON, W. B., 337 Emerson Radio and Phonograph Corp., 397 Emery universal testing machine, 96 emf (see electromotive force) 

emission spectra of elements, 34L See also spectrographic analysis. 

EMLEY, Warren E., 196n, 267 enabling act (see NBS organic act) 

"Encyclopedia of Specifications," 259n endorsement of products (see NBS policy) 

Engineering Instruments section, NBS, 74, 79, 86 

Engineering Physics division, NBS, 257 Engineering Plant section, NBS, 74 Engineering Research division, NBS, 127, 148 

engineering standards, 122 Engineers, Army Corps of, 16, 189, 190, 202, 343, 364, 

383, 417, 423, 429, 497, 501 ENIAC (computer), 453 Environmental Science Services Administration 

(ESSA), 511 expeditions, scientific, 316—317 "Experiment in Prophecy" (H. G. Wells), 11 explosives, 172—173 F 

689 

Federated American Engineering Societies, 253 Federation of American Business, 307 FERMI, Enrico, 357, 360, 361, 363, 378, 380, 381, 382, 384 FERNER, Roy Y., 65, 74, 100, 170 FERRY, John D., 478n FESSENDEN, Reginald A., 139, 191 Fibrous Materials division, NBS, 268 film, photographic (see photographic research) 

FINN, Alfred N., 418 fire-hose couplings, 84-86 

Fire Resistance section, NBS, 130 fire resistance research, 130—133, 263, 273. See also building technology research. 

fireproofing aircraft (see airplane, fire resistant) 

FISCHER, Louis A., 49, 56, 58, 65, 67, 74, 77, 86, 90, 

101, 162, 170, 233—234, app. A, app. B, app. M flame standards (see photometric standards) 

flasks, sugar, 58 FLEMING, Sir John A., 15 FLOOD, Daniel J. (Congressman), 439n Florida, University of, 344 FLORY, Paul J., 478n fluoroscope, 146 Flying Coffin (DeHavilland.4), 181 FOCKE, Heinrich, 282 Food Administration, 177n, 229 Food and Drug Administration, 137n, 306n. See also Pure Food and Drug Act. foot, 36 FOOTE, Paul D., 99, 240, 248, 249, 276n, 310n FORD, Henry, 5, 276 

foreign calibration of U.S. instruments, 38, 58, 77 foundry, experimental, NBS, 165 Franck.Condon principle, 437 FRANKLIN, Benjamin, 16 fraud, weights and measures (see weights and meas- ures, crusade) free radicals research, 15, 478n FREHAFER, Mabel K., 170n French scientific mission (1917), 191, 192, 202 

frequency allocation, broadcast, 289, 291, 292, 404 frequency, standards, 15, 196-197, 291, 292, 408, 

475, 477 

fading, radio (see radio propagation research) 

FAIRCHILD, Ihler J., 443n 474, Far West building, 165, 376n, 472 

farad, faraday, 32, 469 FRICK, Henry Clay, 9 FARLEY, James A., 332 FRISCH, Otto R., 360 farm waste utilization (see utilization of waste ma- fuel research, 78, 192, 507. See also petroleum 

terials) research 

FECHT, Arthur J., 203n FULTON, Robert, 16 Federal budget and expenditures for research (1920) fuze (see proximity fuze; bomb fuze) 226—228 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 302n, 351—352 G 

Federal Communications Commission, 472 Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) GAGE, Lyman J. (Secretary of Treasury), 39, 40, 41, 

331, 333 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 52, 60, 61, app. M Federal Home Loan Bank Act, 309 gage blocks, precision, 200, 336, 374, 423 

Federal Radio Commission (Federal Communications Gage Laboratory, NBS, 162, 165, 199—200, 286n, 314n Commission), 289, 292 gage testing and standards, 60, 165, 199—200, 374 Federal Radio Law of 1912. 287 Gaithersburg, Md., in, 503—505, 508 Federal Specifications Board, 112n, 257, 260 GALLATIN, Albert, 23, 28, app. A Federal Supply Commission (see General Services gallon, 26, 28, 34 

Administration) gamma-rays, 146 Federal Trade Commission. 19, 110, 221n, 281, 301, GARAND, John C.. 206 302n, 330n, 482, 483 GARDNER, Irvine C., 356 
690 iNDEX 

GARDNER, Washington (Congressman), 98 gas appliances, 115, 263—265 Gas Chemistry section, NBS, 204, 421 gas engineering 112—115 gas and gas appliance industry, 110, 111, 112, 114—115, 173n, 264 gas, household, 172, 173 gas light standards, 114, 151 gas, manufactured, 264, 411 gas, natural, 263, 264 gas mask research, 203 gas meters, 79, 110, 115 gas photometry, 112—115 "gas-saving" devices (appliance), 264, 302—303 gas service, standards, 114, 148 gas warfare, 202—203, 395n gasoline, standards, 276—277, 303 "gasoline.savers," gasoline additives, 277n, 375, 414n GAYNOR, William 3. (Mayor of New York City), 89 Geiger counter research, 353 Geissler tube, 83n GELLER, Roman F., 169n GEM lamp (carbon-filament), 112, 136—137 General Electric Company, 14, 61, 99n, 112, 136, 178, 

192, 198, 257n, 286, 293, 343, 380, 391, 395, 419, 444 General Motors Corp., 366n General Services Administration (GSA), 500n General Supply Committee, 124, 149, 258n 

Geological Survey, 16, 18, 73, 81, 94, 96, 125, 173, 

190, 215 

Geophysical Laboratory (Carnegie Institution of Wash. 

ington), 188, 203 

Ceorge Washington University, 99, 100 GIBSON, Kasson S., tIm, 245, 271, 337, 487n 

GILCHRLST, Raleigh, 169n GILLETT, Frank H. (Congressman), 149 GILLILAND, T. R., 404 glass fiber paper, 479—480 glass industry, 216n glass plant, NBS (see optical glass plant, NBS) 

GLAZEBROOK, Sir Richard T., 487 Globe Union, Inc., 398 GODDARD, Robert H., 205-206, 282 goggles, aviation, 189 GOLDSBOROUGH, Winder E, 313n golf ball, bounce, 413 GOLOVIN, Nicholas E., 443n Goodrich, B. F., Co., 14 GORDON, C. L., 387 GOULD, Ralph E., l69o 

Government Printing Office, 91, 128, 133, 308, 415 Government purchase specifications (see specifications, Federal purchase) 

Government testing (see NBS testing) 

graduate study program, 99—102 graduated line standard, 29 Craf Zeppelin (dirigible), 284n graphite, 362, 363, 379 

gravitation, Newtonian constant (G), 237, 245 

gravity, local acceleration (g), 245 GRIES, John M., 250 GROVER, Frederick W., 74, 80, 100, 105, 109, 169n 

GROVES. Leslie R., 383. 384, 437 - 

GR—S synthetic rubber (see rubber research) 

guided missile research, 376, 399—403, 407, 419, 429, 

445, 451, 472, 475, 490, 497 gun screws, 162 gun sights, 189 GUNN, Ross, 363 GURNEY, Ronald W., 437 GUTHE, Karl E., 74, 79, 99n, 313 gyromagnetic ratio of the proton, 464, 468, 469 

II 

HAFSTAD, Lawrence A., 390 HAHN, Otto, 360, 361 HAHNER, Clarence H., 418 HALE, George E., 160 HALSEY, Frederick A., 209n, 211 Handbook of Physics (Condon & Odishaw), 487—488 HARDING, Warren G., 219, 229, 237, 266 harmonic analyzer, 51 HARPER, William Rainey, 65 HARPER, D. R., 3d, 130 HARRIMAN, Norman F., 258 HARRIMAN, W. Averell (Secretary of Commerce), 

448, 492n Harry Diamond Ordnance Laboratories, 497 Harvard University, 12, 20, 38, 52, 54, 99n, 356, 385 HASSLER, Edward Troughton, app. A HASSLER, Ferdinand Rudolph, 24—28, 30, 34—36, app. A, app. B HAUSER, Philip M., 435 HAY, John M., 2 HAYES, Rutherford B., 30 HAYFORD, John F., 153 HAYNES, Elwood, 5 Haywood Optical Co., 417 Heat (Heat and Power) division, NBS, 111, 128, 130, 

131, 180, 240, 248, 250 Heat and Thermometry section (division), NBS, 65, 

74, 78, 94, 127, 250 

HEAVISIDE, Sir Oliver, 293 heavy hydrogen, heavy water (see deuterium) 

Hefner amytacetate lamp, 81, 111, 112 Werner, 435 helicopter, 282 heliographic signaling mirror (see mirror, signaling) 

helium, liquid, 466—467, 471n—472n. See also cryogenic research. 

helmet liner, 422 - HENDERSON, Joseph E., 390 HENRY, Joseph, app. B. henry, 32 HERING, Carl, 37, 47 

HERTZ, Heinrich R., 12 HEYL, Paul R., 99n, 245, 283 HIDNERT, Peter, 271—272 High Altitude Laboratory (see Dynamometer Labors. 

tory, NBS) 

high-altitude weather-recording system, 353 high.frequency direction finder (see direction finder, 

high frequency). 

high-frequency research, 140-141, 294—295 high-temperature measurement and research, 94, 127, 

131, 231 
INDEX 691 

High Voltage Laboratory, NBS, 116n, 333, 340 

high voltage research, 80, 115—116 HILGARD, Julius E., 30n, app. B HILLEBRAND, William F., 101 Hindenburg (dirigible), 285n HINMAN, Wilbur S. Jr., 347n, 353, 389, 390, 391, 393 HOFFMAN, James I., 169n, 380, 417 

HOKE, William E., 200 HOLT, W. L., 279 Home Owners' Loan Corp. (HOLC), 333 HOOVER, Gilbert C., 362 HOOVER, Herbert C., 177n, 211n, 234, 253, 319 as Secretary of Commerce, 157, 219, 229—235, 237, 

241, 249—250, 253, 258, 260—263, 267, 269, 314, 510, 

app. M as President, 266, 307, 308, 309, 313, 319, 427 "Hooverizing," 177n HOPKINS, Harry L. (Secretary of Commerce), 319, 

434, 446 

HORAN, Walt (Congressman), 440n House Com,nittce on Coinage, Weights and Measures, 1, 45, 46 House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 68 House Office building, 91 House Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropria. 

tions (see Appropriations, House Subcommittee) House Committee on Un.American Activities, 491 household measurements, 135—136, 303 household materials, 137, 303 

household safety, 137—138, 103 housing program (1920s), 232—233, 249-253; (1930s), 333—334. See also building technology. 

HOWARD, Paul L., 484 Howard University, 477 HOWE, Henry M., 128, 153 HOXTON, Llewelyn C., 74, 139, I69n HUBBARD, Donald, 344-345 HUBBARD, Henry D., 65, 74 HUDSON, C. S., 268 HUDSON, Ray M., 259, 261, 314 

"Huff.Duff" (See direction finder, high-frequency) 

HUMPHREY, R. L., 94 HUTCHINS, Robert M., 435 HYDE, Edward P., 74, 81, 98, 100 Hydraulics Laboratory, NBS, 310, 400—401 hydrocarbon research, 369, 419, 429, 445 

hydrogen bomb, 379n, 458n hydrogen research (see deuteriuns; cryogenic research) 

Hydrographic Office (Navy), 17, 18 hydrometer testing, 31, 65, 77 hygrometer, electric, 354 Hygrade Sylvania Co., 391 I 

iceberg proximity detection, 142n Illinois, University of, 40, 49, 54, 74, 98, 385, app. M illuminants, gas and oil, 112—114 Illuminating Engineering Society, 255n illumination standards (see photometric standards) 

imperial weights and measures, 23, 28, 33, 34n incandescent lamps (see lamps, incandescent) 

inch, 336 inch board, 257 

inclinometer (see aeronautical instruments) 

independent testing agencies, 37 Inductance and Capacity section, NBS, 74, 80, 101 inductance, electrical, 80, 105. See also henry. 

inductance measurements and standards, 104, 140, 196 Industrial building, 167, 217, 253, 262, 266, 268, 274, 279 industrial research (see under NBS research) 

industrial research laboratories, 14, 98, 217—218, 244, 

264, 265, 269—270, 282 industry and Government, 216, 262 

industry, Government interference in, 307—308, 345 infrared absorption spectra, 464 1NGBERG, Simon H., 131, 196n, 443n 

INGHAM, Samuel D., app. A Inspector of Standard Weights and Measures, 53 Inspector of Standards, 40, 56 

Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), 342 Institute for Applied Technology, NBS, 511 Institute for Basic Standards, NBS, 511 Institute for Materials Research, NBS, 511 Institute for Numerical Analysis, NBS, 454, 458, 461, 497 Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), 255n, 496n instrument industry, scientific, 37—38, 269 instrument landing techniques, 196, 295—297, 407 Instrument Shop section, NBS, 74, 83n instrumentation program, basic, 490—491 insulating materials, electrical (see dielectric mate- rials) 

interchangeable parts (see mass production) 

Interdepartmental Screw Thread Committee, 369—370 interference, radio (see radio interference) 

interferometry, Sin, 61n, 186n, 463n Interior, Department of, 16, 18, 94n, 152, I55n, 165 interlaboratory comparisons, 335n, 336, 337 internal combustion engine research (see automotive 

engine research) 

International Advisory Committee on Electricity 

(1928), 337 International Bureau of Weights and Measures, 29, 

60, 61, 75, 77, 78, 146, 209, 24.6n, 335n, 463n, 

app. B, app. M International Commission for Illumination, 271 International Committee on Radium Standards, 146 International Committee of Weights and Measures, 61, 109 International Conference on Electrical Units and 

Standards (London, 1908), 107 International Congress of Radiology (London, 1925, 

1928), 338—339 International Critical Tables of Numerical Data of Physics, Chemistry, and Technology, 359n International Geophysical Year (1957—59), 355 - International Polar Year (1882—83), 354, 357; (1932— 34), 354, 355, 357 

International Practical Temperature Scale, 246—247, 335, 337n, 462 International Radium Standard, 146 Interservice Radio Propagation Laboratory (IRPL), 

405, 406—407, 430n, 472, 474.. See also Central 

Radio Propagation Laboratory. Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), 19, 116, 118, 

122, 148 
692 

inventions at NBS (see NBS staff, patents) 

ionization chamber for x-ray measurements, 24%, 339 ionospheric research, 293, 294n, 350—351, 355—357, 403— 405 ionospheric storms, 405—407 Iowa, University of, 389 iron, high-purity, 370 iron and steel industry (see steel industry) IRPL Radio Propagation Handbook (see radio propagation) 

ISBEL, Horace H., 268 isoprene (see rubber research) 

isotopes and isotope separation, 13, 109, 357—360, 363, 

379, 380—385, 437 Isthmian Canal Commission, 94, 258n 

J 

JACKSON, Andrew, app. A JACKSON, Richard F., 265 JEFFERSON, Thomas, 16, 21, app. A, app. B Jena glass hydrometer, 77 jerusalem artichoke (see levulose) 

jet propulsion, 282—283, 466 JEWETT, Frank 0., 322 JOHANNSON, Carl Edvard, 200 Johns Hopkins University, 37, 61, 63, 65, 74, 81, 99n, 

100, 101, 146, 16%, 236, 237n, 313, 314, 358, 361, 

390, 430 

JOHNSON, Joseph T. (Congressman), 149 Joint Resolutions of Congress: 

copies of Hassler's standards (1838), 27; standard 

balance, 27; metric weights and measures (1866), 28 JOLIFFE, Charles B., 289 JONES, Jesse H. (Secretary of Commerce), 432, 433, 

434, 446 joule, 32 JUDD, Deane B.. 225n JUDSON, Lewis V., 169n Justice Department, 302n, 307 K KDKA (Westinghouse), 286, 289 

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, 360, 363 KALLET, Arthur, 327, 329 KANOLT, Clarence W., 101, 471n 

KARCHER, I. C., 276n KARRER, Enoch, 169n KATER, Capt. Henry, 26 KELLY, Marvin 3., 495, 507n Kelly Committee (see Ad Hoc Committee) 

KELVIN, Lord (William Thomson), 210 KENNELLY, Arthur E., 38, 52. 55, 293n, app. B Kennelly.Heaviaide layer (see ionospheric research). 

kerosene oil, 110, 112 KETTERING. Charles F., 311, 321 Keuffel & Esser, 187 Kew Observatory (Great Britain), 44 Kiess, Carl C.. 248 kilos and Kiln building, NBS, 165, 167, 188, 417 

kilogram, 23, 28, 29, 30, 33, 36, 68, 77, 335n, app. B KING, William H. (Congressman), 209n "Kingfisher" (see guided missile research) 

INDEX 

KIRBY, Robert S.. 404 KOLSTER, Frederick A., 141, 142—144, 191, 194, 196n, 403 Kolster Radio Corporation, 144 Korean conflict, 429, 442, 445, 449, 490, 495, 496, 507 

KOUWENHOVEN, William B., 169n KRYNITSKY, Alexander I., 169n krypton 86, 75n, 336 krypton lamp, 336, 463—464 L 

labeling, commercial standards, 260—261, 328 Labor, Department of, 19 (Navy) Laboratory for Special Radio Transmission 

Research, 140, 191, 192 

laissez.faire, 7, 9, 17, 19—20, 33-34, 36, 37, 133, 228, 

321, 482 LAMONT, Robert P. (Secretary of Commerce), 252, 311 lamps, incandescent, 3, 14, 31, 90, 110—111, 127, 136— 137, 257, 302—303 lamps, standards and specifications, 79, 81, 90, 109, 

110, 112, 127, 133, 134, 257. See aLto photometric 

standards. 

LANGE, Oscar C., 74 LANGLEY, Samuel P., 182 Langley Field, 190 LANGMUIR, Irving, 136 laser, 464n LAWRENCE, Ernest 0., 380, 382, 383, 385 leather and leather substitutes research, 175, 268, 479 

LeCJ-IATELIER, Henri R., 237 Lehigh University, 295n Lend.Lease, 367, 381, 423, 462 length, standards, 15, 34, 75, 462—464. See also indi- vidual units by name: foot; yard; meter. 

LESLIE, Robert T., 417 levulose research, 265—266, 268, 307, 345, 349 

Libbey.Owens Ford, 417 Liberty engine, 182—184, 206 Light and Optical Instruments section, NBS, 74, 78 light bulbs (See lamps, incandescent) 

light, standard of (see photometric standards) 

light, Waidner.Burgess absolute standard, 111—112, 239, 337 lighter-than-air craft, 174, 283—284. See also dirigibles 

by name. 

Lighthouse Board (Commerce). 91 lightning hazards, research, 121 LINDBERGH, Charles A., 284n, 286 liquefied petroleum gas, 464 

liquid hydrogen (see cryogenic research) 

LITTLE, Arthur D., 307. See also Arthur D. Little, Inc. living standards: 1900: 8—9 1920: 222, 223—224, 225, 228 1930: 308, 332 1946: 427 LIVINGSTON, Leonidas F. (Congressman), 148 LLOYD, Morton C., 74, 109, 122n 

LODGE, Henry Cabot, 53n LOGAN, Kirk H., 120 London Ejecerical Review, 61 
INDEX London Wireless Conference (see Wireless Conference, London) 

long-distance radio transmission, 192, 197, 350—351. See also radio propagation research. Los Alamos, N. Mex., 377, 378, 385, 387, 388, 430, 434, 437 "The Los Alamos Primer," 387—388 Los Angeles (dirigible), 284, 285 Louise A. Boyd Arctic Expedition (1941), 356 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904 (see St. Louis 

Exposition) 

Lovibond color scale, 270 low-temperature research (see cryogenic research) 

Low-Temperature (Cryogenic) Laboratory, NBS, 83, 472 LOWAN, Arnold N., 342 LOWELL, Percival D., 194, 196n, 348n 

lubricating oil, 37, 263 luminous paint, radioactive (see radium sickness) 

LUNDELL, Gustave E. F., 169n LYND, Robert S., 328 Lynd Report, 328 LYONS, Harold, 403, 408 

M 

McADAM, Dunlop I. Jr., 443n McALLISTER, Addsms S., 258, 438n 

McBRIDE, Russell 5., 112, 114, 303 

McCOLLUM, Burton, 120, 202, 276n, 352n, 487n 

McDOWELL, Louise, 170n MCKEE, Samuel A., 421 McKELVY, E. C., 100 McKINLEY, William, 7, 20, 39, 58, 68n 

McLANE, Louis, 26 McLEAN, W. B., 391n McMAHON, Brien (Congressman), 437 McMahon Committee (see Atomic Energy. Special 

Senste Committee) 

McMILLAN, Edwin M., 378 McPHERSON, Archibald T., 169n, 443n machine gun corrosion, 213 Macon (dirigible), 285 MADDOX, John W. (Congressman), 46—47 MADISON, James, 16, 21, app. A Magnegage, 419 magnetic storms (see ionospheric storms) 

Magnetism and Absolute Measurement of Current 

section, NBS, 74, 79, 128—129 MANDELKERN, Leo, 478n mangsnin resistance, 104 Manhattan District (Corps of Engineers), 340, 364, 

383, 385, 419, 429, 467 MANN, James R. (Congressman), 69n maps and map paper, 423 Marburg, University of, 74 MARCONI, Guglielmo, 3, 139 Marconi Co., 198 Marine Corps, 423 Maritime Commission, 421, 422 

maritime radio, 141 MARK, Hermsn, 478n MARVIN, C. F. Jr., 279a Maryland, weights and measures, 34—35 

693 

Maryland, University of, 34 MASON, William P., 33-34 mass production, 161, 199, 221, 369—370, 423 mass spectrometer, 441, 451 mass spectroscope, 358 mass, standards, 15. See also individual units by 

name: pound; kilogram. 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 45, 61, 74, 98, 235—237, 335, 378, 400, 401, 430, 437, 444, 453, 

454, 484, 486, app. M master scale depot (Chicago), 331 Material Prufungs Amt, 79 materials research and testing (see under NBS, research) 

Materials Testing Laboratory, NBS, 376 Mathematical Tables Project, NBS, 342—343, 404n, 461 mathematics and numerical analysis program, 442 MAUCHLY, John W., 453 MAXWELL, James Clerk, 12, 105, 507 Mazda (tungsten-filament) lamp, 112, 136—137 Meadows, Md., field station, 350, 376, 406n 

measurement pinch, 507—508, 511 measurement standards, 156 measurements for the household (see under household) 

Mechanics and Sound division, NBS, 340, 400 

Medical Department of the Army (see Surgeon Gen- eral's Office) 

medical preparations, radioactive, 301—302 medical treatment, x-ray, 146, 338—339, 340 medical treatment, ultraviolet, 338 MEGGERS, William F., 99, 186, 190, 248, 341, 344, 

462, 487n MEITNER, Lise, 360 Mellon Institute of Indusjrial Research, 307 melting point determination, 78 MENDELEEV, Dimitti I., 240n MENDENHALL, Thomas C., 6n, 13n, 18, 30, 32, 34, 36, 

app. B Menlo Park, 14 MERICA, Paul D., 225n mercury 198, 75n, 462—463, 469 mercury 198 lamp, 336 mercury vapor arc, 15 MERRILL, Albert S., 74, 86 mesothorium, 349 Metallurgy division, NBS, 118—119, 171, 237, 239, 240, 250, 349 "Metallurgical Laboratory," U. of Chicago, 382, 384, 385 

127, 129, 148, 165, 

metallurgy, basic research, 128, 148, 173—174, 231 metals, properties, 128—129, 173 metaphysics in metrology, 35—36 METCALF, Victor H. (Secretary of Commerce and Labor), 86 meteorological instruments, 60 meteorological 352 meteorological services, 17 meter (metric system), 28—30, 33, 36, 61, 67—68, 75, 77, 335, 463, app. B. See also under wavelength 

definition. 

Meter, Committee, app. B Metric Act (1866), app. B Metric Convention (1875), 29—30, 209, app. B, app. C The Metric Fallacy (Halsey and Dale), ZOPn 
694 INDEX 

metric legislation, 209, 210—212, app. B metric manual for soldiers, 208—209 metric standards, 28—30, 58, 196, 209, 423 metric system, 28, 29, 30, 36, 207—212, app. B Metrology division, NBS (see Weights and Measures division) 

MEYER, J. Franklin, 122n MICHELSON, Albert A., 51—52, 54, 61, 99n, 169n, 

186, 190—191, 336, 463n, app. B, app. M Michigan Agricultural College, 74 Michigan School of Mines, 74 Michigan State College, 313, 317 Michigan, University of, 60, 74, 100, 101, 313 microwave radio frequency standards, 408, 475 microwave spectroscopy, 475-476 MIDDLEKAUF, George W., 74 mil scale, 188 military research (see NBS research, military) 

MILLER, John F., 197n "Miller effect," 197n MILLIKAN, Robert A., 12, 51, 215, 219 miniaturization, 354, 398, 452—453 mining industry, 121 Minnesota, University of, 248 mint, Philadelphia, 23, 26. See aLso U.S. Mint. 

mirror, reflecting telescope (see disk, telescope) 

mirror, signaling, 418-419 Miscellaneous Materials division, NBS (see Organic and Fibrous Materials division) 

missile research (see guided missile) 

MITCHELL, William ("Billy"), 285 mobilization for war (1917), 159—161 model law, weights and measures, 88, 89 

MOHLER, Fred L., 99n, 169n, 240, 248—249, 358, 362, 390 molasses waste research, 266—267. See also utilization of waste materials. 

monopolies, 7, un, 20, 36, 228. See also public 

utility monopolies. 

MONROE, James, app. A MOON, Charles, 109 MORGAN. John Pierpont. 19, 20 MORSE, Samuel F. B., 16 MORTON, Harold S., 397 Mount Wilson Observatory, 160, 274 

Munsell color system, 270 MURPHREE, Eger V., 383 musical pitch, broadcast, 350, 474—475 mustard gas (see gas warfare) MUTCHLER. W. H., 415 N 

NPL (see National Phys)cal Laboratory) 

"NBS Handbook of Physical Measurements" (see 

Handbook oJ Physics) 

NBS.Meggers mercury 198 lamp, 462-463 NAGEL. Charles (Secretary of Commerce and Labor), 153 National Academy of Sciences, 16, 18, 20, 32, 40-41, 

160, 321, 382, 485—486, 495, 496n, app. B. National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), 159—160, 162, 171, 174, 180, 182, 282, 283, 320n, 

324, 371, 372, 420, 421, 431, 443, 4-66, app. B 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

(NASA), 160n, 320n, 472, 505 

National Applied Mathematics Laboratories, NBS, 

343, 461 National Archives, 335 National Aosociation for Purchasing Agents, 261 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), 211, 

255n, 307, 319n 

National Board of Fire Underwriters, 86 National Board of Health, 17 National Bureau of Standards: 

administration (see under Directors: Briggs, Bur. gess, Condon, Stratton) 

Anniversary, 50th, 491—493 annual reports not printed, 369n appropriations: 

consolidation, 324, 347n for testing and calibration, 447 general and direct, 44, 46, 55, 69n, 148, 149, 167, 

199n, 200, 213, 214-215, 218, 225, 231, 241—242, 

308, 309—310, 311, 320, 322, 331—332, 345—346, 349, 372, 375—376, 441—442, 448, 488, 502—503, 507n, app. F special appropriations, 88, 93, 112, 116, 119, 120, 

123, 124, 130, 144, 149n, 151, 167, 174—175, 218—219, 231—232, 259, 263, 267, 274, 324, 346, 

349, app. F, app. C transferred funds, 167n, 213—214, 241, 282, 305, 

306, 309, 349, 376, 431, 497, 502—503, 507n, 

app. F 

Baconian scope of research, 64, 148 

buildings (see NBS plant) 

comparison of NBS with campus, 99, 498; with battleship, 82; with PTR, 82, 261n, 310n; with 

NPL, 232n, 310n; with hydraulic laboratories 

abroad, 232n 

central and coordinating agency of research, as a, 123, 124, 215—217, 324n, 342, 442, 454—456, 461, 472—474, 479, 510 construction and construction costs, 44, 45, 62, 69— 71, 72, 83, 96, 107—108, 144, 165, 333, 375, 376, 503—504, app. 0 

cooperation with national laboratories abroad, 246n, 

292, 336, 339, 350 

correspondence, public, 55, 138, 299—301, 381 Directors (see under Stratton, Burgess, Briggs, Con- dos, Astin; also app. D) 

eating facilities (lunch rooms), 72—73 economies, petty, 157, 225, 242n, 331, 332 establishment, 1, 40, 48, 58 field (see under location: Allentown, Ames, Atlantic City, Auburn, Belts- villa, Boston, Boulder, Bridgeport, Charleston, 

Cleveland, College Park, Columbus, Corona, Den- ver, Meadows, New York, Northampton, Pitts. 

burgh, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, 

Seattle, Sterling, Tuscaloosa) 

fire, explosion, at NBS, 84, 277n, 375 functions and scope, 43, 156—157, 307, 322—323 functions, redefinition of, 323—324, 489-490 functions, limitations on, 43 institutes of NBS, new, 511 lecturers, guest, 139, 236, 477—478 

legislatien, app. C mission (1960), 508—509 
INDEX name changes, 43, 48, 69, 332; variations on name, 300 need for NBS, 9, 14—15, 18, 21—23, 36—39, 41—42, 68—69 guest workers, 248 operations: 

curtailment, 322—323, 345—350, 495—497 growth (new projects), 94, 148, 155—156, 165— 167, 218—219, 231, 242, 303, 309—310, 342—343, 393 investigated, 314—316, 321—322 organic act, 43, 46, 49, 58, 64-65, 69, 91, 96, 147— 148, 149—153, 156, 307, 322, 323, 330, 433, 434, 442, 488—490, 509, app. C plant: 

site, 44, 58, 62, 69—71, app. L land purchases, 62, 165, 310, 376, 504-505, app. L buildings, 60n, 62, 69, 84n, 310n, 448, 503—504, app. L, app. 0. See also individual buildings: 

Butler, "Bushey House," North, South, East, 

West, Radio Laboratory, Far West, Chemistry, 

Standard Store, Northwest, Industrial, Kiln, 

Dynamometer Laboratory, Hydraulic Labora. 

tory, Materials Testing Laboratory, Wind Tunnel, Stucco, High Voltage Laboratory, High 

Altitude Laboratory, Telephone, Ordnance Elec- tronics Laboratory. 

Gaithersburg (ace under Same) 

pilot plants, 162—165, 344. See also under centent 

plant, cotton mill, woolen mill, sugar mill, 

rubber mill, foundry, rolling mill, paper mill, 

aluminum research 

policy: 

general, 133, 240 change in, 240—241 patent, 196n, 308, 347—348 products endorsement, 133, 136, 137 testing, 133—134, 270n PTR as model for NBS, 60, 60n 

publications, 27n, 105n, 441—442, app. I, app. N letter circulars, 251n, 286—287 printing data, 135, 192—193, 208, 251, 268—269, 330, 

411, 424n, 425n, 481—482 purpose, NBS, 1, 15, 103, 261n, 299 relations: with Congress, 45, 241, 246—247. See also under 

individual Directors by name. with consumer public, 42—43, 133, 157, 262, 302— 303, 305—306, 327, 329—331, 432—433, 449n with industry, 216, 217, 269—270, 273—274, 308, 

348n, 482, app. M reorganization of divisions and sections, 444—445 representation in other organizations, 256n, 322 research: basic (pure) (fundamental), 33, 55, 61, 147—148, 215, 216, 244—247, 249, 261n, 332, 325n, 326, 335, 

336n, 349, 430, 441, 442n, 447, 448—449, 450, 495—496, 499, 502, 507 basic research, depletion, 325n, 430, 448 criticism of, 151—152, 231n, 253, 268, 303—308, 322 industrial (applied) (technological) (developmental), 215, 216—218, 233, 244, 246—247, 249, 263— 276, 323, 344—346, 349, 429—430, 433, 434, 442, 

447,448, 450, 495—496 

695 materials research and testing, 92—93, 94, 124-125, 231—232 military: World War I, 159—160, 162, 170—206, 244; World War II, 368—369n, 372—407, 410—425; Korean War, 445, 450, 490 

orientation to industry, 69, 103, 149—151, 170, 219, 

329, 431, 510; to science, 489 range of, 64—65, 171—172 significant accomplishments, app. K suppression of results, 264, 272, 344—347, 482—483. See also AD—X2. value of, 228, 241—242 research associates, 224—225, 244, 264, 272, 273, 277 staff: books published by, app. N caliber, 99 compensations at NBS, 98 competition with industry for, 96, 98, 223, 224. 

227n, 311 cooperation between divisions, 148, 358 

fully staffed, 311 graduate courses, 99—102 hiring practices, 64, 98—99, 100, 331—332, 377 in 1901, 65; in 1904, 74 

independent status, members with, 147n increaaes, 67, 69, 94, 96, 148, 155, 167, 218—219, 231, 311, 331—332, 376, 444, app. H life at NBS in World War I, 206; in 1930's, 335; in World War II, 377 patents by, 196 positions established, 44; positions available, 223n publications, research, app. I rebellion, 234n recruiting, 98—99, 105, 377 

reductions, 46, 224, 320, 322, 331, 335, 347, 350, 

497, app. H research highlights, app. K rosters of administrative staff and directom of research, app. J salaries, 44, 45—46, 52, 63, 96, 98, 218—219, 223, 

224, 227, 234—235, 237n, 279n, 320, 332, 377 specialization, 64 survey of problems and attitudes, 497-499 turnover, 443 under Civil Service appointment, 44, 99 wartime problems, 169—170 weekly staff meetings, 139, 311 women on staff, 54, 169—170 symposia, NBS (1951), 491, 493 

testing and calibrating: for Government agencies, 79, 82, 90—92, 93, 94, 96, 

103, 124—128, 147—149, 151, 157, 162, 270n, 309— 310, 332, 374, 450, 499—500, 501. See also 

under NBS research, materials testing. for industry and the public, 79, 82, 91—92, 94, 124, 

147, 149, 162, 270n, 309—310, 501 testing, effect on industry, 92—93 testing and calibrating fees, 46, 501, 502 testing policy (see NBS policy) 

testing, routine, 91—92, 94, 147, 447, 450, 496, 497, 499—SQl testing program, representative, 125-127 testing, types of, 270n, 499 
696 INDEX 

National Bureau of Standards—Continued Visiting Committee, 44, 46n, 61-62, 93, 103, 128, 153, 235—236, 237, 242, 261n, 310, 311, 314, 321— 322, 345, 348n, 363n, 431—432, 433, 434, 444, 495, 

504n, app. E, app. M war preparations, 162, 170—171, 365—366, 368, 377 

National Cannals Association, 465 National Carbon Co.. 392 National Committee on Radiation Protection and Measurements, 339, 340 

National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), 343n, 

363, 364, 367—369, 372, 376, 382, 383, 384, 389, 390, 399—400, 403, 405, 415, 419, 437 

National Electric Lamp Association (NELA), 136 National Fire Protection Association, 86, 131 National Geographic Society, 316, 355—357 National Observatory (Naval), 17, 33, 475 

National Physical Laboratory (NPL, Great Britain), 

39, 44, 60, 67, 101, 107, 111, 133, 232n, 282, 310n, 

320n, 329, 406, 487 

National Planning Board, 327 National Recovery Administration (NRA), 321, 327— 328 National Research Council (NRC), 160, 171, 172, 204, 

215, 321, 326n, 423 Natidnal Resources Committee, 327 National Science Foundation, 430, 505n National Screw Thread Commission, 200—201, 241n, 273. See also screw thread standardization. 

National Security and Defense Fund, 167 National Standard Reference Data Program, 511 national wealth, 8 Naval Consulting Board, 160, 206, 282 Naval Observatory (see National Observatory) Naval Ordnance Laboratories (Corona), 497 Naval Research Laboratory, 363, 380, 385, 388, 400, 479. See also Office of Naval Research. 

navigational instruments, 37—38, 295 Navy Department, 17, 18, 96, 140, 142, 162, 173—174, 190—191, 192, 198, 200, 202, 281, 283, 284, 285, 

305, 308, 354, 369, 371, 390, 397, 399, 403, 406, 

407, 412n, 417, 423, 429, 431. 445, 458, 466, 472, 508 Navy Dept. radio laboratory at NBS, 197, 293, 431n. See also Laboratory for Special Radio Transmission Research Nebraska, University of, 74 NELSON, Donald, 412 neon signs, 83n Neoprene (see rubber research) 

neptunium, 378 neutron and neutron standard, 357, 359—360, 464, 467— 468 New Deal, 253, 319, 320—321, 325, 327, 334 The New Industrial Day (Redfield), 153 New York, N.Y., field laboratory, 165, 199, 310n New York World's Fair, 1964-65, Sn NEWCOMB, Simon, 33 NEWKIRK, W. B., 265 NICHOLS, Edward L., 61 Normal Eichungskommission (Berlin), 44, 77 Normal Eichungskommission (Vienna), 44 North building (mechanical laboratory), 62, 69, 71, 

73, 155, 165, 210 

North Pacific Radio Warning Service, 491 Northampton, Pa., field laboratory, 94, 310n 

Northwest building, 167, 184, 198o 

NORTON, Kenneth A., 403, 404 

NOYES, William A., 74, 79, 81, 98 

nuclear constants, 464, 4.67, 469, 471 Nuclear Data, 471 nuclear fission, 357, 359-363, 365, 368, 378—379, 380, 

382, 384, 387—388 nuclear physics, 12, 139, 385, 443 nuclear (atomic) research, British, 363, 378n, 379n, 

385, 385n; German, 360, 361n, 363, 381, 388n 

NUTTING, Perley G., 74, 79, 83, 99n, 101 0 

ODISHAW, Hugh 443, 488 

"oerugo nohilis," 34 Office of Civilian Defense, 373, 422 Office of Naval Research, 430, 442n, 451, 454, 461, 491, 497. See also Naval Research Laboratory. Office of the Petroleum Coordinator, 375 Office of Price Administration, 367, 423, 424 Office of Production Management, 367, 372 Office of Rubber Reserve, 479 Office of Scientific Research and Development 

(OSRD), 363, 364, 368, 382, 384, 390, 397, 398, 

408, 417, 429, 430 Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, 430 Office of Weights and Measures (Coast and Ceo. detic Survey), 16—17, 18—19, 20—21, 27, 28, 30, 32—33, 34n, 36, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 49, 52, 56-58, 

62, 65, 77, 82, app. A, app. B, app. M Ohio State University, 74, 443 

Ohio Wesleyan University, 274 ohm, 32, 80 

international, 105, 107 

absolute, 337 oils and paints, Federal specifications, 257 OLDS, Ranson E., 5 Olsen testing machine, 96 omegatron, 469 One World or None, 435n ONNES. Kamerlingh, 247 OPPENHEIMER, J. Robert, 385, 387, 437 

optical glass research and manufacture, 187—188, 216n, 274—275, 305, 366, 369, 417—418, 449, 490 optical glass plant, NBS, 162—165, 167, 375, 417 optical glass qualities, 187n optical glass testing, 188—189 optical measurements, 61, 78 optical pyrometer (see pyrometry) 

Optical Society of America, 271 Optics division, NBS, 94, 110, 116, 147, 186, 188, 203n, 

240, 249, 268, 270, 418—419 Ordnance, Army, 162, 170, 176. 188, 190, 199, 200, 

202, 206, 213, 362, 374, 393, 397, 398, 417, 429, 

445, 453, 497 Ordnance, Navy, 188, 213 Ordnance Development division, NBS, 393 Ordnance Electronics Laboratory, NBS, 430 ordnance research, 199, 376, 497 Organic and Fibrous Materials division, NBS, 267, 268 
697 

photometric standards, 15, 37, 58, 81, 110, 111—112 photometric units, 337—338, 462 photometry, 94, 110, 271 Photometry section, NBS. 74, 81, 171 physical constants, 43, 93, 129—130, 156, 170—171, 245, 

246, 343, 363, 382, 462, 464, 468, 471, 496 physical properties of materials, 269n physicist, what is a? 148—149 Physics (Ganot), 49, 313 physics, stasis in, 12, 13n, app. M Physics of Radioactivity (Dorsey), 147 Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, 463—464 Physikalisch.Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR), 13, 38, 

39, 42, 44, 60, 61, 75n, 78, 79, 80n, 81, 82, 101, 

101, 111, 261n, 310n, 361n, 463—464 

piezo oscillator 291. See also quartz crystal. 

pile, atomic (see nuclear fission) 

PINCKNEY, Charles C., 16 Pioneers, Inc., 484, 485n Pittsburgh, Pa., field laboratory, 94, 96, 126, 148, 162, 

165, 167, 175, 187, 188, 267 Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co.. 187 Pittsburgh, University of, 54, 139 PLANCK, Max, 13, 245, 357 Planck's constant, 245 planeness, standard of, 275—276 plasma physics, 15, 249 plastics and plastics research, 15, 371—372, 399, 422, 478 Plastics section, NBS, 371, 422 platinum and platinum research, 174—175 platinum resistance thermometer (see resistance 

thermometry) PlOcker tube, 83n plumbing codes, 250, 374 plutonium, 378, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385 

Polar Year (see International Polar Year) 

polarimetry, 94, 217, 247 Polarimetry section, NBS, 265, 409 

polariscope testing and standards, 37, 58, 65, 79 polarization of downcoming ionospheric radio waves, 403 polymer research, 412, 449, 476, 477-479 Polytechnic Institute of Warsaw, 343 porcelain research, 217 Portland Cement Conference, 125 portland cement, Federal specifications, 257 Post Office Department, 30, 91, 196, 281, 301, 302n, 

483, 491, app. B pot, glass-making (see crucible) 

potentiometer, 81, 109 avoirdupois, 23, 25, 26, 30, 33, 34n, 36 English, 30 imperial, 28, 36 Kater, 26, 27 troy, 23, 26, 28n, 34 U.s., 36 power measurement, electric, 80 practice, standards of, 156, 157 predetonation (atomic bomb), 387—388 prediction services, radio, 474 preemptive stockpiling, 408n pressure gage, 37, 60, 79 PRESTON. Prince IL. Jr. (Congressman), 502 

INDEX 

organic reagents, high.purity, 343 The Origin of Spectra (Foote and Mohler), 249 OSBORN, Albert S., 302n OSBORNE, Nathan S., 74, 130, 225n outer space phenomena, 474 OVERMAN, Lee S. (Congressman), 148—149 Overman Act, 213 P 

PTR (see Physikalisch.Technische Reichsanstalt) 

Packard Motor Car Co., 182, 184 

PAGE, Chester H., 454 PAIGE, Satchel, 316 Panama Canal Commission (see Isthmian Canal Commission) 

Pan.Arnerican Exposition (Buffalo, 1901), 2, 5, 20 

paper mill, NBS, 162—165, 167, 203 paper research, 267, 268, 334—335, 423, 479—480 paper substitutes, 176 paraffin hydrocarbons (see petroleum research) 

Paris Exposition (1900),60 

Paris, University of, 74 PARSONS, Douglas E., 439n Passamaquoddy Bay Dam, 327 patent litigation, 206, 347—348 patent litigation, radio, 191—192, 197, 198, 286 

Patent Office, 17, 230-231 patents and patent policy, NBS (see NBS policy) 

patents and trade secrets, 187, 221, 265, 267, 274, 279, 334—335 PEARSON, Joseph C., 170, 175 PEGRAM, George B, 360, 363 PEIRCE, CHARLES S., 20, 21, 23, 27n, 32, 33, 53n "Pelican" (see guided missile research) Pembroke Park, 376 Pennsylvania State College, 74 Pennsylvania, University of, 74, 453 Pennsylvania Railroad, 14 pentane lamp, 112, 114 performance, standards of, 156 periodic table of the elements, 65n, 357-358 

Perkins Observatory (Ohio Wesleyan Univ.), 274 permeameter, 128—129 perpetual motion devices, 301 PERSHING, General John J., 161, 184, 211, 212 

personnel (see NBS, staff) 

PETERS, Chauncey G., 186, 352n, 443n petrographic laboratory, NBS, 126 petroleum, critical supply, 184—185, 263, 276, 374, 410 

petroleum industry, 262, 383 

petroleum laboratory, NBS, 420 petroleum research, 185, 276, 277, 369, 374, 419—420, 466n petroleum, tables of physical constants, 247 pH standards, 465—466 PHELAN, Vincent B., 251 PHELPS, Francis P., 410 Philco Radio Corp., 348n, 397 phosgene (see gas warfare) 

photoelectric fuze (see proximity I uze) 

photographic emulsion research, 344—345 photographic research, military, 190, 418 Photographic Technology section, NBS, 240 photometric measurement, 59, 111, 116 
698 

PRIEST, Irwin C., 99n, 186, 196n, 225n, 270, 271 Princeton University, 140, 342, 360, 361, 364, 382, 385, 

435, 437, 444 The Principles Underlying Radio Communication, 138, 193 printed circuits, 398, 452—453. See also miniaturization. 

PRITCHETT, Henry S., 37, 45, 52, 53, app. M Procurement Division (Treasury), 408 "proof gallon," 31 propagation data, radio (see radio propagation re- search) 

prophets of 20th century science. 11 protective coatings, 201, 415—416, 419, 421, 422 

Protecto-charge (see AD—X2) 

proton measurements, 468—469 proximity faze, 376, 378, 381, 385, 388—397, 398—399, 407, 418, 429—430, 445, 451—452, 490, 497 

Public Buildings Administration (PBA), 439n, 503, 504 public service commissions, 110—111, 114, 115, 116, 118, 122. 123—124 public utility monopolies, 110, 114n, 122. See also monopolies. 

public utility research, 15, 112, 123—124, 133, 148, 149, 

153, 231n, 244, 263. See also individual utilities. 

Public Works Administration (PWA), 309, 326, 333 

PUPIN, Michael. 160 Purdue University, 74 Pure Food and Drug Act, 20, 88. 89, 91, 137n, 306. 

See also Food and Drug Administration. 

pure research (see under NBS research) 

Pusey & Jones, 162 pyrometers, optical, 78, 217, 239, 245—246 Pyrometry section, NBS, 171 Pyrometry and Heat division, NBS (see Heat and Thermometry division) 

pyrometry, 61, 67, 111—112, 127, 245—246, 268—269 Q 

quality, standards of, 156 quantity, electrical (see coulomb) 

quantum theory, 13, 249, 357, 435 Quartermaster Corps, 176, 277, 422 quartz crystal stockpiling and research, 371, 374, 

375, 408—410 quartz research laboratory, NBS, 410 Questioned Documents (Osborn), 302n R 

RABAUT, Louis C. (Congressman), 439n, 448 RABINOW, Jacob, 391n, 397, 458 radar, 378, 381, 388, 399, 400, 401, 403—404, 474 radiation hazards, 146—147, 202, 338, 387 Radiation Laboratory (Univ. of California), 385, 387 

Radiation Laboratory (M.I.T.), 400, 401 radiation, standards of, 15, 245 radiation protection standards, 146, 338, 339 radiation physics, 15 radiation tolerance dosage, 304 radio astronomy, 474 radio beacon, 142, 295—297 

INDEX 

radio and radio broadcasting development, 139—240, 141, 172, 286—292, 294n Radio Communications, Principles Underlying (see 

Principles) 

radio compass (see radio direction finder) Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 198, 289, 348n, 400 radio, crystal set, 199, 286—287 radio direction finder, 142—144, 194, 196, 197, 285-286, 294—295, 297, 403 

Radio Division (Commerce), 230 radio fading phenomena, 289, 290, 293—294, 351. See also radio propagation research. 

radio frequencies and frequency standards, 140—141, 291, 292, 350, 407—407. See also time intervals; 

radio propagation research. 

radio guidance system, aircraft (see blind landing 

system) 

Radio Inspection Service (Commerce), 291 radio instruments and measurements, 192—193, 287 radio interference, 142, 194, 287, 290—291, 292, 293— 294. See also radio propagation research. 

Radio Laboratory, NBS, 144, 165 

radio laboratory at NBS (Navy), see Laboratory for Special Radio Transmission Research. 

radio legislation, 141—142, 192, 198, 287—289, 292 Radio Measurements section, NBS, 140 radio noise, 405, 406 radio patent litigation (see patent litigation, radio) Radio Propagation Handbook, IRPL, 407 Radio Propagation Laboratory, Interservice, NBS (see Interservice; also Central Radio Propagation 

Laboratory) 

radio propagation research, 15, 197. 289, 293—294, 350, 

351, 404—407, 408, 442, 474. See also ionospheric 

research. 

radio proximity fuse (see proximity fuze) 

"radio and radioactivity," 139, 144—146 radio research and engineering, 104, 140—141, 144, 191—197, 217, 347, 350, 474—475 radio stations, NBS (experimental, WWV, WWVH), 

290, 291, 350, 474—475 radio in submarines, 194 Radio Transmission Handbook, 405 radio as war weapon, 194 radio "weather" and "weather" predicting, 351, 404, 

405, 407. See also radio propagation research; 

ionospheric storms. 

radioactive (tracer) labeling, 268, 469—471 Radioactiviry (Rutherford). 13, 138—139 radioactivity, 13, 139, 147, 357 

radioactivity research, 104, 144, 383, 488n radiographic detection of metal flaws, 202 Radiological Society of North America, 339 radiometeorography, 353—354 radiometry, 94, 245 Radiometry section, NBS, 171 radiosonde (radiometeorology), 353—354, 407 radiotelegraphy, 140 radiotelephony, 285—286, 294—295 radium, 139, 146, 202, 300, 301—302, 339, 340—341 radium protection, 339 radium sickness, 340—341 radium standards, 146—147, 338—339 
INDEX 699 

Radium and X-ray section, NBS, 147 railroad accident investigation, 118—119 railroads as public utility, 116—119 railway scale test car (see scales, railway) range finders, 189, 190-191, 418 rare sugar research (see sugar research; levulose; 

xylose; dextrose) 

rate-of-climb indicator (see aeronautical instruments) 

rationing, wartime, 367, 375, 413 

RAWDON, Herbert S., 443n Raytheon Manufacturing Co., 391, 454 reception difficulties, radio (see radio interference) 

reclaimed rubber, 280, 303 Reclamation Service (Interior), 165 Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), 309, 

408, 412n REDFIELD, William C. (Secretary of Commerce), 

123, 136, 138, 153—155, 184n, 198n, 206, 212, 216— 218 referee fuels (see petroleum research) 

refrigeration cons ta,,to, 130. See also physical con- stants. REICHMANN, Fritz, 89 ReichsanstaU (see Phyoikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt) 

REID, C. E., 74 relativity, theory, 357 relocation of NBS (see Gaithersburg) 

REMSEN, Ira, 61, 81 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 33—34, 54 research (see under NBS research) 

research, source abroad, 12—13, 215 Resistance and EMF section, NBS, 74, 79, 101 resistance, electrical (see ohm) resistance measurements, 58, 67, 79, 104 

resistance thermometry, 78, 127 resistor, printed (see miniaturization) 

rheology, 478n rifle, automatic (Garand), 206 RITCHIE, Jess RI., 484 

Riverside, Calif., field laboratory, 333 ROBERTS, Richard B., 361 Roberts coke oven, 173 "Robin" (see guided missile research) 

ROCKEFELLER, John D., 9 Rockefeller Foundation, 215 rocket engineering, 282 rocket weapons, 205—206, 282, 381 rockets and illuminating shells, 202, 205 RODDEN, Clement J., 379, 380 ROENTGEN, Wilhelm K., 12, 139, 146, 357 "roentgen," 339, 340 ROESER, William F., ilin, 337n Roma (dirigible), 284 ROOSEVELT, Franklin D., 313, 319, 320, 326n, 327, 

333, 361—362, 366—367, 381, 382, 434, 446 ROOSEVELT, Theodore, 7, 9, 20, 68n, 82, 88, 110, 

228, 229 

ROPER Daniel C. (Secretary of Commerce), 313n, 

319, 322, 346, 434, 446 

ROSA, Edward B., 62—63, 65, 71, 72, 73, 74, 82, 83, 98, 

99n, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107, 110, 111, 112, 115, 

116, 120, 122, 128, 136, 139, 141, 144, 146, 149, 

204n, 231, 233, 237, 240, 242, 255, 303 

described, 63—64 as researcher and director of research, 63, 64, 79—80, 102, 105—107, 109 on the Federal budget, 226—228 death, 233 - ROSE, Jonathan (Congressman), 46 Rose Polytechnic Institute, 6n, 18, 81 ROWLAND, Henry A., 37, 63, 313 

Royal Institution (London), 83 Royal Society (London), 133 rubber mill, NBS, 165, 167 

rubber, reclaimed (see reclaimed rubber) 

Rubber section, NBS, 279, 411, 412 rubber inventors, 412 rubber and synthetic rubber research, 268, 279—280, 374, 375, 410—412, 413, 414, 442, 448, 478—479, 490 RUSSELL, Samuel, 209n Russian Imperial College (St. Petersburg), 235 Russian standards laboratories and calibration centers, 5070 Rutgers University, 467 RUTHERFORD, Ernest, 13, 138-139, 144, 357, 359, 361n S 5—1 Section, NDRC (see Advisory Committee on Ura- nium) 

sabotage, 421—422 saccharimerry, 247, 265 SACHS, Alexander, 361—362 safety and safety codes, 15, 109, 115, 121, 124, 131, 137—138, 201—202, 230 safety in the household (see household) 

St. Louis Exposition (1904), 82—83, 94n salaries (see NBS salaries) 

salinity meter, 142n San Diego, Calif., field laboratory, 165 San Francisco, Calif., field laboratory, 165, 310n 

SANFORD, Raymond L., 109 SAWYER, Charles W. (Secretary of Commerce), 492n scales, mine, 118n, 370 scales, railway and other large-capacity, llo—118, 230, 370 scales, truck. 118n, 370 

SCHERRER, J. A., 380 SCHLINK, Frederick J., 170, 196n, 255, 305, 306, 327, 

328n, 329 

SCHOONOVER, Irl C., 385 SCHRöDINGER, Erwin, 357, 435 SCHWAB, Charles, 9 science and technology progress, 2, 9—11, 14 science as a Federal activity, 16—19, 21, 33, 42, 60n, 64, 226—228, 320, 321, 324—326, 327, 362n, 429, 430—431, 448, 505—507, 510 science, lack of application in industry, 127, 154, 174, 

176, 216n Science Advisory Board, 321—322, 323—325, 349, 489 

"Science, Department of," 17, 18—19, 20, 31—32 Science—The Endless Frontier (Bush), 430 scientific instrument industry (see instrument indus. 

try) 

"scientists, unemployed," 342 SCOTT, Russell B., 471 
700 screw thread standardization, 31, 200—201, 273-274, 424, 462. See also National Screw Thread Commission; 

Interdepartmental Screw Thread Committee. 

SCRIBNER, Bourdon F., 380, 423 SEAC (computer), 456—458 searchlights, 202, 418 Seattle, Wash., field laboratory, 333 second, atomic definition of, 477n security, wartime, 206—207, 369, 372, 377—378, 381, 421 semiconductors, 452 Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Appro. 

priations, 148—149 Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, 46 SERBER, Robert, 387 Services of Supply (War Department), 413 SI{AFROTH, John F. (Congressman), 47 SI-IEAFFER, Craig R., 485n, 486n shells, faulty, 162n Shenandoah (dirigible), 284, 285, 291 SHEPHERD, Martin, 421 ships, concrete, 175 shortages, wartime, 174, 371. See aLto critical mate- rials. 

SHORTLEY, George F., 437 shortwave transmission (see very high frequency) sieve testing, 126 Signal Corps, Army, 17, 18, 140, 162, 170, 180n, 181, 

184n, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 197 205, 344, 393, 

403, 453; Signal Corps radio laboratory at NBS, 

191, 197, 431n signal lamps, 202 SIKORSKI, Igor Ivan, 282 SILSBEE, Francis B., 109, 247, 487n 

"Silsbee hypothesis," 247 SIMHA, 477 simplification (simplified practice program), 177, 178, 

244, 254, 259—260, 424, 432. See also specifica. 

tions; standardization. 

Simplified Practice division, NBS, 233, 259, 260n, 304, 424 SKINNER, Clarence A., 99n SKRAMSTAD, Harold K., 401 sky glow (see "blackout") 

SLIGH, T. S., Jr., 225n SMITH, Edgar R., 358 SMITH, Lloyd L., 74 SMITH, Lloyd P., 364 SMITH, Newbern, 404, 405 

SMITHER, F. W., 155, 443 

Smithsonian Institution, 16, 61, 160, 205, 206, 269n 

SMYTH, Henry D., 364 snooperscope, 204 SNOW, Chester, 109, 387 SNYDER, Monroe B., 31 Social Research, Inc., 498 SociLtL Francaise de Photographic et de CinLmato- graphic, 344 Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), 200, 255n, 

277, 280 SODDY, Frederick, 357 "soil physica," 313 solar disturbances (see radio propagation research) 

solar radiometer, 474 

INDEX 

"solar searchlight" (signaling mirror), 418—419 SOMMERFELD, Arnold, 478n Sorbonne (Paris), 237 SOUDER, Wilmer, 126, 271, 302n 

sound, standards, 15 sound-ranging and sound.detecting apparatus, 202, 206 sound transmission and sound research (see acousti. cal research) 

South American expeditions (1940, 1947), 356—357 South building (physical laboratory and administra. 

tion), 62, 69, 71, 72, 73, 210, 311, 437 SOUTHARD, James H. (Congressmafs), 41, 46, 47 

space physics, 46 space program, 507, 508 Spanish.American War, 2, 38, 52, 161n, app. M spark plug, airplane (see aeronautical research; air- plane engine research) 

Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy (Mc. Mahon Committee), see under Atomic Energy 

specifications, 254, 257 specifications, arbitrary, 178—179 Specifications division, NBS, 233, 253 specifications, Federal purchase, 42—43, 93, 125, 178— 179, 257—259, 260—261, 279, 414, 499—500 spectacle glass, 187 spectral line standard, 463 spectral luminosity, llln 

spectroanalysis (see spectroscopic analysis) 

spectrographic analysis, 248 spectrometer, magnetic electron, 451 spectrometer, mass, 451 spectrophosometry, 488n spectroscopic analysis, 247—248, 263, 341 spectroscopy, 94, 24-5, 247—248 Spectroscopy section, NBS, 189—190 SPERLING, Edward 0., 83n SPERRY, Elmer A., 5, 160 Sperry Gyroscope Co., 282 Spirit of St. Louis (Lindbergh), 284 SPONSLER, Charles E., 74 SPRAGUE, Frank J., 119, 160 Sputnik I, 472, 507 stable-zenith device, 206 stainless steel research, 172n, 371 standard barrel law (1915), 89 standard cell, 79, 104, 105, 108, 369 Clark, 58, 79—80 Weston, 38, 80, 105 standard frequency broadcasts (see radio frequencies) 

standard of light, absolute, 111—112. See also photo. 

metric standards. 

standard of living (see living standard) 

Standard Oil Co., 7, 14, 383 standard practices (see specifications) 

standard resistor, 105 standard samples program, 15, 93—94, 129, 151, 257, 

265, 424, 462, 465—466, 469—470, 478, 501, 502 Standard Store and gas station, 167n standard time signals (see time) 

standardization, industrial, 177—178, 179, 216n, 253— 262, 273, 280, 281, 346, 349, 424, 425, 433 standardization of machines, appliances, and tools, 170—171 
INDEX 

standardization, arbitrary, 178—179 standardization crusade (see crusade) 

standardization, difficulties, 261—262, 262n standards, arbitrary, 33—34, 36—37 standards, atomic (see atomic standards) 

standards, Federal (1825—1875), 31 standards, Hassler's 24—27, 28, 87 

standards, hierarchy of, 75—76 standards, industrial (see standardization, industrial) 

standards legislation, need for, 1, 14—15, 18—19, 23, 31— 32, 33, 34, 37, 41, 52, 53 "standards," meaning of term, 151 standards, reproducibility of, 35, 109 Standards Yearbook, 256 STANLEY, F. E., 5 State Department, 17 Statistical Engineering Laboratory, NBS, 461 steam, physical constants, 246 Steamboat Inspection Service (Commerce), 230 steel and steel alloys, 172, 174n, 175. See also alloy 

research. 

steel industry, 118, 127, 129, 174 

steel shortage, 410, 414, 421. See also alloy research. 

STEFAN, Karl (Congressman), 439n, 442, 488 

STEFFENS, Lincoln, 88 stellar and solar spectra, photography of, 190 Stephens College, 329 Sterling, Va., field laboratory, 376, 4U6n STIMSON, Harold F., 225n, 248 STOKES, Henry N., 74, 81 storage battery, 5, 14, 18 storage battery research, 263, 280—281. See also bat. 

tery additiveg. 

storage tanks, concrete, 421 The Story oJ Standards (Perry), 36 STOTESBURY, Edward, 9 strain gage, optical, 273 STRASSMAN, Fritz, 360 Strategic Materials Act, 365—366 stratospheric research, 355 Stratton, Samuel W., 40, 45, 49, 54, 65—67, 68, 69, 72, 

73, 74, 83, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 96, 99n. 100, 101, 

102, 103, 110, 116, 120, 123, 124—125, 128, 130, 133— 134, 137, 146, 148, 149, 153, 154, 155, 157, 159- 

160, 162, 167, 169—170, 171, 176, 178, 182, 184n, 186—187, 190, 191, 198n, 199, 200, 204n, 209, 210— 211, 212n, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222n, 

224, 225, 226, 233, 236, 237, 240, 241, 242, 254n, 

255, 302n, 335, 439, 440, 445, 489, SOOn, app. A, app. B Inspector of Standards, 40, 52—54, 56—58 on salaries, 46, 98, 224 on his staff, 46, 98, 148 relations with Congress, 49, 107—108, 149 described, 49, 51, 54, 55 234, 316, app. M (brief 

biography) at U. of Illinois, 49 at U. of Chicago, 51 interest in interferometry, 51, 186 apppointed Director, 58 as administrator, 55, 58—60, 61, 64, 82, 99, 126, 127, 

234n, 240, 249 as paterfamilias, 63, 233 as empire-builder, 64—65, 91, 148, 149—151, 151—152, 156, 162—165, 215, 231, 303 

701 

patent policy, 348n leaves NBS for MIT, 233, 235—236 guest lecturer policy, 478n at MIT, 236—237, app. M death, app M STRAUS, Oscar S. (Secretary of Commerce and La. bor), 229 streetcars (trolley cars), 9, 11, 12, 31, 62, 71, 119. See also electrolysis. 

street lamps, gas, 115 striae, optical, 191n - strontium 90, 340 Structural Engineering division, NBS, 250 Structural Materials division, NBS, 131, 167 Structural and Miscellaneous Materials division, NBS, 148 structural testing, 96, 125, 148 Stucco building, 199n STUDEBAKER brothers, 5 STUTZ, Walter F., 443n submarine (U-boat) detection, 204 submarines, combustible gas detection, 204 substitute materials, 174, 371, 421, 425. See also commercial standards and individual materials: 

wool; leather; paper; "dope;" platinum; tin, zinc; fuel (gasoline) ; concrete. sugar industry, 265 sugar mill, NBS, 266, 306 sugar research, 58, 79, 81, 151—152, 265, 266, 449, 470 

SUMMERFIELD, Arthur E., 485n superconductivity, 247, 466, 467 supersonic flight research, 466 Surgeon General's Office, 17, 202, 271, 470 

surveyors' instruments, 58 SWAC (computer), 458, 461 SWIETOSLAWSKI, Wojciech, 343, 478n 

synthetic rubber (see rubber) 

SZILARD, Leo, 361, 362 T 

tachometer (see aeronautical instruments) 

TAFT, William Howard, 228 TARBELL, Ida M., 88 TATE, John, 248 TAYLOR, A. Hoyt, 388n TAYLOR, Lauriston S., 339, 390, 393 

TAYLOR, Wayne C., 432, 446n 

telegraph, 3, 16 telemeteorography (see radiometeorography) 

telephone and telegraph industry, 3, 6n, 31, 110, 123, 

124, 218 

Telephone building, NBS, 333n telephone, long.distance, 15, 139 television, early, 294n TELLER, Edward, 362, 458n temperature measnrements, 59, 78. See also high. 

temperature measurement; cryogenic research. 

temperature scale, 129, 130. See also International 

Practical Temperature Scale. 

temperature standards, 15 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 327, 333 TESLA, Nikola, 10 testing and calibrating (see under NBS) 
702 INDEX 

testing machines, 96 textile industry, 172 textile mill, NBS (see cotton mill) 

textile research, 31, 176, 244, 268, 272—273, 422—423, 479 Textile section, NBS, 176, 423 

thermal conductivity, 131, 263 thermal radiation standards, 338 thermocouples, 78 thermometer testing, 37, 58, 61, 65, 78, 500 thermometer, clinical, 59,78, 90 Thermometry section, NB5, 170 thermopile, 204 Thiokol (synthetic rubber), 411n, 412. See also rubber research. 

THOMAS, J. L., 109 THOMAS, J. Parnell (Congressman), 491 THOMPSON, John G., 439n THOMSON, Elihu, 61, 153, apP. M THOMSON, Sir John J., 12, 139 

time intervals and signals, standard, 350, 474—475 time measurement, 78 time, standards, 15, 464, 475n 

time-temperature curve, 131 time zones, standard, 4iSn tire testing, 263, 279, 280, 413, 500 Titanic, 141 TITTMANN, Otto H, 155n tohiol (see explosives) 

toss bombing (see bomb director device) 

tracer micrography, 469 tracers (see radioactive labeling) 

trade associations, 255, 256 trade secrets (see patents and trade Secrets) 

Trade Standards division, NBS, 233, 260, 304, 432. See also under commercial - Trading-with-the-Enemy Act (1917), 221n training program, radio, 192 training program, weights and measures, 90 TRALLES, Johann Georg, app. A, app. B transatlantic radio system, 192 transformers, current, 115 transistor (see semiconductors; diode; miniaturization) 

Transportation Corps (Army), 277 Treasury Department, 16, 18, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 

34, 39, 44, 45, 52, 53, 68, 69, 72, 79, 124, 302n, 

370n, 416, 417, 423, 460. See alto Secretaries of the Treasury by name: Gage; Gallatin; Ingham; 

McLane; Woodbury. 

Treaty of the Meter (1875), 29—30 tritium, 341n troposphere research, 474 TROUGHTON, Edward, 26, app. A Troughton yard (see yard) 

TROWBRIDGE, John, 12-13 troy weight (see under pound) 

Truman Committee, 413 TRUMAN, Harry S., 428, 435, 445, 446, 492 trusts (see monopolies) 

"Tuballoy," 378 TUCKERMAN, Louis B., 147n, 273, 355, 443n 

Tufts College, 454 tungsten-filament lamp (see under lamp) 

Tuscaloosa, Ala., field laboratory, 310n, 331 TUVE, Merle A., 369, 390, 404 TYNDALL, E. P. 1., llln, 245, 273, 337 

typewriter controversy, 261 U 

U-boat menace, 161, 194, 204, 372, 374—375, 403, 417, 420 ultrasonic laboratory, NBS, 451 ultrasonic mechanics, 15 ultraviolet lamps, 338 ultraviolet radiation standard, 338 UnAmerican Activities, House Committee (HUAAC). 491—492 underwater radio transmission, 194 Underwriters' Laboratories, 131 United States Testing Company, 500 uranium and uranium research, 12, 147, 174, 300, 357. 360—362, 363, 368, 377, 378, 379—380, 382, 383, 3M 385—387 uranium, estimatees of usefulness, 362, 378 

Uranium Section (NDRC); Uranium Committee 

(OSRD). See Advisory Committee on Uraniom. 

UREY, Harold C., 357, 358, 359, 363, 379, 382, 383, 444 U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 405, 419 

U.S. Mint, 416 U.S. Naval Radiotelegraphic Laboratory (see Labora- tory for Special Radio Transmissisn Research) 

U.S. Rubber Co., 14 U.S.S.R. (Soviet), 356, 406, 423 utilization of waste materials, 263, 266, 267—268, 349 V vacuum tube (see electron tube) 

VANDERLIP, Frank A, 40, 52, 54 

VanDUSEN, Milton S., 443n VanKEUREN, Harold L., 162 very high frequency (vhf) radio transmission, 293—294 Vidal Research Corp., 400, 401 VINAL, George W., 109, 24.5, 281, 392n, 484 VINCENT, George E., 215, 219 

VINOGRADOFF, Dmltri I., 443 Virginia, University of, 74, 363, 380 

visibility curve, standard, 337 Visiting Committee to NBS (see under NBS Visiting 

Committee). 

volt, 32, 80, 105, 107 voltage measurement, 80 voltameter, silver, 80, 104, 105, 245, 469 voltmeter, 58, 115 volume, Hassler's standards of, 26—27 volumetric determination, 151—152 VOORHEES, Samuel 5., 94 

'V 

WGY (General Electric), 293 WWV and WWVH (see radio stations, NBS) 

WAIDNER, Charles W., 65, 67, 74, 78, 99n, 101, 111, 

127, 142n, 234, 239, 240 WALCOTT, Charles D., 160 
INDEX 

WALKER, Percy H., 155 WALLACE, Henry A. (Secretary of Commerce), 432, 

433, 434, 435, 444, 446—447, 483, 489n WALTENBERG, R. C., 225n WALTON, Ernest, 357, 359 War Department, 30, 96, 142, 159, 160, 175, 178, 199n, 

200, 283, 285, 307, 367, 369, 372, 390, 391, 393, 

397, 398, 406, 407, 412n, 416, 421, 423, 429, 431, 

461, 472, 508 War Industries Board, 159, 171, 174, 177, 179, 188, 

216n, 225, 255, 320 War Production Board, 412, 414, 422, 423, 424, 425 

WASHBURN, Edward W., 223, 358, 359 WASHINGTON, George, 12, app. B water, isotopic fractionation (see deuterium) water meter testing, 79 waterproofing (see "Aquella" incident) 

WATERS, Campbell E., 101 watt, 32 watthour meter, 115 wattmetor, 115 wavelength definition of meter, 20, 61n, 75n, 335—336, 462—463n, app. B wavelength, radio (see frequency, standards) 

wavelength standard, 78, 189-190, app. B, app. M wavemeter, 140, 291 weapons research, 177ff, 244, 495, 496, 497. See also ordnance research; rocket weapons. wear gage, high-precision, 421 Weather Bureau, U.S., 139, 353, 472, 511 

weather station, automatic (see radiosonde) 

WEAVER, Elmer R., 115, 204 

WEBSTER, Arthur G., 60n, 140, 141, 153 

WEEKS, Sinclair (Secretary of Commerce), 485, 

486n, 495, 497, 504n WEIBEL, Ernest E., 202 weighing and measuring devices, 257 weight, Hassler's standard, 26 Weights and Measures (Oldberg, 1885), 34 weights and measures, conferences, 87—88, 90, 331, 335, 

337, 462, 496n 

weights and measures, crusade, 86—90, 111, 149, 370 weights and measures, Hassler's Construction, app. A weights and measures, household, 135n Weights and Measures section, NBS, 74, 77; division, 

NBS, 65, 77, 94, 126, 131, 170, 171, 424, 445 weights and measures, State: 

distribution, 27—28, 36 inspection, 86, 89, 94, 111, 151 regulations, variety, 36, 86 model law for, 88, 89 

weights and measures, units of, 208 Wellesley College, 170n WELLS, H. C., 11 WELLS, Lansing S., 417 WELLS, Philip V., 203 WENNER, Frank, 9%, 109 WENSEL, Henry T., llln, 16%, 364, 443n 

Wesleyan University, 62, 63, 74 West building, 72, 96, 167, 206, 276, 316, 317, 434 Western Electric Co., 192, 286 Western Reserve University, 140 Westinghouse Electric Corp., 14, 192, 286, 293, 363, 

380, 393, 435, 437, 441, 443 

703 Weston cell (see etandard cell) 

Weston voltameter-ammeter, 38 J. C. White Engineering Corp., 16, 444 WHITNEY, Willis R., 16 WHITTEMORE, Laurens E., 169n, 196n, 443n WICHERS, Edward, 169n, 385 WIG, Rudolph J., 94, 170, 175 WIGNER, Eugene P., 360, 361, 362, 444 

WILEY, Harvey W., 81, 306 Williams College, 65, 74 WILLOUGHBY, John A., 194, 196n WILSON, Woodrow, 153, 159, 160, 167, 206—207, 214, 

225, 228 

Wind Tunnel buildings, 182, 314, 317, 376 

WINTON, A., 5 wire telephony, 197 Wireless Conference (London, 1912), 140, 141 Wisconsin, University of, 74, 112, 138, 363, 385 WOJCIECHOWSKI, Mieczyslaw, 343, 478n 

WOLFF, Frank A. Jr., 32, 49, 56, 58, 62, 65, 67, 74, 

79, 81, 99n, 101, 109 WOOD, Lawrence A., 411 wood substitutes (aircraft), 185 WOODBURY, Levi, app. A WOODWARD, Robert S., 153 wool and animal fibers (see textile research) woolen mill, NBS, 165, 176, 217 

WOOLLEY, H. W., 471 Works Project Administration (WPA), 326, 331—332, 342, 343 World War I, 159, 160—161, 162n, 179, 203—204, 212; 

mentioned, 389, 407, 410, 423 World War II, 362, 365, 367, 372, 382, 388, 395, 398— 399, 403, 411 WORMELEY, Philip L., 279, 443n WRIGHT, Orville, 15, 180, 182 x 

a rays, 12, 13, 139, 146, 357. See also radiation 

hazards. 

x-ray dosage, standardization, 338—340 "x-ray hands," 147 x.ray protection, standards, 146, 202, 339 

x.ray research, 333 x-ray safety code, 339, 340 x ray, sources, 51, 451 x-ray spectroscopy, 13 x-ray therapy, 146, 340 spectrum, 336 xylose research, 265, 266, 268 

Y Yale University, 54, 9% 

yard, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34—35, 36 Yerkes Observatory, 274 YOUNG, L. L., 419 

ZAHM, Albert F., 101 Zenith Radio Co., 395, 401 zeppelin (see .lighter.than.air craft) 

ZEPPELIN, Count, 283 U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1974 0—534-543 

z