United States Department of Commerce

Technology Administration

National Institute of Standards and Technology

NAT'L INST. OF STAND & TECH FU.C.

REFERENCE

A11103 ArjEMbT

NIST

PUBLICATIONS NIST Special Publication 825

NBS/NIST

A Historical Perspective

A Symposium in Celebration

of NIST's Ninetieth Anniversary

March 4, 1991

QC—

100

.U57

825

1992

NIST Special Publication 825

NBS/NIST

A Historical Perspective

A Symposium in Celebration

of NIST's Ninetieth Anniversary

March 4, 1991

Co-sponsored by the Standards Alumni Association

and the National Institute of Standards and Technology

Edited by

Karma A. Beal

Office of Information Services

National Institute of Standards and Technology

U.S. Department of Commerce

Barbara Hackman Franklin, Secretary

Technology Administration

Robert M. White, Under Secretary for Technology

Gaithersburg, MD 20899

Issued April 1992

National Institute of Standards and Technology

John W. Lyons, Director
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for

Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

National Institute of Standards U.S. Government Printing Office

and Technology Washington: 1992

Special Publication 825

Natl. Inst. Stand. Technol.

Spec. Publ. 825

78 pages (Apr. 1992)

CODEN: NSPUE2

For sale by the Superintendent

of Documents

U.S. Government Printing Office

Washington, DC 20402
FOREWORD

This Symposium on a Historical Perspective of NBS/NIST commemorates ninety years of

outstanding and dedicated service by the National Institute of Standards and Technology

(formerly the National Bureau of Standards) to the people of the United States, other

government agencies, industry, academia, professional societies, trade associations, standardization bodies, and the international scientific and engineering community. The speakers, all former or current staff members, have provided a series of historical snapshots in the

form of factual and nostalgic descriptions which capture the spirit and creative atmosphere

of this unique laboratory. They tell a story which all Americans, particularly the younger

generation, should read, of dedicated public service to the nation, intellectual integrity, honesty, fairness, and superb craftsmanship in the difficult field of precise and exacting measure- ments which form the basis of modern science and technology.

The Symposium was planned and organized by the Standards Alumni Association with

indispensable help from the NIST staff. The Association is comprised of more than 400

retirees and former employees with average Federal service of about 30 years. This adds up

to a formidable number of years. In a manner of speaking, participation in the Symposium

was our way of saying "Thank you" to NBS/NIST for creating a work environment which

made it possible to render a public service while fulfilling a rewarding and interesting career

in government. We are confident that this laboratory will continue in its tradition of excellence and will make further significant contributions to the well-being of the nation.

Emanuel Horowitz

Symposium Chairman and

President, Standards Alumni Association

iii

PREFACE

During 1991 we at NIST celebrated the completion of nine decades of service to the

Nation. A number of events were scheduled including a very exciting open house for school

children in September and a symposium on science, technology, and competitiveness in

November. The "NBS 90 NIST" program co-sponsored by the Standards Alumni Association and NIST was the first commemorative event and took place on the actual date of the

anniversary of the signing of the first legislation setting up the National Bureau of Standards.

This symposium was, except for my own remarks, a retrospective. Attended by many NBS

old-timers, the meeting covered history that for many represented personal experience. Dr.

Passaglia, author of a brilliant tract on the AD-X2 episode, related episode after episode

from our history, taking his audience on a whirlwind tour of the century. (We look forward

to Elio's forthcoming history of NBS from World War II to 1988.) Former Directors

Branscomb and Ambler offered both recent history and observations on its meaning as we

enter our last decade of the century. Then we had a series of talks on building new sites at Gaithersburg and Boulder and the rise and fall of several interesting program elements. It was a most enjoyable day for all present and launched our year-long celebration in fine style.

John W. Lyons

Director

v

CONTENTS

Page

Foreword iii Preface v Opening Remarks

Emanuel Horowitz 1 Welcome and Current View

John W. Lyons 3

Historical Perspective: 1901-1970

Elio Passaglia 13

Historical Perspective: 1969-1973

Lewis M. Branscomb 25

Historical Perspective: 1973-1988

Ernest Ambler 31

History of the Boulder Laboratories

Robert A. Kamper 43

The Gaithersburg Site

Robert S. Walleigh 49

Spinoffs: An Additional Measure of Success — Introduction of Panel

Lawrence M. Kushner, Moderator 57

Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory and National Inventors Council

Jacob Rabinow 59

Automotive Safety Laboratory

Paul J. Brown 65

Central Radio Propagation Laboratory

C. Gordon Little 69

Letter from Frederick J. Schlink 72

ILLUSTRATIONS

National Bureau of Standards, Washington, DC 11

Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics 23

Boulder Laboratories 41

National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 47

vii

Emanuel Horowitz

Opening Remarks

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name

is Manny Horowitz. I worked in this laboratory for

about 30 years and retired in 1980. It is my plea- sure to welcome you to this symposium "A

Historical Perspective of NBS." This year we are

celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the

National Bureau of Standards, now known as the

National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Incidentally, it is also the twenty-fifth anniversary

of the move of NBS from Van Ness Street and

Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., to the

Gaithersburg site. As former NBS employees, cur- rent staff members, and Americans, we are all proud of the many accomplishments and contributions of this laboratory to the nation over the past

90 years.

Speaking of 90 years, on this occasion we

received a letter from Frederick J. Schlink, who at 99 is, we believe, the oldest living alumnus of NBS.

If there is someone in the audience who can beat

that, please stand up.

I should mention that today's program has been

arranged by the NBS/NIST Standards Alumni

Association, with the magnificent help of Sara

Torrence, Paula Killen-Fry, and the NIST supporting staff. My thanks to all those behind the scenes who made this important day possible. It is also my

special privilege to introduce the principle speakers

on today's program, including our NIST Director,

John Lyons, and former NBS Directors, Lewis

Branscomb and Ernest Ambler.

1
John W. Lyons

Introduction by Emanuel Horowitz

I want to introduce our first speaker, Dr. John

Lyons, who is the Director of the National Institute

of Standards and Technology. John, I remember

our first meeting when you first came to NBS. You

might recall it, too. You told me about your plans

as you headed up the Fire Research Center and

some of your aspirations. I remember that meeting

very well. You later went on and served as Director

of the National Engineering Laboratory. John was

appointed by President Bush as the ninth Director

of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1989 and took office on February 9, 1990.

Dr. Lyons will lead this laboratory into the next

century, as foreboding as that may seem. He will

also add to the historical perspective, which we will

be reporting on the one hundredth anniversary of

this laboratory in the year 2001.

It is my pleasure to introduce John Lyons.

2
WELCOME AND CURRENT VIEW

John W. Lyons

Thank you, Manny. Good morning, everyone.

Welcome. Manny mentioned some of the key historical events. I remember when Sara Torrence

first came to me to talk about the anniversary celebrations. One of my reactions was, "Let's not

overdo it, because in ten short years we want to have a real blow-out." Actually, we're having a

pretty good celebration as it is. I doubt that I'll be

here for the turn of the century, but the longevity

of NBS Directors is well known. It's a well-known

fact that there are twice as many former living

presidents of the United States as there are living

former Directors of this great institution. I'm only

the ninth in 90 years, and I haven't served very

long, so the average tenure is quite considerable.

We're very conscious of history here. Many of

you will know that Elio Passaglia is writing a sec- ond volume of the history of this institution. He has

a committee of kibitzers and helpers, including former Director Ambler and many others. Periodically, he issues a pile of paper that I try to read. It's very interesting. Elio and I recently had a conversation about the problems of a historian. I sought his

advice on how to sort our files, because my staff are always saying, "Can't we throw this out? Can't we

throw that out?" I've listened to the stories Elio

tells about trying to track things down through

boxes that only have dates on the front and are not

indexed, and have decided to try to do something

about that. We're going to get some help from professional archivists, so that in another 30 or 40

years, when we try to do volume three, we'll be a

little better organized.

Slide 1

There are some changes at NIST. The most obvi- ous change is the name. The second most obvious

change, if you are here at night, or if you go down

highway 1-270 after dark, is the fact that the flag is now flying 24 hours a day and we've arranged

spotlights to illuminate it. I must say, it's quite an

inspiring sight, especially in the last 5 weeks, to go

up or down that highway at night and see Old

Glory waving in the spotlights. There's a story that

goes with it that's not quite as inspiring. Having

been overseas to some of our embassies, in particular the one in Bejing where my daughter served, I noticed that the flag ceremonies are treated with

considerable respect. When the flag is raised or lowered in an embassy compound, everyone is ex- pected to come to a halt, no matter where you are

in the compound. Not salute exactly, but stand in

respect while the flag is raised or lowered, which is reminiscent of military reservations, where, in fact,

you're supposed to salute. I thought that as the flag

comes down here at 5:00 or 5:30 and people in

their cars are zipping around the area of the flag

pole, it would be nice if people stopped out of re- spect. So I asked Guy Chamberlain what he could

do about that. He came back after a while and said,

"John, it's going to cost us additional staff on the

guard force to stop the traffic." The usual budget

stuff. We thought about it some more and not too

much later Guy came back and said, "I have a better idea. Why don't we just leave it up?" As you

know, you can't leave the flag up unless it's illuminated, so that's exactly what we did. Now, in the

recent Gulf War, a lot of people decided to illuminate flags and leave them up, but we were ahead of

them by some several months. Anyway, that's a sec- ond change.

The third change is that when you came in here

you had to get cleared through the gate. That's a very unfortunate development that I hope will not

last. When the hostilities began in the Gulf, we decided there was just too much at stake on this campus and too high a chance of terrorism to allow

business as usual and let just anybody come and go.

Certainly, we have very expensive equipment here,

including the reactor and other items, so we reluctantly closed the site and required that staff wear

these badges. I think we'll evaluate the situation over the next month or a little more, and as soon as possible we'll revert to the old open form.

My assignment is to tell you where we are now

and to take a quick look into the future in order to

3
set the stage for the historical discussion, which

should, if we all do our part, build to a logical tie to what we're doing today. Let me begin with some

status slides.

NIST PROFESSIONAL STAFF

Fiscal Year 1991

Total Prof/Tech Staff (FTP) = 1628

Slide 2

This is the professional staff. Those of you who

have been away for a while will notice the increase

in computer-trained people. It's still not very high.

If this were Bell Labs, that number would probably

be 40 percent or more of the staff, but for us it's an

increase over what it used to be. Otherwise, not

very different. I guess the physicists have shrunk

some, and the Ph.D. level is about as it has been as long as I can remember— approximately half of the

staff.

NIST RESOURCES

Fiscal Year 1992 (Proposed)

S108M ~ #BM

S10NI

S202M

Labof&rofy "; : Research V

ApprGrjncitiorts

trs -: mat

Total Resources = S462 Million In-House Total = $41 6 Million Extramural (ITS) Total

:

Total Appropriations = S248 Million

Total Staff (FTE) = 3343

S46 Million

Slide 3

This one will probably amaze some of you that

have been away perhaps only a short time. It now

costs about $400 million to run this institution each

year. If you add the In-Kind, that is the donations

and loans of staff and equipment and so forth, it's better than $450 million to run the operation. The

staff has risen from a low of 2,700 or 2,800 back up

to over 3,300. Actually, this is the proposed budget

for 1992. It's a bit less than that, but still over 3,000

staff today. Another thing that's new about this

slide is that we now run some programs outside the

laboratory— extramural programs. I'll have more to say about three of them later. You see they've gotten to the point of being about 10 percent of the

total. We're now a combination laboratory and

program manager.

The direct appropriations are a bit over half of

the total. If you look at the In-Kind as well, then

other agency funding is less than the number

you're used to. We've talked about 40 percent

other agency, but if you add the In-Kind that number is down to about 25 percent. This depends

upon how you do the numbers.

NIST BUDGET SUMMARY ($M)

FY 1991 FY 1992

In-House $370 $416

Extramural $ 49 $ 46

Total $419 $462

Slide 4

Another way to look at it is just the inside-outside breakout. For this year, the year we're actually

operating in today, the extramural is a bit larger

than the 1992 proposal, but that has to do with

carry-over and other budget details. The number is, in fact, constant. You see that the in-house work

has gotten a very nice increase. That's all in the

appropriated accounts. I'll come back and talk

about that in a few minutes.

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Organizational Chart

Director

Proofam Office Scagei Office InicuftikxvU £ Academic Alfalra OTtoo Of Personnel 4 CnII Rejha

Slide 5

Manufacturing I Engineering I Physics

Laboratory I Laboratory

Building I Computing

and Fire I and Applied I Director of Research I Mathematics | Admlnlstratlon| Laboratory | Laboratory

Another thing that's new is the organizational

structure. I spent half of my career in industry.

Some of you did, as well. In industry, we used to reorganize every month or so, not all of the company, but parts of it. The organizational changes

tracked the market. A changing market meant

changing structure. In fact, you had to watch the

bulletin board to know who was on first and who

was on second. This institution is a little different.

Elio says that the 1964 Astin reorganization, which

created the Institutes, was in fact the first major

4
reorganization of NBS since the beginning. (By

which, I take it he means that all other changes

have been evolutionary or one-at-a-time shifts in

Divisions and so on.)

When Ernie Ambler reorganized in 1978, it was

actually only the second general reorganization, 14

years later. I have decided on and have just completed this reorganization in 1991, or 13 years after

the last one. You will see that we have eight technical laboratories. In addition to those eight, we also

have Technology Services and Administration as equivalent elements. We call all of these operating

units. Then we have the Advanced Technology

Program, set apart. I'll explain the reason for that

in a few moments. And then there are various staff

functions.

The idea behind this reorganization was first of

all to eliminate the old former institute and laboratory level, The National Engineering Laboratory,

The National Measurement Laboratory, and so on.

It turned out in all of the upheavals of the last couple of years, the managers in NEL and NML

had all gone somewhere else, so it wasn't very hard

to reorganize them out of existence— merely a paper coup de gras. We wanted to set the units up so

that they were large enough to have a fairly firm

and independent base. Each of these units is of the

order of 250 to 300 staff and $30 to $40 million.

Therefore, in theory at least, they have a great deal

of flexibility. Each of these units should be able to

set up its own financial reserves and begin new

work with the mere notification of the Director,

rather than coming in every time they need

$10,000.

TECHNOLOGY COMPETITIVENESS ACT

"TO MODERNIZE AND RESTRUCTURE [NIST] to augment its unique

ABILITY TO ENHANCE THE COMPETITIVENESS OF AMERICAN INDUSTRY WHILE MAINTAINING ITS TRADITIONAL FUNCTION AS LEAD NATIONAL LABO- RATORY FOR PROVIDING THE MEASUREMENTS, CALIBRATIONS, AND

QUALITY ASSURANCE TECHNIQUES WHICH UNDERPIN UNITED STATES COMMERCE, TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS, IMPROVED PRODUCT RELIABILITY AND MANUFACTURING PROCESSES, AND PUBLIC SAFETY"

August 23, 1988

Slide 6

Now let me go back and trace some of the rationale for how we got here. As you know, in 1988 the

Technology Competitiveness Act was passed as part of the omnibus trade legislation of that year.

The statement of purpose of that Act is shown

here. The underlined part is what is new. In effect,

it tells us to take more seriously and raise in priority the assignment to work with industry. To help

industry improve its competitive posture in global

markets. Market places are now global rather than

national, and our industry is struggling to keep up

with some of our off-shore trading partners. That's

the statement of purpose.

NIST FUNCTIONS

• Assist industry in the development of technology and

procedures needed to - improve quality, - modernize manufacturing processes, - ensure product reliability, manufacturability,

functionality, and cost-effectiveness, and - facilitate the more rapid commercialization . .

.

of products based on new scientific discoveries.

• Develop, maintain national standards of measurement.

• Assure international compatibility of national measurement standards.

• Advise industry and government on scientific and

technical problems.

• ... Slide 7

The NIST mission is enunciated in terms of new

and traditional functions, all of this being by way of

a large amendment to the enabling legislation of

1901. Here you see that the first function is to assist industry in a number of specified ways with a focus on quality and improving the way industry

does business. Cost and quality, really. And sec- ondly, a major focus on manufacturing or processing. We, in the past, have focused more on

products and product-related measurements, not

so much on processes. In this law we're told very

pointedly to pay more attention to process technology. Number two on the list of functions is the tra- ditional measurement assignment, a national

system of measurements, and number three, international standards, and so on.

I should say before I talk about the goals that the

change in mission is not an abrupt change, it's a matter of emphasis. This laboratory has always

worked in support of industry. In fact, carved in

stone in the lobby is a statement by the Committee

in the year 1900 saying that they could think of

nothing better to do for manufacturers than to es- tablish the National Bureau of Standards. Thus it is not a new idea. What is new is the emphasis and

5
underscoring of the importance of worrying about

industry. As you know, we are the only Federal

laboratory with broad programs that is assigned

that as a major function: that of helping industry.

NIST GOALS

• Support industry

• Conduct selected programs in health, safety,

and the environment

• Support scientific and engineering community

through fundamental studies

Slide 8

Given this background, I have enunciated three

goals for the laboratory. I did this as part of my

confirmation process. The first one is to support

industry. The second one is special because Washington tends to be a digital town. Either we're all onto something or we're all off it. In the background are other assignments to NIST, not the

least of which are some in health and safety (and I should include the environment in that list) where

we play a key role in establishing the facts through

better measurement. In the case of building and

fire research, you know that we have a very old and

traditional role. More recently, we've worked very

hard in things like clinical standards in support of

the health industry. I regard these as very important assignments, and it's very easy for them to get

lost. Alternatively, it's very hard to get folks in the

Administration who are worrying about trade and

industry to think with you constructively about

health and safety. We in management are responsible for keeping these areas in focus as well.

Third, and very important, is the fundamental

base of the laboratory. We do fundamental scientific work, and fundamental engineering studies,

really for two purposes. One is to be a good citizen

in the scientific community where we are expected

to do certain kinds of tasks as part of our role in our technical society. Secondly, to keep up the

quality of the rest of the work. I assert that one

can't do good applied work without doing good basic work. The quality of this place rests squarely on

the foundation of long-term, fundamental work.

NEW MECHANISMS

• Advanced Technology Program

• Manufacturing Technology Centers

• State Technology Extension Program

Slide 9

I'm not going to talk about the laboratory programs, but I am going to talk just briefly about the

new mechanisms that have been established.

STATE TECHNOLOGY EXTENSION PROGRAM

• To help states get started

• Nine planning grants awarded in 1990

Arkansas Minnesota

Georgia New York

Maryland Pennsylvania

Massachusetts Tennessee

Michigan

Slide 10

There are three in the law. I'm going to talk about

them in inverse order. The first program, called the

State Technology Extension Program, is Congress'

instruction to us to help the states establish analogs

of the Agricultural Extension Service, an enor- mously successful joint effort among Federal,

State, and county governments, and the backbone

of the technical side of American agriculture.

States are trying to emulate this in the industrial area. They're struggling and Congress thought we

could help them, and gave us a little money and an

assignment to attempt to coordinate the state efforts. Last summer we awarded small grants to nine

states. Some of these grants actually tied the state

efforts back to the second program, the manufacturing and technology sentence.

MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY CENTERS

• To translate, harden, and transfer technology to industry

• Regional

• Three set up in 1989

Great Lakes Center in Cleveland, Ohio

Northeast Center in Troy, New York

Southeast Center in Columbia, South Carolina

• Two more set up in 1991

Industrial Technology Institute,

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Kansas Technology Enterprise Corp.,

Topeka, Kansas

Slide 11

The second program, somewhat larger, is a series

of entities to help small business connect with

NIST and other technology sources in manufacturing technology. These new entities do not do R&D.

They're strictly chartered to move and to diffuse

technology. They're called by some "Holling Centers" after the senator whose idea this was and who

6
promoted the legislation. They're intended to be

regional, to reach eventually most of the industrial

parts of the United States. We started with three in

1989; one in Ohio, one in New York, and one in

South Carolina. We're going to announce within

about 2 weeks two more centers [in Michigan and

Kansas]. The budget calls for additional ones next

year. The original thinking was there would be a dozen of these. There is a sunset provision, so that

the Federal money will be withdrawn after 6 years,

and the discussion now is what to do with that

money once withdrawn. Should we use it to start more centers? Or should we terminate the Federal

effort and let these centers go about their business?

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM

Goal

Assist U.S. business to carryout R&D on PRE-COMPETITIVE GENERIC technologies, which are

• ENABLING -offer wide breadth of potential application

and form an important technical basis for future product-specific applications; and

• HIGH-VALUE -when applied they offer significant benefits

to the economy by enhancing economic growth and

raising productivity.

Slide 12

The third program, far and away the one with

the largest potential impact on this institution, is the Advanced Technology Program (ATP). The

point of the ATP is to help business commercialize

exciting new technologies — not to generate technology, but to help commercialize it. This is done

through giving money to companies — something

new. It's relatively new anywhere in the government, and it's certainly new here, for appropriated

funds to be passed to industry for civilian technology. The funds can go either to single companies or

to consortia of firms, with an emphasis on consortia. The idea is to help go to market, not in niche

technologies, but in technologies with the potential

to have a major influence on the economy. The

judgement as to whether or not a technology is ready for this kind of investment and whether it has the potential for large leverage on the econ- omy, whether there are technical barriers, whether

the companies are qualified to do the work, and so on, is part of the competitive procurement evaluation. All of the decisions are made here with assists

from people from industry and other federal agencies. Ray Kammer has spent a lot of his time over- seeing this activity. I'm pleased to say that we're

just completing round one, and tomorrow morning

at Commerce we'll be announcing the first awards

under this program.

Generic ^-Technology

Product & Process New

Concept

Proprietary,

Technology"

Sales

Supporting Technology

Slide 13

It's important to note the generic and precompetitive criterion, and here's a slide that explains in

oversimplified fashion what we mean by that. You

may have noticed that the phrase "generic and precompetitive" has appeared in the speeches and tes- timony of the President's Science Advisor. It has,

in fact, appeared in a speech the President himself

gave and is bandied about considerably in Washington these days as the answer to the criticism that

programs like this smack of industrial policy or the

selection of winners and losers. The way around

that was devised by people here and downtown

who were writing the first rule for the ATP, and it was hammered out with the aid of OMB. The idea

is that if you're going to market with something

new already in hand, and you're trying to get to routine production and sales, you go through a two-part process. The early part is where the risk is high and the technical barriers are openly discussed. For example, I cite the high-temperature

superconductors, where the problems are sufficiently difficult that firms engaged in such R&D

have been sharing widely what they've learned. At

some point as time goes by, people begin to see some answers and then they stop talking and the

information becomes proprietary. In fact, a better

word would be preproprietary rather than precompetitive, because obviously it's all competitive. Anyway, we coined this phrase, generic and

precompetitive, and it's now part of the Washington lexicon. We shall invest via ATP in the generic

and precompetitive (preproprietary) part of the development time line.

NIST STATUS

• -1000 guest scientists

• 103 Co-op R&D agreements (CRDA's) - 30 more in progress

• 5 Manufacturing Technology Centers (MTC's)

• 1 1 Grants awarded under the Advanced

Technology Program

Slide 14

We now have about 1,000 guest scientists per

year here. They average about half a year per

guest, so that we get about 500 staff-years from

that group. Two hundred of these are Industrial

Research Associates, up by a factor of about two

7
from 10 years ago. We've executed under authorities legislated during the 1980s, almost 90 cooperative R&D agreements. This is known as CRDA.

We have another almost three dozen such agreements in the pipeline. That makes us either number two or number three in the Federal race, NIH

being in the lead position and, of course, they're

four or five times bigger than we are. We're doing

very well in executing agreements with industry.

We have three of the manufacturing technology

centers; soon we'll have six. And we have just gone

through our first experimental year on the ATP.

PRESIDENT'S 1992 BUDGET

". . . A 15% increase to . . . $248 million for NIST. The . . . projection will result in a budget that is approximately doubled by 1996."

Slide 15

In the President's 1992 budget it first says that

there's a 15 percent increase approved for NIST,

and that's for the laboratory, not for the extramural

programs. The appropriated funding will rise to al- most $250 million. Then the budget goes on to say

that the budget projection will result in a budget

for NIST that is approximately doubled by 1996.

That's an extraordinary statement for this institution. We now have OMB saying that NIST should

be treated the way they wanted NSF to be treated,

doubled in 5 years. What can we do with that?

It turns out if you talk to the folks over at NSF,

despite their disappointment that they haven't gotten the doubling so far, that having projections that are on the rise makes an enormous difference in

how you can think and talk and write about the

institution. It is now, for example, okay to write

expansionist plans, because the projections are for a very substantial increase. So we can publish, for

the first time, a strategic outlook or a long-range

plan that talks about new programs built on top of

existing programs. That gives us flexibility that we

haven't enjoyed in the past. In fact, we've written

precious few long-range plans here in the last 20

years because of the difficulty in publishing anything significant, given the set of zeros in the OMB

marks for out-year increases. This is a very significant achievement for us and we're very pleased by

it. It puts us in the spotlight, and in fact, we have

been in the spotlight since the 1988 legislation.

STRATEGY/OUTLOOK

1 . External work will grow fast

2. Technology development - fast

3. Supporting technology - slower

4. Fundamental research - priority

5. OA work - proportional

Slide 16

I want to spend just a few minutes talking about

a strategic outlook document that we just released

to the senior management here for their use in

writing their own plans for the 1990s. This is just a summary. There are 10 bullets in our strategic outlook, designed to suggest to people where we think

we're going. The first one is that the new external

work will grow rapidly. Congress is talking about

$100 million for ATP in the third year. We got $10

million the first year, and $36 million the second

year. There has been talk in Congress of numbers

as high as $250 million. I didn't say so, but the ATP

money has to be matched dollar-for-dollar, so we're talking about very substantial influence.

Secondly, I think our work that is aimed at technology development, generic and preproprietary,

will increase relatively rapidly. It will go up in lockstep with the outside funding.

Third, the supporting technology — things like

reference data, reference materials, some of the

measurement work (not all, because a lot of the

measurement work is part of technology development) will grow more slowly, but I think it will

grow. Everything here will grow some. We'll keep

fundamental research as a priority; it's up to us to maintain a proper percentage of that. Nobody

knows what the right level of fundamental work

should be, but it's somewhere around 15 percent.

The other agency work, I think, will not grow proportionately, but will grow somewhat slower so that

the number will come down several points over the

next five years, and perhaps more than that over

the next ten.

STRATEGY/OUTLOOK (Cont'd)

6. Collaborations - increase

7. National facilities - more

8. Technology transfer - more, new ways

9. Staff - better, more sophisticated

1 0. Facilities - major improvement

Slide 17

8
More and more collaborations. The example of

the Cooperative R&D Agreements, I think, points

that up. It will become a way of life here to do

things in partnership, not only in planning as we

always have in workshops, but actually in the doing.

Our success with the Cold Neutron Research Facility encourages us to be on the lookout for more

national user facilities like that one. We'll be opportunistic about that. We'll find new ways to do

technology transfer. In fact, Don Johnson has a group thinking hard about new institutional ways to work with the private sector. The staff will become

ever stronger, more sophisticated. Because of a personnel demonstration project that we have

here, our staff, I think, is stronger than ever and

the chances of keeping it strong are greater than

ever. Furthermore, there was a pay adjustment,

finally, this last fall for our senior managers, so that

I think we'll do better retaining and employing se- nior staff. Finally, we need to do something about the facilities. The facilities look great; I don't want to slam

them, but they're getting tired. We now have an

architectural/engineering firm looking very carefully at what it will take to get us into the next

century. Of course, if we're going to double the

laboratory staff in five years, that's going to put a severe strain on the capacity of our facilities. We

have gotten in the 1992 budget several million dollars for the first wave of improvements. I think that

we're looking at something on the order of a magnitude greater than that when we really get into

this.

POSSIBLE MODELS

• NSF

• DARPA

• NIH

Slide 18

$2 billion, running a grants program of about $7.5

billion. I submit that both the NIH laboratory and

their grants program are world-class and run the

medical research in a very successful way for the

entire world. So our model is NIH, and, although

we'll never see that kind of money— I'm sure we

won't ask for it — it is instructive in how to run a

laboratory and a grants program together.

That's where we are and that's where we're going. I hope that sets the stage for the next speakers,

Manny. Thank you.

Lastly, the question is, What should be a model

for NIST as we go into the future? There are those

who say that you can't run a program management

function at a laboratory. A lot of people in Washington think that if you're going to set up something along the lines of NSF or DARPA, that you

can only do so by damaging the laboratory. Therefore, they would like to see the ATP Program

moved out of this laboratory. Well, it's assigned to

us, and so very pragmatically, it's our job to figure

out how to make it work. So we cast about for models where doomsday doesn't have to be the answer.

It's right under our noses. Down the street at NIH

is a highly successful laboratory, budgeted at about

9

11
Elio Passaglia

Introduction by Emanuel Horowitz

Our next speaker is Dr. Elio Passaglia. Elio

joined the National Bureau of Standards in 1961 as a physicist in the Textile Section. He is a former

Deputy Director of the NBS Center for Materials

Science and he is currently a professor part-time at Johns Hopkins University. It seems that old NBS

employees somehow find their way to Baltimore.

As John Lyons has mentioned, Elio is writing a history of NBS from the 1950s, roughly where the previous history ended, until it became NIST in 1988.

Directors of this laboratory have, for a long time,

turned to Dr. Passaglia when there was an especially difficult task needing scholarly thought, as for

example, the Flammable Fabrics Program. There

are many, many others that I could mention. Elio

retired from NBS in 1987.

It is a pleasure for me to introduce a personal

friend and great colleague, and an important per- son of this laboratory, Dr. Elio Passaglia.

12
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: 1901-1970

Elio Passaglia and Karma Beal

As many of you know, Karma Beal and I are working on a history of the Bureau starting approximately in 1950 where Rexmond Cochrane's fine

book Measures for Progress ends, bringing the history up to the formation of NIST. We are now

working on Chapter IV, which covers the period

1957 to 1964.

In preparing for our account, we reviewed much

of the Bureau's history, and in the process formed

some ideas of important events that either shaped

the nature and character of the Bureau or were of

particular significance in its history. We find, however, that the process of writing is also one of continued study, and our perception of events in the

Bureau's history continually changes. Nevertheless,

I am going to share with you our present perception of those events. Our ideas may change with

further research and study, but while our present

perception may prove shallow, we do not believe it

will be proved wrong. The period I will cover is from 1901, when the Bureau was formed, to 1970,

where other speakers will take over. This is a very

long period indeed, so our account will of necessity

be broad-brush. It will be neither an eagle's-eye

view, for I am not knowledgeable enough, nor a worm's-eye view, for I don't know enough detail.

You can think of it as an eagle's view through the

eyes of a worm.

What I am going to do is give you a series of

dates and explain to you why I believe they were

important in the Bureau's history. Some of them

will be new and strange to you, but after I finish I hope you will agree that they were important ones. Obviously I will have to leave out a great deal.

Karma and I have had to be selective, but we hope

not misleading. And you may find some of the

dates provocative.

The first date is 1900, one year before the establishment of the Bureau, and the event is the establishment of the General Electric Research

Laboratory. This will seem like a strange date to

pick, but I want to make two points. The first is that the growth of the electrical industry at the turn

of the century was the catalyst that forced the formation of the Bureau. Indeed, one year before the

Bureau's formation, the electrical industry was well

enough established that it resulted in the first central industrial research laboratory.

Now, I cannot enter into the Alice-in-Wonderland history of nineteenth-century measurement

standards in the United States, but I will mention

one date. In 1893 at the Columbian Exposition in

Chicago, an international meeting agreed on definitions of all the electrical units, and Congress a year later legalized those units. But the United

States had no standards for them, whereupon Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences to prescribe and publish specifications "necessary for

the application of the ampere and the volt." A year

later the Office of Weights and Measures began

the study of the Academy specifications, but the

work of that office had little standing and less legal

status. The Nation had reached an impasse on

electrical standards. Something had to be done.

The other reason for bringing up the GE

Research Laboratory is not very obvious, but very

important. At the turn of the century there were

not many research laboratories around, and Table

1 shows the dates of formation of a few of them.

Table 1. Establishment Dates of Research

Laboratories

1900 General Electric

1903 DuPont

1904 Westinghouse

1908 Corning Glass

1912 Eastman Kodak

1925 Bell Telephone

1928 U.S. Steel

1901 National Bureau of Standards

1912 Bureau of Mines

1923 Naval Research Laboratory

1886 A. D. Little

1925 Battelle

Notice that the Bureau, formed in 1901, predates

all of them except GE. The table is a little misleading in that most of these organizations previously

had some kind of engineering or scientific work going on, particularly Bell Labs, which was preceded

by Western Electric engineering and scientific laboratories in 1907 and 1911, but it was not until the

dates shown that research had become a centralized

activity.

In the Federal Government there was also re- search, notably in the Department of Agriculture

and the Geological survey, but there was nothing

that could be called a physical science laboratory

until 1901 when the Bureau was established. In- deed, the laboratory that many of us feel is most

similar to the Bureau in scope of activity— the

Naval Research Laboratory— was not formed until

1923. Oddly enough, the first contract research

13
laboratory, A.D. Little, dates from 1886, but Battelle was not formed until 1925.

The point of all this is that for a large part of its history the Bureau was the only physical science

laboratory in the Federal Government, and one of

the few in the Nation. As a result it was called

upon to do things simply because there was no one

else. There are numerous examples of this, and we

will mention two important ones later. Proceeding now on our historical trek, we come

to what is perhaps the most important event in

shaping the character and nature of the Bureau. In

1899, then Treasury Secretary Lyman Gage, in

whose Department the Office of Weights and Measures resided, took the bull by the horns and re- sponded to the clamor to do something about

national standards. Now serendipity took over. He

asked his Assistant Secretary, Frank A. Vanderlip,

to suggest someone to prepare a report proposing

legislation for a national standards laboratory.

While a student at the University of Illinois, Vanderlip had a friend who was now a professor of

physics at the University of Chicago. The friend's

name was Samuel Wesley Stratton, and Vanderlip

wrote to him. Stratton accepted the task, came to Washington, and, with the title of Inspector of

Standards, began work on the legislation. By early

1900 he finished the draft of a bill for what he

called a "National Standardizing Bureau," marshalled arguments to be used at the hearings, and

obtained an overwhelming number of endorsements.

As we all know, on March 3, 1901, Stratton's

proposed legislation was passed into law with a single—but felicitous — change. National Standardizing Bureau became National Bureau of Standards,

but otherwise Stratton's text was untouched. It was

a short law, requiring but two pages, but in it were

buried the seeds of the Bureau's future nature. We

all know what was in that law, but let me refresh

your memory and then point out two characteristics that were crucial in determining the nature of

the Bureau, aside from the appointment of Stratton himself as the Bureau's first director. In the

law the Bureau was given these functions:

(1) the custody of the national standards;

(2) the comparison of the standards used in

science, engineering, manufacturing, and

commerce with the national standards;

(3) the construction of standards when necessary;

(4) the testing and calibration of standards

measuring apparatus;

(5) the determination of physical constants and

the properties of materials when such data

are of great importance to science and

manufacturing . . . and are not available in

sufficient accuracy elsewhere.

All except the last are what might be considered

obvious functions for a standards laboratory. The

last one gives the Bureau considerable freedom to engage in scientific research, but there is one final

function that best captures the spirit of the law.

One of the functions given to the Bureau was "the

solution of problems which arise in connection with

standards." Now, since in a technological society it

is difficult to conceive of an area that does not involve standards in one form or another, the law in

effect authorized the Bureau to engage in any as- pect of science and technology, provided only that

it show involvement with some standards problem—which inevitably means with measurement

technology— a not too difficult task. Many years

ago, in a goose blind on the Maryland Eastern

Shore, that irrepressible gad-fly of the Bureau Irl Schoonover, in discussing this clause in the law

said, "Elio, it's better than a license to steal." What

Schoony meant was that the Organic Act gave the

Bureau authority to do almost anything it wanted

to do, if it were somehow connected with standards

and hence measurement capability. Robert

Huntoon, that eminent scholar of the Bureau's

role, coined the word "permissive" for the law, and

the freedom it gave the Bureau is one of the most

important factors that shaped its character.

The other factor that shaped the Bureau's character is something the law does not say. Nowhere

does the law give the Bureau any regulatory function. It was given no policing authority; this is left to the states and other agencies of the Federal Government. In effect, the Bureau was shielded from

the political arena. In cases of dispute, its sole function was to discover scientific truth. Truly, in its shaping of a scientific institution, and in its simple

wisdom, it would be difficult to devise a better document than Stratton's two-page law. That is why I feel that Stratton's hiring is the most important

event in the Bureau's history.

The next date that was important in determining

the nature of the Bureau was 1904, just three years

after the Bureau's establishment. In that year the

Bureau — the only physical science laboratory in the

Government— was approached by another agency

on the prosaic question of light bulbs. These

seemed to be burning out with unexpected rapidity.

Could the Bureau do something about it? The

Bureau tested a batch of light bulbs and found that

not only did they not conform to the minimal

Government specifications, they did not even con- form to the manufacturer's own requirements.

Agencies quickly learned that they could save a lot of money by having the Bureau test their purchases

14
for conformance with specifications, and despite

the fact that the Organic Act says nothing about

the Bureau testing Government purchases, it got

into testing— and the development of specifications — in a big way. This led to a great deal of routine testing at the Bureau, which was partly the

genesis of the three materials divisions. But perhaps more important, this work was extended to testing for regulatory agencies like the Federal

Trade Commission and the Post Office Department, which were concerned with truth in advertising and mail fraud. The Bureau published letter

circulars, circulars, handbooks and whatnot for the

consumer on such topics as antifreeze, washing and

polishing materials, sun lamps, health lamps, mercury arc lamps, and battery additives — almost a Consumers Union that did not name names. It was

a great service for the Government and the general

public, but would eventually lead the Bureau into

serious trouble.

Thus, before the First World War, the Bureau

was busy establishing its full line of standards in

weights and measures, temperature and heat, electricity, X-rays and radioactivity, and chemistry, and

doing a large amount of acceptance testing. It was

also involved in what might be called national

problems such as underground corrosion, railroad

failures, and fire prevention, as well as standards

and research for new technologies like radio and

aircraft.

But the next really important event in determining the nature and character of the Bureau did not

come until May 20, 1920. In my view, this was sec- ond in importance only to Stratton's hiring, and to understand its significance we have to discuss the

Bureau's activities in the First World War. In

Cochrane's words,

. . . there was scarcely an investigation of

the National Research Council or the

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-rays and ra- dium research, the Bureau participated in

almost the whole range of America's

wartime effort.

The best-known of these efforts was the glass

plant which produced (not merely studied, but produced) optical glass for the whole war effort, and

was still producing optical glass during the Korean

War. Similar comments could be made in spades

about the Bureau's activities during the Second

World War and the Korean War, where the bestknown outputs were the proximity fuze, guided

missiles, and electronic computers.

Now, it is important to note that these activities

had little to do with the fact that the Bureau was

the Nation's central measurements and standards

laboratory. Rather, it had more to do with the fact

that the Bureau was peopled with capable scientists whose talents could be turned to the solution

of problems brought about by the war effort. It was

technology development, but not technology development limited to measurement technology; it included a much broader range of activities — the

development of products. The effort in the First

World War extended the Bureau's horizons beyond

measurements, standards and data.

But our concern right now is how all of this activity was financed. Largely, all this work was for mission agencies — primarily the military— who had the

responsibility for pursuing the war. Now, the Bureau had done work for other agencies before the

war, but in doing so, no funds were transferred

from the other agencies to the Bureau. Rather, the

Bureau used its own funds or requested special appropriations from Congress for the work. Agencies

simply did not have the authority to transfer funds

among themselves, although it was occasionally

done. However, to improve efficiency, during the

war the Congress passed the Overman Act, which

permitted the transfer of funds from one agency to another to carry out work the transferring agency

needed to be done. With the end of the war, the

Overman Act expired, but the military still had a

lot of work it wanted the Bureau to carry out, and

Stratton, who was against the idea of transferred

funds, was induced to ask Congress for authority to receive funds from other agencies. Thus it came

about that the appropriation act for FY 1921 contained a codicil that permitted the Bureau to re- ceive funds from other agencies. The Bureau was

the only agency that had this privilege until 1932

when the Economy Act permitted such transfer

among all agencies.

The appropriation act of 1920 permitted the

camel of other agency money to stick its head into

the tent, never to be removed and changing forever

the lives of Bureau middle management. In later

years, a new requirement for financial entrepreneurship was added to their functions, along

with new bosses in the form of clients. Many are

the division and section chiefs who, when faced

with a sudden loss of a hundred thousand dollar

contract, wished the camel had never been allowed near the tent.

15
But it seems to me that this authority to accept

other agency money had an even more profound

effect on the Bureau. During the war years the

Bureau had shown that it could engage in unfettered technology development, and could do it very

well indeed. Now, absent some Bureau policy to the contrary, it had a mechanism by which it could

continue this type of work— at least for specific

clients. A whole new horizon had manifested itself. As we shall see, in the aftermath of World War II the march toward this horizon would become so great that the Bureau's principal horizon of providing new and needed measurements and standards

for emerging technologies would be obscured.

The Bureau after World War I, imbued with

confidence after its performance during the war;

believing that the military work it had done had

industrial value; and having formed a new, trusting

relation with industry; undertook, in Stratton's

words, "to carry out the applied research for industry that industry could not do for itself." It declared itself "fundamentally concerned either

directly or indirectly with the improvement of the

methods of production or the quality of the output" of industry. It wanted to occupy "somewhat

the same position with respect to the manufacturing interests in this country that the Bureaus of the

Department of Agriculture do to the agricultural

interests." Thus, in 1920, with special appropriations from Congress, new programs in metallurgical

research, high temperatures, industrial research,

sound, industrial safety, automotive engines, and

standardization of equipment were begun. One of

the first results of this new policy was the installation of the industrial research associate program,

and by 1923, 21 associates representing 18 industries were at the Bureau.

Then, in 1921 Herbert Hoover became Secretary

of Commerce and reinforced and took over these

industrial aims of the Bureau. Reacting to the

short but intensive recession of 1920 and 1921, his

prescription for the recovery of industry was

through "the elimination of waste and increasing

the efficiency of the commercial and industrial sys- tems . . ." His prime candidate for spurring the

economy was home construction, for it promised

the quickest means of stimulating other industries

and providing work for unemployed. He thus

formed a Division of Building and Housing in his

own office, with a program at the Bureau to provide scientific, technical, and economic re- search; simplification and standardization of building materials; and revision of municipal and state building codes. Also established at the Bureau

were divisions of simplified practice and trade stan- dards, again with counterparts in his own office. In modern parlance, they were activities programmanaged from downtown. Hoover's program included direct assistance to both new and

established industries, with specific help for the

new aviation and radio industries. And spurred by

Hoover's campaign against waste in industry, the

Bureau began investigations on the utilization of raw materials, the quality of manufactured articles,

and on new uses for industrial by-products.

Now, Karma and I have not done the research

this period merits, but when I look at the results of

all these activities, I come to some tentative conclusions. When the Bureau provided support services

in its traditional outputs of measurement methods,

standards, and data, the programs were quite successful, as for example in properties and dimensions of building materials, and in automobiles

where the Bureau developed the octane rating for

gasolines. When it came to providing new technologies, as in the production of chemicals from

sugar wastes, the record of success is not great, nor

is it in the production of sugars. For example, capitalizing on its knowledge of sugar chemistry arising

from the assay of sugar for customs purposes, and on its wartime success in developing an industrial

process for the production of dextrose, the Bureau

had great technical success in developing manufacturing methods for levulose and xylose, but failure

economically because the price was far too high

and the market far too small. But, when the market

or the client were well established as in the development of aircraft equipment, success was high.

What I deduce from this period of the twenties is that despite its technical capabilities, the Bureau

was not an industrial research laboratory, for it lacked the supporting structure provided by marketing and manufacturing divisions that those laboratories need. But it is fair to say that in this

period, the Bureau and industry came to know one

another better— not always a frictionless process.

I want now to jump to a date of immense historical interest to the Bureau and in fact the world.

This date will prompt me to make some remarks

about what happened to the Bureau during the

great depression of the thirties.

On October 11, 1939, Alexander Sachs delivered

to President Roosevelt the fateful letter from

Albert Einstein and a covering memorandum from

Leo Szilard alerting the President to the discovery

of nuclear fission and hence to the possibility of a new and immense source of energy, and possibly even an atomic bomb. Who was the President to turn to for advice? It was a matter that had to be

kept in the official family and not complicated by

military prejudices, so he called on Lyman J. Briggs,

Director of the Bureau, the only non-military laboratory around. The story from then on is well

known: how the President appointed an Advisory

16
Committee on Uranium with Briggs as its chairman; how some seven months later, still under

Briggs, this became the S-l Section of the National

Defense Research Council; how in 1941 this was

transferred to the Office of Scientific Research and

Development; and finally, how the final stages of

research and development of the atomic bomb

were taken over in 1942 by the Army Corps of

Engineers as the Manhattan District.

Dr. Briggs' operation of the Advisory Committee

on Uranium and its successor S-l Committee has

received some criticism. Cochrane writes,

It was an awesome responsibility that

had been thrust upon Dr. Briggs. In his

66th year ... he had witnessed a serious

reduction in Bureau funds and staff .... A younger man might have seized on the

adventure into the unknown 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 research, in which the Bureau

ought to become involved. He and his

committee hesitated.

1. 1. Rabi, quoted by John Newhouse in his book

War and Peace in the Nuclear Age , is more direct.

"[He] was out of his depth," Rabi is quoted as saying, "and that held things up for a year."

Strong words, and they merit attention, so let me

now enter into some speculation, and before I begin, let me assure you that I know that the Bureau

did very important work for the atomic bomb project on the purification of graphite and uranium,

and in the development of analytical methods.

With that aside, let me continue with the main

thread of our story. Trained as a soil physicist, Dr.

Briggs could hardly have been expected to know

the ramifications of nuclear fission. But what does

a director do when confronted with a problem of

this type? Why, he calls in his experts to advise

him. And it appears that Briggs did so, for Fred

Mohler, spectroscopist-atomic physicist Chief of

the Atomic Physics Section, who had worked with

Harold Urey on the preparation of heavy water,

accompanied him at the first meeting of the original Uranium Committee. But the Bureau had no program in nuclear physics. Indeed, the Visiting

Committee had earlier recommended that further

research in heavy water be stopped. When one

looks at the early experiments that were done to determine the possibility of a chain reaction in ura- nium, and to the participants in the meetings of the

uranium and S-l committees after the first, one is struck by the fact that no Bureau names appear,

except Briggs, of course. The Bureau had simply

not kept up with the so-called "new physics." This

was in fact centered in the European — and particularly German—universities, and until the great migration of physicists to the United States in the

thirties, only a few American universities whose

professors had been trained in Europe, could be

said to have "kept up."

And what about the Bureau? Its staff had

dropped from about 1,100 in 1931 to less than 700

by mid-decade, and by 1939 was only again approaching the level of a decade earlier. It could not

afford the luxury of expanding into a new and esoteric field that, at that time, had only a distant connection to its measurement and standards mission.

Indeed, a few of our distinguished alumni recall

that in the late thirties some noted professors of

physics did not have a high regard for the scientific

program of the Bureau. Thus, in my untutored

view, it is possible that Briggs' dilatory response to the problem the President laid before him was not

due solely to his own personal characteristics, but

to the fact that his organization could not provide

him the support he needed, for it, in turn, had not

had the support it merited. Had it received that

support, the Bureau, and perhaps the Nation,

might have become quite different places. If there

is any validity to this speculation, and any moral to

this story, it is that if you have an organization that

is your principal scientific arm, it is well to be sure

that it is properly nurtured.

Now I want to jump again in our historical trek

to the post-World War II years. In April of 1948,

Merle Randall, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, known to the chemistry world because of his co-authorship

with G. N. Lewis of the definitive text Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances , and now a consultant, wrote to George Vinal,

Chief of the Electrochemistry Section, about a product of one of his clients. It was a mixture of

anhydrous sodium sulfate and slightly basic anhydrous magnesium sulfate which, when added to a

lead-acid battery, allegedly improved its perfor- mance. Thus began the famous battery additive —

or AD-X2 — incident.

Now, it is not my intention to subject you once

again to a recounting of this episode. But I do want

to touch on some salient points. In its testing of

battery additives — primarily for the FTC and the

Post Office Department — the Bureau had come to the conclusion that none of them was helpful, and

specifically stipulated all preparations of sodium

and magnesium sulfates in its publications. Moreover, the Bureau had the policy of not naming any

proprietary products, and of not carrying out tests for private concerns. Thus a manufacturer could

claim that his product was different from the general class, and that by its condemnation without

17
testing, the Bureau was restricting the business of

the manufacturer. This loophole in the Bureau policy was brilliantly exploited by Jess Ritchie, an aggressive and charismatic entrepreneur of Oakland,

California, whose product, known as AD-X2, was what Randall wrote about to Vinal, and which, in

fact, had many satisfied customers in the Oakland

area. The Bureau eventually carried out exhaustive

tests on AD-X2 and found it ineffective, but could

not convince Ritchie.

The AD-X2 affair began in 1948 and ended in

1953. Before it was over it caused the firing of the

Bureau's director, Allen Astin, followed by his partial and eventual full reinstatement. It brought the

wrath of the scientific community down on Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks because his

statement before Congress that in its work on ADX2 the Bureau had not sufficiently considered the

play of the market place, was widely interpreted to mean that science should take political considerations into account in its technical judgments. It made the Bureau front-page news for months and

gave political cartoonists a field day. It caused six

days of hearings before a Senate Select Committee.

It caused a large number of the Bureau staff to threaten to resign. And, most important for our

purposes, at the request of Secretary Weeks, who

would later become a strong champion of the

Bureau, it caused the investigation of the Bureau

by a high-level committee chaired by Mervin Kelly,

President of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Another high-level committee, the Jeffries Committee, investigated the Bureau's work on AD-X2 and

found it impeccable.

Thus began the fifties, one of the most fateful

decades in the Bureau's history. Table 2 shows

some of the events of this period.

Table 2. The Fateful Fifties

1950 A new Organic Act, and an unfulfilled

vision

1951 A Director resigns under attack

1953 A new Director and his Bureau come un- der attack

1953 The first Kelly report

1954 Advisory committees formed

1954 A Post-Doc program is instituted

1950 Boulder is acquired

1956 Gaithersburg proceeds toward reality

FY 1957 A new accounting system is instituted,

and the Bureau comes out ahead

First, in 1950, a new Organic Act was passed.

Despite being considerably more detailed than the

original act, it was not greatly different from it, and

did not materially change the Bureau's operations

and philosophy. But an event that occurred during

its evolution is interesting for something that did

not occur. The revision of the Organic Act came

about because Henry Wallace, when he became

Secretary of Commerce in 1945, wanted to develop

a program for the Department and asked Dr.

Briggs to prepare a revision of the Organic Act. In

his original draft, Dr. Briggs proposed a new function for the Bureau which, had it been part of the

final legislation, would have completely changed

the future course of the Bureau. The proposed

function reads: "The prosecution of basic research

in physics, chemistry and engineering to promote

the development of science, industry and commerce." Such a function would obviously have dramatically changed the future of the Bureau. It would have gone from the Nation's measurement

and standards laboratory with all of its basic re- search deriving from that function to an institution

with a far broader and more general mandate.

But this was not to come about. On the Visiting

Committee at that time was Vannevar Bush, who

had just finished writing Science: The Endless

Frontier, which was to lead to the formation of the

National Science Foundation in 1950. Wallace of course sent the proposed legislation to the Committee for their comments, whereupon Bush wrote

that he felt the Bureau should do basic research,

but ". . . it should be unmistakably clear that the

major emphasis should remain on its unique as- signment in the field of standards." Briggs' clause

did not appear in the final bill. Then, in late 1951, at the height of the AD-X2

affair, Edward Condon, a great and charismatic

scientist who had succeeded Dr. Briggs as Director

in late 1945, resigned, a victim of the Nation's obsession with communism. He was succeeded by the

steadfast Allen V. Astin, a man with a peerless sense of Bureau mission, and of unparalleled personal and official integrity. Thrust into the turmoil

of the AD-X2 episode, he guided his Bureau safely

through some of its most trying days, and for 17

years led it to some of its most productive and re- warding times.

But the most important event for our purposes is the Kelly Committee. Formed by Secretary Weeks

at the height of the AD-X2 affair to "evaluate the

present functions and operations of the National

Bureau of Standards," its report was one of the

most important documents in the Bureau's history,

and its recommendations formed the agenda for a

large part of Astin's tenure as Director.

To understand the report, it is well to put it in

context. It was written in 1953 at the climax of the

AD-X2 affair, which in fact brought it about. As a

result of the Korean War, the Bureau, with a staff

of some 4,800, attained the largest size in its

history. But 85 percent of the work was for other

18
agencies, most of it for the military. A large part of

that was weapons development work, and even more of it was what I earlier called unfettered

technology development. The work on its basic

standards mission had shrunk, and the Bureau was

in danger of becoming an appendage of the military at a time when science and technology were

growing explosively and clamoring for new measurement methods and standards. Kelly's committee wrote, "Since 1950, the decrease in basic

programs must be considered as tragic," and, "The

presence of these [weapons programs] in the

Bureau is impairing its effectiveness for its primary

functions and making it difficult for the Bureau to build strength for the future." While recognizing

that much of the other agency work was valuable

and of the same type the Bureau would do on its own, the committee recommended the divestiture

of the weapons work. At the stroke of a pen, as Jacob Rabinow will tell us about this afternoon,

2,000 people were transferred to the military as the

Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory and the

Corona Missile Laboratory. Less than a year later,

the Institute for Numerical Analysis was trans- ferred to UCLA under the name Numerical Analysis Research. It was left to Astin to find increases

in the Bureau's direct appropriation for work on its basic mission, a quest that the launching of Sputnik

in 1957 helped greatly. But even with this massive

divestiture it was not until 1960 that other agency

funds dropped down to 50 percent of the Bureau's

total expenditures. The Bureau had been in danger

of forgetting its basic reason for existence, and the

Kelly Committee brought it back to its true

function.

Another recommendation of the Committee was

that advisory committees for each division be

formed, and this was done in 1954. It is difficult for

those of us who came after that date to conceive of

a Bureau without evaluation panels, but for more

than half its history the Bureau had none, except

the Statutory Visiting Committee.

A few other events happened in the fifties. Under the leadership of Joseph Hilsenrath and David

Mann, the Post Doctoral Research Associate Program was instituted in 1954, although one person,

known as the "zeroeth" post doc came in 1953. She

was a woman. Probably no other program has done

as much for the scientific competence of the Bureau. There were also two changes that materially al- tered the Bureau's fiscal operation. First, it was

permitted to retain fees for standard samples and

calibrations, fees which were previously sent to the

Treasury. This increased Bureau funds by almost

two million dollars annually. Second, a working

capital fund was instituted, thereby partially lessening the onus of yearly appropriations.

Finally, the Bureau increased in extent, if not in

personnel. In the fifties Boulder was acquired, as we shall hear from Dr. Kamper, and the seeds for

Gaithersburg were planted, as we shall hear from

Mr. Walleigh. The fifties were busy years indeed.

Let us now jump into the sixties, and the last two

dates I will discuss before turning over the floor to Dr. Branscomb. Early in the decade, Allen Astin,

responding to the urging of the Secretary of Commerce that members of the Department develop

and transmit suggestions for strengthening its programs, submitted a bold proposal indeed. I think

you will find this proposal interesting in view of the

development of NBS into NIST. In agreement with an Academy of Sciences report that I will discuss

later, Astin strongly stressed the need for strengthening the scientific activities of the Department.

But he felt that report did not go far enough in its recommendations, and that "the great dependence

of commercial and industrial growth upon science

and technology requires a more unified and dynamic approach." Then, citing scientific activities

in the Department of Defense, the Department of

Agriculture, and particularly the National Institutes of Health, he finds ". . . no comparable program within the government department entrusted

with promoting the Nation's commerce and industry." Astin particularly notes "the serious international competition for technological and economic

leadership." Seems to me we have heard those

words recently.

To help remedy these various factors, Astin,

clearly with the National Institutes of Health in

mind, proposed the formation of a major new re- search and development agency to be called the

National Institutes for Physical Science, the subunits of which would have Bureau status. There

would be new national research institutes in such

areas as new materials, automation and production

processes, construction, communication, trans- portation, fire research, quality control, and engineering standards. Other functions would be the

provision of services such as measurement standards and services, the acquisition of precision

data, and the operation of scientific information

centers. Importantly, the new institutes would support applied research important to industrial eco- nomic growth in private institutions through

contracts or grants.

The Bureau itself would either become, or provide a nucleus for, or be merged with, a number

of new institutes: a National Materials Research

Institute, a Communications Institute based on the

Central Radio Propagation Laboratory, a National

Construction Research Institute. The computer

program would become a separate program or be

merged with an Automation and Control Institute,

and the commodity standards work could be

19
included in a Quality Control and Engineering

Standards Institute. Echoes of this organization are

clearly found in the NIST legislation.

Astin had plans for all the other agencies of the

Department, but to discuss those would take us too

far afield.

The plan was immense in its scope and grandeur,

and Astin writes the perceptive words,

To a limited extent the Department and

NBS are now attempting to perform a few

of the functions of a Department of Sci- ence and Technology. NBS has frequently

been requested to take on technical activities quite distinct from its central measurement-standards mission and certainly

not related to its name primarily because

there is no other suitable place within the

government for the location of a particular program.

Toward the end of his proposal, Astin shows his

personal feelings. He writes,

[This] proposal ... is made with mixed

feelings on my part since it involves, if ac- cepted, a loss of most of the present programs of the National Bureau of

Standards and at least a major part of its present identity.

Alas, Astin need not have feared. His proposal

would result in something quite different from

what he had in mind.

In 1958, doubtless happy with the Kelly Committee report on the functions and operations of the

Bureau, Secretary Weeks asked the National

Academy to form another committee to evaluate

the functions and operations of the Department of

Commerce to ensure that it was fulfilling its responsibilities in the interest of science and technological progress. A committee was formed, again

under the chairmanship of Dr. Kelly. On March 1, 1960, the committee submitted its report —

a

second Kelly report. This 103-page document contained detailed recommendations for all the scientific agencies of the Department, but only a single

recommendation that pertained to the whole department. The recommendation was that a position

of Assistant Secretary for Science and Technology

be formed. This was done, and as we all know, the

first occupant of that position was the forceful and

dynamic J. Herbert Hollomon of the General Electric Research Laboratory. Now, Karma and I have

not yet studied in detail the interaction between

Hollomon and Astin, so we cannot trace through

its full course. What we do know is that Astin detailed Irl Schoonover to work with Hollomon.

What eventually happened was that Astin's proposal for a National Institutes for Physical Science

became something quite different. In 1964, the Bureau itself was reorganized into three institutes and

one laboratory: the Institute for Basic Standards,

the Institute for Materials Research, the Institute

for Applied Technology, and the Central Radio

Propagation Laboratory. It was the first major re- organization of the Bureau in its history, and made

a profound change in its management operations.

Rather than having roughly one and a half dozen

divisions reporting to him, the Director of the Bureau now had only four Institute Directors, and, of

course, a Director for Administration and a Deputy Director. But to show that some of his proposal had inspired the new organization, Astin re- ported to his division chiefs that while the Bureau

would continue to be called the National Bureau of

Standards, it would be subtitled the Institutes for

Science and Technology, or 1ST. This was not to be

the case. The Bureau would remain NBS until

1988, when NIST was formed.

At various times in this talk I have made refer- ence to the nature and character of the Bureau.

What do we mean by this? Let's look at some characteristics of the Bureau. The Bureau has always

prided itself on the soundness of its technical work,

but this is hardly a unique distinction; all great laboratories do the same. More distinguishing is the

fact that in its unique measurement-standards

function, after a short start-up transient, it become

one of the premier standards laboratories in the

world. I believe that can be traced to the freedom

the permissive Organic Act gave it, and, of course,

wise management leadership at all levels. But perhaps most instructive is to look at how the Bureau

describes itself. When doing so it uses adjectives

like "objective," "unbiased," "impartial," "neutral," which are adjectives normally used for judges

rather than laboratories. This usage can be traced

directly to the Bureau's lack of regulatory function.

Since the custody of the national standards places

it in the position of arbiter in questions of measurement, the court of scientific inquiry forces it to search for scientific truth as its only recourse in

rendering judgments, hence these adjectives. And

the Bureau has been adaptable. Either because of

direct assignment or because of assistance to an- other government agency, the Bureau has always

been ready to undertake work on a national problem, real or perceived.

Perhaps the best way to think of the Bureau is by

a corporate analogy, with the Nation it serves as the corporation. That Nation has many laboratories, and many agencies with well-defined missions,

corresponding to the corporate divisions. These

20
laboratories cannot be concerned with national

problems outside their mission. The Bureau is quite different. While it had a very specific mission,

the rest of its legislation was so broad that it could

work in almost any area it could justify, and it was

called on to work on national problems as they

arose. It was allowed to carry out work under contract for other agencies of the government. In the

corporate analogy, the other laboratories are divisional laboratories, carrying out work that fosters

their agency, while the Bureau is the central, or

corporate, laboratory, concerned with all the problems of the corporation and in the process carrying

out contract research for the divisions.

Let me close with a comment on the metamorphosis of NBS into NIST. From an admittedly cur- sory and superficial reading of the NIST

legislation, I find that it embodies and formalizes

characteristics the Bureau had, and activities it car- ried out at one time or another. In my view, it represents a confluence, if you will, of trends that were

always there. Considering the Bureau's performance throughout its history, this bodes well for

the future.

21

23
Lewis M. Branscomb

Introduction by Emanuel Horowitz

For our next presentation we have a videotape of

Dr. Lewis Branscomb. He has asked me to express

his regret in not being here, but at this moment

Lew is on an exciting expedition stomping through

the jungles of Costa Rica with an expedition from

the National Geographic. We hope to see him

when he comes out, of course, but you'll be seeing

him on tape today.

Dr. Lewis Branscomb came to the National Bureau of Standards in 1951. He later founded the

Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at Boulder, Colorado. He was appointed by President

Nixon as the Director of NBS in 1969. He left NBS

in May 1972, to become Vice President and Chief

Scientist of the IBM Corporation. He is now a professor and Director of the Science and Technology

Public Policy Program at The John F. Kennedy

School of Government at Harvard University.

Now, I will take just a moment since we are let- ting some skeletons out of the closet here, to recall an incident with Dr. Branscomb. I was at a meeting

with Jack Hoffman, who was then the Director of

the Institute for Materials Research. We were talking about, as John Lyons was this morning, funds

and programs, and things of that sort. There arose, of course, a difference of opinion. Jack turned to Lew Branscomb and said, "Well, you tell me what

the definition of a standard reference material is." Lew looked him in the eye and he said, "A stan- dard reference material is a material that is a stan- dard when I say it is." At that moment, I grabbed

Jack's leg to keep him in the chair. We'll now hear

from Dr. Lewis Branscomb.

24
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: 1969-1973

Lewis M. Branscomb

Thank you, Manny, for that great introduction,

and "Happy Birthday" to all my friends at "the

Bureau." I'm sorry I can't be with you. I am, at this

moment, somewhere in the jungles of Costa Rica

or Honduras with the National Geographic Society,

making it look like work. I wish very much I could

be with you on this ninetieth birthday of the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

As a name, the "Bureau" sounds strangely ar- chaic, like a piece of furniture. For years, we tried to find a better name, and yet we realized that the

Bureau of Standards had earned a level of respect

that very few government agencies ever achieved.

Now a new world has come to the laboratory with

new challenges and new opportunities. The most

important goal everyone at NIST should have is to ensure that in time the name NIST also conjures

up an image of a scientific and technical institution

of the highest competence and of incorruptible

values.

It was just 20 years ago, in September 1971, that

I asked our legislative committee in the House of

Representatives, then called the Science and

Astronautics Committee, to recognize the Bureau's

seventieth anniversary by undertaking an in-depth

review of the Bureau of Standards — the goals,

structure, operations, strengths, problems, and opportunities. In a few minutes, I want to recall some

of the testimony that I gave at the time. My testimony and that of our Institute Directors is contained in a public report, the 1971 Annual Report. 1

But first, a little stage setting.

When I was Director, John Rooney of Brooklyn,

chaired — maybe I should say owned — the Subcommittee on Appropriations for Commerce, State,

and Justice. Preparing for testimony before John

Rooney was an agonizing affair, though not quite so agonizing as the experience of testimony itself. He ate government officials for lunch. I remember

that with the extraordinary help of our budgeting

and planning offices, we went to those hearings

with two notebooks of about 500 pages each, containing materials which I had, in effect, memorized.

In addition, the staff had a lot more back-up material. My theory was that the right way to win over John Rooney was to play an anti-political game. I meant to convince him that, with me as the example, the Bureau of Standards consisted of a group

of very serious, very high-minded, very dedicated

1 National Bureau of Standards Annual Report 1971.

professionals, who knew what they were doing,

knew why they were doing it, and who did it better

than anybody else could do.

One piece of preparation for that testimony was

particularly essential. I knew that he had harassed

Allen Astin, my predecessor, unmercifully ever

since the Gaithersburg facilities were built. His

leading question usually was an effort to trip up

Allen with some piece of knowledge that he should

have known but didn't: "How much was spent for

the flagpole in front of the main building in

Gaithersburg?" I knew the answer. It was $44,000

and some odd dollars. I had it down to the cents. Rooney always took great delight in accusing the

Bureau of Standards of profligacy because of that

stainless steel flagpole. I suspect that flagpole was

a bargain. In any case, it served a useful test of our

ability to meet John Rooney on his own terms.

And, to anticipate just a bit, in that 1972 appropriation year (the budget prepared in 1971), we got

through President Nixon and John Rooney a 36

percent increase in the research funds for the Bureau of Standards. When I finally left NBS in May

1972 to go to IBM with a good conscience, little did

I realize that Nixon would be re-elected and would

impound every nickel of the increase that we had

worked so hard to win. But it was a satisfactory

demonstration of what one had to do in order to win the support of a Congress composed of people

who had very little understanding of what we were

about.

While it was indeed clear that Congress knew

little about the agency, the public knew less. NASA

had just spent $20 billion going to the moon. The

Atomic Energy Commission had spent at least as much learning everything about nuclear science

and engineering. Well, almost everything. We knew

that we did more for America per dollar spent than

either of them, but our problem was how to break

out of the constraints of seeming to be an old line

agency in a department everyone loved to hate.

Larry Kushner was my Deputy. He was an important part of our success. One day when I was in

despair about our relationship with the Department of Commerce, Larry Kushner explained to me why we had so much aggravation in our relations with the Department. "The Department of

Commerce," he explained, "is the only department

of government with a hostile constituency." The

business community had not yet learned how

severely it was being challenged by foreign competitors in technology who were themselves being

25
helped materially by their own governments. Our

business community was still fighting its government.

The Associate Directors and I changed the program structure of the Bureau so that the Congress,

the press, and the public could understand, perhaps, the purpose and value of what we did. All of our program elements were re-defined in terms of

the benefits that they would produce. When I was

all done, Churchill Eisenhart came to me and

showed me the Bureau's Annual Report of 1918. It turned out that I had re-invented the Bureau's program structure from fifty-four years earlier.

In those days, we also established a more collegial system for managing the Bureau of Standards.

In addition to Larry and me, our three Institute

Directors were Ernie Ambler, Jack Hoffman, and

Karl Willenbrock. We had three special program

areas. Ruth Davis managed the Computer Center,

Ed Brady the Office of Information Services, and

Dan De Simone the National Metric Study. Our

planning and administration were run by Howard

Sorrows and Bob Walleigh. It was a terrific team.

I discovered that, as Director of the Bureau of

Standards, I had more clout in Washington than I had realized, primarily because of the agency's ex- traordinary reputation for integrity. NBS enjoyed a

particularly good reputation with foreign embassies. Ministers of Technology and Industry in

other countries looked at the Bureau of Standards

and identified it as the U.S. agency most adept at providing the underpinning of the technological success of American industry. Perhaps they gave us more credit than we were due. But it gave us a lot of self-confidence that we were on the right track, even if the rest of government didn't fully recognize the power and importance of what we were

doing.

I decided it was time to go public with the NBS

story. Our team pulled the cloak of obscurity off of

the Bureau's vital contributions to the nation. And,

by the way, I believe it is time to do that again. In a lecture I gave at a review of the Bureau's history in

1987, I made the following comments:

The Bureau learned to keep its head

down over many years of serving as the

arbiter of technical disputes in and out of

government. This is a necessary form of

behavior for an organization that is asked

to make value-free determinations of

technical facts, and it's appropriate behavior for an organization that values its integrity above other qualities. But there are other reasons NBS does not follow traditional paths to the development of political constituencies, through which it can

increase its budget in pursuit of its goals.

First, the Commerce Department has

been an uneasy foster parent in most Administrations. [Here again, I quoted Larry

Kushner.]

Let me say we had another thing going for us — a record of distinguished leadership unmatched in

government, and I'm not talking about me, but

about Samuel Stratton, Edward U. Condon, and

Allen Astin. Also, the Bureau of Standards had

never seen its directorship used for political purposes. I think that's a strong statement, but I challenge you to find another agency to match it. Remember that after the election of 1972, when

Richard Nixon had his staff demand the undated

resignations of all 3,000 presidential appointees,

Robert Marston, then Director of NIH, was asked

to resign. He refused and he was fired for refusing.

No NBS Director has ever been replaced routinely

after an election to make room for a political appointee. Now, I'll admit we finessed that possibility a few times. I left in May of 1972, so that the

search for my successor was already underway before the election, and therefore was not a political

choice.

One word about Ed Condon, who would have

wanted to be here in this room today. Ed is famous

for many things, but I think his most important

contributions to the Bureau of Standards lay in two

areas. One was his enormous personal courage. He

lived his values and he expressed them openly and

clearly to the Congress and the public. But sec- ondly, I think it was he, more than anyone else,

who put the Bureau of Standards on an irreversible

commitment to absolutely first-rate basic science,

competitive in quality with the best universities.

Look back to the 1930s and think about the NBS

alumni of those days. Many subsequent Nobel Laureates and very famous scientists called the Bureau

of Standards home.

Ed Condon recreated that capability after the

War, and we are still the beneficiaries of it. One of

the best examples is the experiment proving the

non-conservation of parity in weak interactions

performed by the team of Ambler, Hayward,

Hoppes, and Hudson. Let me quote just a moment

from the testimony that Ernie Ambler gave in

those hearings in 1971. After describing the number of projects at the Bureau of Standards that were recognized in Nobel Laureate acceptance

speeches as critical to the success of Nobel Prize

work, he said,

We are proud of our participation in

these distinguished efforts, and we re- member that we were able to contribute

26
because good science and good measure- ments go hand in hand. Once we lose this

connection, we regress intellectually and

our technical work gradually degenerates.

If this should happen, our efforts would

be of no use to anyone. I am pledged to assure that this never happens.

Ernie was as good as his pledge.

Allen Astin should be here, too. Indeed, I'd like to propose that an effort be undertaken by John

and his staff to persuade the Commerce Department to ask Congress to rename the Gaithersburg

laboratory after Allen Astin, or at least to name

the Central Administration Building after him. It was he who almost built this with his own two

hands.

Secondly, I'd like to suggest that everyone on the

staff of the Bureau of Standards who is under 57

years of age, and everyone who has been hired

since 1956, should be required to go to a special

lecture on the history of the battery additive ADX2 issue. If there's anyone in this room who

doesn't know that story, then "for shame." That

was the time Allen Astin maintained the integrity

of the laboratory against extraordinary odds. He

had been removed from his job by the Secretary of

Commerce during the early days of the Eisenhower

Administration as a result of a serious political

challenge to the technical objectivity of the Bureau

of Standards. I'm not going to go back through that

story now. All the old-timers here lived through it and remember it well. The Bureau stuck to its guns

when it was under heavy fire, when distinguished

organizations like MIT did very little to help (that's an understatement). Finally the scientific community and the industrial community rallied to the Bureau's side. The National Academy of Sciences

wrote a thousand-page report on the Bureau's

technical work, which began with a conclusion that

the work the Bureau of Standards had done to prove the correctness of its work in this case has

advanced the science of electrochemistry by at least a decade. The report completely exonerated the

Bureau of Standards. Mervin Kelly, then president

of Bell Laboratories and head of the Statutory Visiting Committee, not only exonerated Allen Astin's

management, but helped set the Bureau of Standards on its postwar course, back to good science

and to service to American technology.

In view of the fact that NIST (I still have trouble

calling the Bureau that) now stands on the

threshold of a new era in government technology

policy, where NIST will— or should — play a very

central role, I want to hark back to what I told the

Congress in 1971 about the Bureau of Standard's

purpose in society.

If a free enterprise economic system is to thrive in a modern industrial society,

indeed, if it is to survive, buyers and sell- ers in the market place need to have as much confidence in the quantity, performance, and quality of goods exchanged as they do in the amount of money that's

paid. A substantial part of the Bureau's

measurement research is devoted to the

validation of fair, objective, and useful

measurement methods for application to both durable and non-durable goods in

trade. A laboratory of this type, with a 70-

year tradition of scientific excellence and

integrity, finds itself not only in great demand, but acquiring additional major re- sponsibilities that go far beyond the

specific research requirements for the national system of measurement.

We were established by the Congress to be helpful, and we find ourselves a critical

link between the basic research community and those who have put science to work for the benefit of man. [I should

have said "of mankind."] As the decades

have passed, the Bureau has responded to the country's problems as they arose, in

war and in peace, in times of rapid

scientific growth, in times of scientific

retrenchment and serious domestic problems. Throughout the thousands of useful

projects at NBS runs a common thread.

The Bureau helps others with applied re- search services to produce, diffuse, and

enhance the value of practical knowledge.

Our goal is to strengthen and advance the

nation's science and technology, and to

facilitate their effective application for

public benefit. In short, to make science

useful and technology the servant and not

the master of people.

That, to me, is still a wonderful statement of

what the Bureau of Standards is all about. I closed

with these words to the Congress:

I believe the National Bureau of

Standards faces the most challenging

opportunity of any large research laboratory in this nation. We have the right

competence in the right organization at the right time. We are effectively engaged

in a way that I think is unique in bringing

science and technology to bear on national social and economic problems, as well as on our scientific achievements.

Our scientists understand the complexity

27
of the social context within which their re- search must find application. We enjoy a generally excellent reputation among

those who know our work, even though

we have not been very active in making

ourselves known to the general public. I am deeply concerned that disillusionment

may follow if government fails to promote

innovation in the productivity of our technology, and fails to guide the regulation

of technology on the basis of objective evidence in fair and accurate measurement.

We see the national measurement system

and a system of industrial and engineering standards as dynamic systems, calling

not for more stewardship, but for more

leadership.

I believe that the disillusionment I forecast

twenty years ago has indeed affected the American

spirit, the American attitude about our national

competitiveness. But, on the other side, after many

years of delay, Americans are now beginning to recognize the changed nature of science and engineering, the changed status of the American econ- omy, and the need for a more supportive role by

government for industrial competitiveness. The

starting point for that recognition is awareness that

the spinoff model for commercial benefit from mission-driven Federal technology is not a sufficient

view of how the government should help. That is, the AEC/NASA model is not enough. Neither is the DARPA model. In the future the Defense

Department will not be in a position to use its budget to support the industrial base, but indeed, will

have to work hard to draw upon the industrial base

which others will have to support. By the same to- ken, the heroic big science model is also shown to be the wrong approach, for precisely the reason

that its benefits, if any, largely must flow through

that indirect spinoff.

Back in 1971 and 1972, when I was NBS Director, Bill Magruder, who had headed the SST Project in Transportation, moved over to the White

House to work for John Ehrlichman. They made a big effort to establish in the budget a program

called the New Technology Opportunities. This was to be a set of multi-million-dollar big engineering developments of heroic technologies. I remember one of the projects was a one-megawatt

superconducting motor generator set. I represented the Commerce Department on the White

House Committee that studied the NTO. The idea was finally scrubbed, and instead, with virtually no

notice, the Bureau of Standards was asked to put

into the budget justification for a $44-million

program called ETIP (Experimental Technology

Incentives Program). With the launch of ETIP, the

Bureau of Standards was set on a new path towards

the correct government relationship with the private sector. Last September 26, there was an extraordinarily

important event that has almost completely es- caped notice in the evolution of the debate about

industrial policy and science policy. As you know,

the nation is very comfortable with its science policy. The nation is, however, quite uncomfortable

with the idea of industrial policy. Now attention is shifting to focus on an intermediate notion: a national technology policy. Last September, the President's science advisor Allan Bromley sent to the

chairmen of the two Appropriations Committees in

the Congress an extraordinary document. It is entitled, "The U.S. Technology Policy." Some of my

friends at Harvard tell me that the most important

part of this document is the title page. The mere

fact that John Sununu, Richard Darman, Michael

Boskin, and the President have signed off on a U.S.

technology policy, with an explicit Federal role, is news in itself. But to me, the really interesting

thing about this document is the first one and a

half pages. This statement of U.S. goals for its technical enterprise is almost entirely devoted to the concept of diffusion of technology, its beneficial use, and the environment within which innovation is to take place. I believe that this emphasis is much overdue.2 NIST is very well positioned to carry out such a diffusion-oriented technology policy.

This document also contains an explicit endorsement of the Advanced Technology Program, which was put in place by Congress in the Omnibus Trade

Bill of 1988. In a very carefully hedged paragraph,

Bromley endorses the precompetitive, generic enabling technology activity to be carried out in cooperation with private industry. If you were the

President, how would you go about assessing the

value of the nation's $73 billion worth of Federal

R&D to the private sector? Once you had considered all of the indirect benefits, which are not insignificant, from the mission-oriented agencies'

work, you would have a residue of issues which are not sufficiently well served by spinoff, and that

needs to be addressed by some agency.

Most obvious in that list would be areas of technological knowledge of importance to industrial

performance but little seen in Federal missionoriented research. Take, for example, the whole

issue of process technology, the characterization of

processes so they can be automated, and the

2 L. M. Branscomb, "The Emerging U.S. Technology Policy,"

Issues in Science and Technology Vol. VII, No. 4, pp. 50-55,

1991.

28
characterization of materials and determination of

their properties, so that both design and production technology can be codified, simulated in computers, and used in automated manufacturing. This

is not the world of the future, but of the present for

those high-tech industries that are highly competitive. This is an area of strength at NIST.

The NIST is the only government research organization whose technical capability is not constrained by an operational Federal mission. NIST

is not defined by responsibility for a particular

technology. It is defined instead by the functional

requirements of its mission to help the scientific

and industrial base as a whole progress technically.

There are three major areas in which the Federal government should move ahead in the direct

funding of technical activities meant to be important to commercial industry. My co-authors and I

call them "strategic," "pathbreaking," and "infrastructural" technology investments.3

In a very limited number of cases there is an

industry needing specific help, and where a shortterm, relatively low-risk, but probably expensive

technology program should be put in place to produce a specific economic result. SEMATECH is an

example. This comes as close to industrial policy as anything that the government can or should do.

Such strategic technology interventions should be

done very selectively. There are times when it's appropriate. That kind of activity may be carried out

by any number of agencies, including the Department of Commerce.

Secondly, the government must continue, as it did so importantly right after World War II, to identify the truly pathbreaking, technical opportunities in which the risk and the time required to find out whether or not science will allow the vision

to be realized is too great for intensive private investment. Such opportunities may have the potential to create whole new industries. DARPA has

been particularly effective at identifying such pathbreaking technologies and probably should continue.

The third type of technology investment is in

infrastructural technology, or, if you like, in the diffusion of generic technology. The diffusion process

has two major parts: industrial extension, with

which NIST is experimenting, and science and

technology information policy and services, where

the Bureau of Standards has always had an important role. The importance of these activities has

3 J. Alic, L. M. Branscomb, H. Brooks, A. Carter, and G.

Epstein, Beyond Spinoff: Military and Commercial Technologies in a Changing World, Boston, Harvard Business School Press (to appear 1992).

been seriously underestimated by those who make

national policy.

NIST's research and diffusion services and those

of the Bureau of Standards before it, have been of

great value to the competitiveness of American industry. I also believe that this value has beenseverely constrained by the historic restriction of

all this work to internal research within a single

national laboratory. If we all believe that what the

NIST does is the right recipe for an ailing econ- omy, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that

similar work should be supported in industry, universities, and other national laboratories, pursued

with the same levels of quality and the same careful

relationship with the end user that has characterized NBS and NIST work. I know that if the budgets for those grant and contract programs have to

flow through the Commerce Department, there's

clearly an opportunity cost for the growth of NIST,

but I see no way to avoid it. My concluding remark is that as we think about

what the NIST Advanced Technology Program

should be, we have a model that has been successful for 90 years in NBS. The infrastructural

investments that NBS has made can, if multiplied

in scale by a factor of ten, truly improve the competitiveness of American industry without interfer- ence with markets or private business judgements.

There is a larger range of technological activity that

should be viewed as "public goods" than there

used to be. The ATP is in its early stages, feeling its way. The initial grants seem to me to look more

like DARPA programs than NIST's traditional

work in infrastructural technology. I hope that as the program evolves, the synergy with NIST traditional work will grow stronger.

Finally, let me just say that after 21 years in government, of which I was proud to be a civil service

scientist, and after 14 years in industry, in which I learned a great deal that's useful to me, I've been

back in the university world for five years at the

Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Ours

is a professional school for public service. We hold

high in our regard the meaning and importance of

public service, especially in science and technology.

My experience in these three sectors of our nation's technological life convinces me that each sector's ability to contribute is greatly enhanced by the

contribution of the other two. For NBS and NIST

this is not a new discovery, as it may be elsewhere

in government. In the next 90 years NIST's role in

helping all American institutions contribute to a stronger national capability will be more urgently

needed than in the past. I am sure NIST will rise to the challenge.

29
Ernest Ambler

Introduction by Emanuel Horowitz

Our next speaker, Dr. Ernest Ambler, of course needs no introduction to this audience. Ernie first came to the National Bureau of Standards in 1953

as a Special Research Fellow and, as Lew

Branscomb reminded us, was a member of the famous team that conducted the world-renowned

parity experiment. Ernie served as the Director of

the Institute for Basic Standards from 1968 until

1973. In 1978, he was appointed by President

Carter as Director of NBS and retired as the

Director in April 1989. But he mentioned that he

also served as the Acting Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology, a very important post. He's

now the Director Emeritus of this laboratory. It is a

privilege to introduce Dr. Ambler.

30
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: 1973-1989

Ernest Ambler

Dick Roberts was sworn in as seventh Director

of NBS on February 5, 1973. He remained Director

for two-and-a-half years and I was his deputy for

two of those years. After he left NBS on June 28,

1975, I became Acting Director. I was sworn in as Director on February 3, 1978, and retired from that

position on March 31, 1989, although for the last few months I was acting in the newly created position of Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology with my office in the Commerce Department.

Ray Kammer, my deputy, was acting in my place at NBS. I have been asked to cover, therefore, a period of some sixteen years spent in the Director's

Office in one capacity or another. These years

started in Nixon's second term and ran through the

Ford, Carter, and Reagan terms and into the Bush

Administration.

In the forty minutes I have available I cannot

pretend to do justice to everything that happened,

nor can I claim to be as objective as I expect Elio

Passaglia will be in his history. I am going to talk

about those events that have left an impression on

me.Dick Roberts came to NBS because of Art

Beuche. Beuche was head of the General Electric

Company's Central Research Laboratory in

Schenectady, and Roberts was one of his senior

people. Beuche was also a member and ultimately

Chairman of the NBS Statutory Visiting Committee. Beuche prided himself on his ability to communicate to top management the nature of the

work of his laboratory and its importance and ulti- mate utility to the company. Roberts was a "whiz"

at the kind of "show and tell" that Beuche's

method demanded. By comparison Beuche thought

we at NBS did an absolutely lousy job in marketing

our wares to our bosses in the Government and

thought Roberts was just the man to come down

and show us how to fix this deficiency. This attitude was held in spite of the fact that government laboratories and corporate laboratories do not operate

under the same set of constraints. If anyone had

wanted proof of this they needed only look at the

FY 1973 budget. Lew Branscomb had obtained a very big increase for NBS; I think it was $22 million

although about half of that was for that OMB

brainchild, ETIP. Unfortunately that was the year

of Nixon's "impoundment," and much of the in- crease was rescinded or deferred to future years.

So the connection between "show and tell" and

budgets was hard for most NBS old-timers to swallow.

Nevertheless Roberts came to NBS with this

background and with great energy and drive. Dick

had an almost insatiable need for personal support,

and he knew how to beat it out of the system, and

what is more important, he knew good work when

he saw it. Looking back, three things that Roberts insisted

on developing stand out in my mind as having been

internalized by NBS and serving the institution well

in the nearly two decades that followed.

First, the ability to do "show and tell," albeit

toned down in "glitz" from the way Dick liked it, beefed up a bit in technical content and executed

by a wide range of NBS staff members. Most effective were presentations that many NBS scientists

and engineers learned to give in their laboratories

to DOC, OMB, and Congressional staff members

who seemed to grow yearly in numbers.

Second, the final welding together of the Program Office, the Budget Office and the Accounting

Division into one single effective unit called the

Office of Programs, Budget and Finance. A great

deal of good work led by Howard Sorrows had al- ready been done in this direction, but Roberts

wanted more and he entrusted that job to me. In

the crucial support, single-mindedness, and perhaps at times ruthlessness I needed, I was helped

by Tom Dillon, whom Roberts had handpicked to come to Gaithersburg from the Boulder Laboratories, and Ray Kammer, whom I stole back from the

Department of Commerce.

Third, the greater importance attached to the

Office of Congressional Affairs to which Roberts

had recruited the ever-conscientious Esther Cassidy. The increased activity and emphasis on information exchange with Congressional members and

their staff turned out be important in many ways.

To give you an idea of the level of activity in the

one year 1984 alone, 120 Congressional staff members came to NBS laboratories for briefings.

This last activity contributed greatly to Congress

holding 1977 Authorization Hearings, the first held

since 1971. This ended their reliance on a "continuing authorization" and began regular annual authorization hearings starting in 1979 with a

so-called "field hearing" in the Red Auditorium at NBS with George Brown and Don Fuqua attending.

The holding of annual authorization hearings

was, in my opinion, absolutely key later on to sav- ing such NBS programs as Fire, Building, and

Computer Sciences, cut by the Administration in

31
each of the fiscal years 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, and

1988. Congress was also key in giving us a Personnel Management Demonstration Project, an ex- panded program authority and name change, and

helping in many other ways.

During practically all the sixteen years I spent on

the 11th floor of the Administration Building, a

large fraction, I'd say about a third, of my time was

devoted to the budget in one way or another. Most

of that effort, until about 1987 at least, was defensive in nature, in the sense that we were constantly

under attack, always determined and sometimes vi- cious. To give you an idea of the level of "jerkaround" we endured, during FY 1982 we were

required to do 18 budgets, each with different line

items, totals and justifications and many of them

with turnaround times of a day or two. In FY 1980-

82 we took a personnel reduction of over 400 and

had to separate about 150 staff members. Yet during that period NBS continued to do world-class

research, to start new programs, to build new facilities and to develop and start implementing a whole

new strategy for carrying out our mission. Whether

those who judge more objectively than I will agree

remains to be seen, but this is the thread that runs through my story of the decades of the seventies

and eighties and one I believe worth telling.

Before I get into the story, let me go back a bit

and cover a memorable meeting in the Director's

Office on March 1, 1976. At that meeting, Elliot

Richardson asked me to become Director of NBS

and I agreed. I mention this because prior to that

time I had made it clear that I really did not want

to be the next Director. In fact, I had been formally

asked to be Director and had declined. Why did I say "no" then and change my mind later? Dick

Roberts had come to NBS as a young, up-andcoming champion from the industrial sector; he

stayed only two and a half years. Lew Branscomb,

was admired by all of us at NBS for his accomplishments as a scientist and for his part in the establishment of JILA. He was well-known in national

science policy circles and clearly Allen Astin's

choice to follow him, a choice that met with fairly

universal acclaim. He quickly made his mark as Director by getting an appreciable increase in NBS's

appropriations but did not stay to see the impoundment. Whatever the reasons for their short tenures,

the prospects facing any new Director were not

very attractive, especially with the justification of

federal budgets getting ever more difficult. Besides, one had the feeling that the scientific and

technical community thought that if a real "mover

and shaker" were appointed, the forces arrayed

against agencies like the Bureau could be over- come. Well, I was not convinced that the "great

man" theory was correct, and in any case I knew I

was not such a person. I was prepared to hold the

fort in an Acting capacity, and indeed I did for over two and a half years with the able and trustworthy

Bob Walleigh as my Deputy.

Elliot Richardson convinced me that this was not

the way to look at the situation and that, indeed, I was the right person for the job. He viewed government service as honorable. He felt government

agencies such as NBS, whose mission he understood quite well, should be led and staffed by people who could bring a high level of professionalism

and objectivity to the job. Reliable facts, integrity

and character is what he looked for— traits that he,

himself, had so clearly and recently displayed. He

convinced me to give it a try. I did know what the

institution stood for, I believed in it fervently, and I enjoyed working with its staff— they were my

friends and my colleagues. I did not relish the

thought of working with the government machinery

outside NBS, but I was prepared to be patient and

take it on, expecting a long struggle and gaining a

little at a time rather than a lot of moving and

shaking. I guess the highest level of confidence I could muster was that, given the outside circumstances, I could probably do the job as well as anybody else, certainly over the long run, and I felt the

long run was what you had to play for. In having occupied every technical level in the

line organization from laboratory researcher to Director, I had learned a lot. I knew that as a practical matter at NBS it took at least five years to get a worthwhile program established. You generally

had to start small with what you had. You had to have the right champion. You gradually accumulated bits and pieces from other programs, you

worked hard and tenaciously for other agency

money and tried to hire some new people, and you

pursued any outside cooperation or cost sharing

you could get. Above all, in the STRS budget process, you kept coming back and improving your

presentation and your own sense of conviction and

commitment. "Keep on leaning" became my

motto — a far cry from "moving and shaking."

What I have just said is more by way of tactics.

As far as strategy is concerned I knew of no approach that convinced me other than that of going

to our roots and examining our mission for its uniqueness. The Bureau had done outstanding

work and championed causes such as energy

conservation, consumer product technology,

automotive safety, and environmental protection,

only to find the primary mission given to other

agencies and to find OMB promulgating the "lead

agency" policy, i.e., don't ask us for the money, get

it from the lead agency— the one with the primary

mission. In addition, Congress, wanting to get us

involved in many areas where our expertise would

32
be beneficial, wrote us into fourteen new pieces of

legislation over about a ten-year time frame start- ing in the mid-sixties. Many of these assignments

we welcomed, such as those contained in the Fire

Safety and Control Act which authorized the right

program at the right time to the right agency. But

this assignment and many others were never properly funded. Indeed, later on the Administration

tried to wipe out the Fire Program as being work

inappropriate for the federal government and more

appropriate for private industry. In contrast $10

million was put into our budget to fund ETIP, the

brain child of OMB. This was to be a program to find ways to stimulate the entrepreneur by removing barriers to innovation. Perhaps it is somewhat

uncharitable of me, but I cannot help recalling that

the high point of the program was a government

procurement standard for safe lawnmowers. The

achievement was reported in Dan Greenberg's

Washington S&T Newsletter under the heading,

"ETIP Cuts a Small Swath." ETIP limped along

only for a few years after that and then disappeared, I think to everyone's relief. Certainly mine.

But criticism is easy, and finding successful alternatives was not so easy. I wanted to focus direction

on the very reasons that NBS was established in

the first place. Measurements, standards, and data

of technical excellence and usefulness is where I

felt compelled to start. Such work served many

groups in our society, and I often used the theme,

"Everybody uses standards whether they know it or

not," as a starting point for talks. I would give ex- amples of such utility to individual citizens, state and local governments, institutions of many kinds,

and always very impressive to me, to U.S. industry.

But with the prevailing administration philosophy

of getting the government out of industry's business, pushing our industrial connection too hard

was dangerous. Under those circumstances it was

difficult to get really hard-charging — an overall

that making presentations on measurements, standards, and data tends to put people to sleep. Our

first opportunity came with the publication in May

1983, of the Packard Report on Federal Laboratories.The findings and recommendations of the Packard Report gave a great boost to my confidence in

my own instincts. These instincts stemmed from

the Organic Act and the Committee Report establishing the Bureau. Allen Astin had spotted the

crucial paragraph in the Committee Report and

had it chiseled in marble in the lobby of the Administration Building for all to see. Just to be certain I understood clearly the five recommendations

of the report, I made an appointment to see David

Packard and spent about an hour talking to him in

his office in Palo Alto.

The first of the recommendations on "Missions"

and the fifth on "Interactions with Universities, In- dustry, and Users of Research Results" were particularly confidence-inspiring. Let me quote from

the first.Of the laboratories visited, those with

well-defined missions clearly were better

performers than those with poorly defined missions. These laboratories with

both well-defined missions and close interaction with the users of their research

appeared to be the most effective of all.

Let me also quote from the fifth recommendation.

The Panel feels that the degree of interactions of Federal laboratories with

university and industry varies among laboratories, but has not been strong traditionally. The national interest demands

that the collaboration be stronger to ensure continued advances in scientific

knowledge and its translation into useful

technology.

These two recommendations provided the necessary boost for us to go all-out in assisting economic

growth through providing support for U.S. industry

and of using cooperation between government, industry, and universities as a major tactic. We began

to measure in dollars the support we got through

assistance in kind and as a matter of policy to in- crease it as fast as possible. By 1986 we had 255

Industrial Research Associates at NBS, three times

as many as in 1980. In 1987 we had 244 cost- sharing interactions with 174 separate U.S. companies. The loans and gifts of equipment, particularly

computers and materials, increased rapidly.

In the decade of the eighties while our STRS

budget remained flat, our funding from other government agencies and our earned income through

fees roughly doubled, all in terms of constant dollars. Thus the total resources available to NBS during the eighties increased about 30 percent in

constant dollars, and that gave us the flexibility to

start new programs and get things done. For comparison during this same period the NSF budget

increased 38.5 percent and total Federal R&D

spending increased by 40.8 percent, all in constant

dollars.

I should point out that this kind of strategic emphasis at NBS was already being given in a lower

key way following my trip with Ed Brady to Japan

in April 1980. The relative loss of our industrial

efficiency and premium quality of our products was

becoming evident in consumer electronics and au- tomobiles as it had been in shoes, textiles, and steel

33
in Hollomon's day. After all, the first U.S. trade

deficit occurred in the 1963-64 period. Hollomon's

strategy of direct government intervention through

such efforts as the State Technical Services Act

brought him down in the end. Later on Jordan

Baruch's cooperative technology had just gotten

started when it was wiped out by the next administration. With the ideology prevailing in the Reagan

Administration we had to be careful, and even then

we nearly fell flat on our face. Our automation program, which we had been carefully building following the strategy I have described, was visited by

Doug Pruitt, Deputy to the President's Science

Advisor. He felt this was private-sector work and

told OMB to cut it out. Fortunately, by this time

Secretary Baldrige had learned to really approve of our programs, especially the one on automation,

and he intervened personally with Stockman to not

cut the program. The program was saved and continued to grow rapidly, mainly with Navy money.

Before leaving the Packard Report I have to

mention two of its other recommendations. The

second recommendation on Personnel led directly to our being given the "Personnel Management

and Demonstration Project" which was implemented on January 1, 1988, as a five-year experiment. This came about because the report praised

the China Lake experiment and recommended

more institutions be given similar authority. But it was Congress who thought it would be a good idea

to give us such authority, and did so over the objections of the Administration.

The fourth recommendation related to management and said that laboratories should rely more

on peer review and less on internal government

layering and micromanagement. This gave a big

boost to the importance of our Statutory Visiting

Committee and the NRC Boards of Assessment.

There is one other major event I must describe,

because it was an essential piece in the development of NBS. This was the big reorganization that

occurred in 1978 when Carter was President and

Jordan Baruch was Assistant Secretary. In my own

mind the new major feature of the reorganization

was the formation of the National Engineering

Laboratory and a deliberate change in the emphasis of much of the work that had made up the Institute for Applied Technology. IAT had never really

been an engineering organization, nor was it ever intended to be. It was a creature of Hollomon,

Schon, and Eberhard, and had a strong orientation

to socially oriented problems and solutions. There

is no doubt that extremely important problems were identified, and there was a strong emphasis

on new ways to look at problems and find solutions. Some programs such as that of the Technical

Analysis Division had been very successful and in

great demand. Unfortunately they ended up doing

a job that the "Beltway Bandits" learned to do

equally well and so OMB wiped them out— competition with the private sector again. The Fire Program had finally done a good job on flammable

fabrics but only by bringing in leadership from elsewhere in NBS, from universities, and from industry, as our new Director will recall. But most

activity in IAT was not my idea of engineering.

There were some programs that formed good bases

for future growth. Jud French's program on test methods for semiconductor devices, again largely

supported by DOD and championed by George

Heilmeier then at ARPA, was combined with parts

of IBS in both Gaithersburg and Boulder which were in need of closer coupling with users. Thus

the Center for Electronics and Electrical Engineering was formed.

A small effort in robotics started by Ruth Davis

while Roberts was Director, was combined with

work in modern dimensional metrology and a program on the automation of coordinate measuring

machines led by John Simpson, to form the Center

for Automation and Manufacturing Engineering.

The Building Technology program was focused

more sharply on the civil engineering aspects and

away from many of the architectural, aesthetic, and

social aspects that had been introduced earlier.

With these and other changes, I sensed by about

the end of Reagan's first term that NBS had

achieved a new unity on the right purpose and a

level of mutual respect among different parts of the

organization that I had not felt before. Even the

Boulder Laboratories were drawn into all aspects

of NBS programs, and managers in Boulder began

to have to manage things in Gaithersburg as well,

instead of everything being the other way around.

There did remain one exception and that was

ICST. ICST suffered because it derived its function

from the Brooks Act rather than the Organic Act.

The purpose of ICST was to write standards and

guidelines for the purchase and effective use of

computers in the federal government. Ruth Davis

had boldly construed the mission to be broader in

computer sciences, but she was alone in that. In

fact in 1983 OMB suggested that the logical thing

to do was to transfer ICST to GSA which, after all, was the appropriate lead agency for government

procurement. It was in that same year that, in my

view, the big turnaround came in ICST. The big

weakness in the implementation of the Brooks Act was that federal government purchases accounted

for only a fraction of the total computer sales in the

United States, and administrative-type computing was light years behind the private sector. It is only

34
a slight exaggeration to say that standards for computers in the private sector was basically a proprietary matter and what wasn't could be safely left to CBEMA. What chance did little ICST have?

The day of reckoning came when the big users of

computers tried to interconnect their computers

and try networking between different companies or

different divisions of the same company, all of

whom had systems bought from different vendors.

The time involved in writing and debugging cus- tomized interface software became horrendous,

and the banks, the insurance companies, General

Motors, and so on got really mad. The ICST staff

members were quick to make their acquaintance

and to show them how the U.S. Voluntary Standards System worked or could be made to work. At

last ICST was in on the big commercial picture and

that was a mission that could be derived from the

Organic Act as well as the Brooks Act. When ICST

began to build testbeds such as the Network Protocol Testing Facility, it began to look like a real NBS

operation. In July 1984, along with Boeing Computer Services, the General Motors Corporation,

and thirteen computer and communications companies, they organized on the exhibit floor at the

National Computer Conference in Las Vegas, a big

network demonstration project using the IEEE Local Area Network Standards and the draft ISO

Standards for Network Communication. Whether

they wanted to be or not, ICST truly qualified to be

part of NBS, and as a tangible demonstration we

gave ICST three-quarters of a million dollars in

precious competence-building funds to start boosting their basic research base in computer sciences.

At last I felt I could defend the ICST programs to people in the Department, OMB, and Congress

with understanding and conviction.

I do not need to take much more time belaboring "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,"

but I have to mention a few other things that stand

out in my mind as rather major trauma. There was

the Grace Commission, otherwise known as the

President's Private Sector Survey, whose first suggestion was to eliminate four or five of our Centers.

There was the attempt by OMB to eliminate our

Post-Doctoral Research Program rescued again by

Congress. There was a constant drive for "privatization" and "contracting out"; they even went after our library. Then there were the perennial

drives to cut travel, printing, reproduction, consulting, and the like. There was a new grand Departmental reorganization proposal called DITI, the

Department of International Trade and Industry,

in which we were to become part of NSF. There

was a move to force our NRC Boards of Assessment to come under the rules for governmental advisory committees. Budget battles went down to the

wire. I remember watching on C-Span our Authorization Committee Chairman, Mr. Walgren, debating Mr. Walker of Pennsylvania on the floor of

the House. Walker's famous statement was "If we

can't cut NBS who can we cut?" and his amendment to do just that lost only by five votes out of

the four hundred cast. Many of these battles could be confined to the

10th and 11th floors of the Administration Building

to a large extent because of the work of the Office

of Programs, Budget and Finance, and the Office

of Congressional Affairs. Vital to me was Peggy

Webb, who had taken charge of me the moment I set foot on the 11th floor and Ray Kammer, by now

my Deputy and alter ego, who took so much pres- sure and irritation off me, and whose knowledge of

the budget process had been and continued to be

indispensable.

I would not want you to think, however, that the

marvelous scientific and technical work of NBS

went unnoticed by me. Far from it, I took great

pride in it. Not the least, I was able to see our

international prestige shine in my official capacity

as U.S. Delegate to the General Conferences held

in Paris under the Meter Convention, in which I was assisted by my friend and international travelling colleague and advisor, Ed Brady. Over a period of some twenty years the meter, candela, volt,

and ohm were all redefined using the results of the

most exquisite scientific investigation. The leadership in this research and the bulk of scientific data

came from NBS. The names and detailed experiments I would love to recount. In the time available, clearly I can't. Let me say I remember the

work of Bruce Steiner, Jon Geist, and our Australian friend and Guest Worker, Bill Blevin, in

getting the candela based on the physical quantity,

energy. I remember Dick Deslattes and colleagues

in Gaithersburg; Jan Hall and Dick Barger in Boulder; and Ken Evanson, Don Jennings, and numerous collaborators also in Boulder, and their

fantastic experiments that led to the redefinition of

the meter, the fixing of the numerical value of that

fundamental constant, the speed of light, and a big

leap forward in the technology of frequency stabilized lasers. I remember the work of Barry Taylor's

Division on the Josephson Effect and the Quantum

Hall Effect and Barry's own work on the Fundamental Physical Constants. I also remember the

work of Dick Kautz and others in developing the

One Volt Josephson Junction array, praised by

none other than Barney Oliver of Hewlett Packard

as "brilliant."

I hope I never showed partiality toward certain

divisions of NBS even though I did have my

favorites. The Time and Frequency Division was

one, because I always felt that the activities encompassed the full range of projects that IBS divisions

should. In particular the work of Dave Allan on

35
UTC and time synchronization, most recently involving the Global Positioning System, stands out

in my mind.

Another of my favorite divisions was the Analytical Chemistry Division for similar reasons. Their

series of clinical Standard Reference Materials

represent quintessential NBS work, and the use of

their analytical organic chemistry program as a springboard to get NBS into biotechnology was forward-looking.

I remember Dick Deslattes' pioneering work on

the X-ray interferometer, XROI as he called it, and his obtaining a new value for Avogadro's constant; Mike Moldover's redetermination of the Gas

Constant; Jim Faller's work on "g" and his search

for the fifth force.

As an old low-temperature man I marvelled at the work of Bill Phillips in Gaithersburg and Dave

Wineland in Boulder on cooling and trapping

atoms and ions to sub-millikelvin temperatures by

shining lasers at them, Jan Hall in JILA "squeezing" light in seeming contradiction to the Uncertainty Principle, and also Jan's work on the tests of

the Theories of Relativity.

The work of Bob Celotta and colleagues in inventing the Spin Polarized Electron Microscope

and instantly applying it, with people from various

industries, to high-density magnetic disc technology

stands out as a substantial achievement. I remember this work particularly vividly and somewhat

shamefacedly because I did not think it would

work. It was Ray Kammer and Karl Kessler who

had faith, gave Bob encouragement and provided

him funds when they were in very short supply.

John Cahn and colleagues created quite a stir when they found crystalline, or quasi-crystalline,

materials with fivefold symmetry. We all learned

how you can have fivefold rotational symmetry

without translational symmetry and got a big kick

out of playing with colors in tiling patterns. We also

got a kick out of seeing John debate Linus Pauling

and win!

The year 1985 was one of pride when NBS won

top place with a record number of eight winners in

the IR-100 contest and received a letter of congratulations from the President.

For stamina and the ability to "keep on leaning,"

Bob Carter, Jack Rush, Mike Rowe, and others at the NBS reactor set a great example. I remember

when the reactor was designed at the old Van Ness

Street site, the design power was 20 MW and there was provision for a cold neutron source. Twenty

years later we finally scrounged enough money to go up to full power and in 1985 received our first appropriation of $1.5 million for the Cold Neutron

Source.

I remember in 1984 the Center for Automation

and Manufacturing Engineering demonstrating the

Interaction Graphics Exchange Specifications and

its seemingly never-ending "openhouses" demonstrating the ever-widening possibilities for manufacturing. And then there was its work with CEEE

developing SRM 474, the linewidth standard to be

used in integrated circuit manufacturing, and the

fine workshops that went along with the purchase

that were designed to show people how to use the

SRM correctly.

NBS has a long record of service in failure analysis, and I believe that is a theme Elio is going to trace in his history of NBS. None was more timely,

dramatic, and effective than the analysis of the skywalk collapse at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City. Standing out in my mind was the big press

conference held in the Green Auditorium to an- nounce our findings. The handling of that by Ed

Pfrang, Dick Marshall, Mat Heyman, and others

was one of the most professional public meetings I have seen. As well as the sublime, we also accomplished the

ridiculous. In testing the Newman machine, Bob

Hebner and others in CEEE deserve our heartfelt

thanks. With dead seriousness they followed a

court order to test a perpetual motion machine and

did a serious and careful job with good humor,

putting up with Jake Rabinow's sarcasm — and

never cracking a smile!

With a staff capable of achieving the kind of

high-level work I have described, we felt our budget labors were worthwhile. We did have some

budget successes, and some of them made profound improvements in our situation. We were able

to add $15 million to our equipment fund to help

modernize our equipment inventory. With a lot of

help from our Visiting Committee and Jordan

Baruch, we added a total of some $8 million to our

long-range research base through the so-called

"Long-Range Competence Building Program." We

installed a completely new and modern telephone

system.

The story of the upgrading of our scientific computing capability is a saga in every sense of the

word — a story of heroic achievement and marvelous adventure through the labyrinths of government regulations and administrative controls

relating to the purchase of computers in the Federal government. Ignoring rather feeble and unsuccessful attempts in the 1975-76 period, the story

does not really begin until long after the days when

the Univac 1108 was shamefully out of date and I think not yet paid for. The barriers we faced,

mostly outside NBS but some of them inside, in

mounting the job of putting together the needed

justification and pushing it through the system were mountainous. We needed to go from the level

of the 1108 to the level of the Cray, and we needed

to put together a requirements study showing why

36
we needed such a big jump in computing power.

Scientists at NBS who needed to do a lot of computing had given up on NBS and made deals of

various kinds outside. Many had, regrettably, decided to do without large-scale computation altogether. It is no wonder we had the devil's own time

getting NBS scientists to respond to our first at- tempt to do a requirements study. Those who believed we were serious felt, if we were to be

successful, the money for the new computer would

end up coming out of their program funds. It was a desperate moment when I was left with the only

optimist I could find at NBS, namely Eleazer

Bromberg. He and I got down into the grubby details and designed a detailed form to get needed

information. I made the members of the Executive

Board, the Center Directors, and Division Chiefs

personally responsible for making sure every scientist and engineer filled out a form and was forwardlooking in his or her projections for future

computer use. We had to make them go back and

do it over several times. Burt Colvin and his Center

for Applied Mathematics, at first reluctantly then

with stoicism, became the focus of a complicated

and ever-expanding effort to do the necessary fol- low-up work. Glen Ingram was hired as a manager

for getting a salable justification together, later

Steve White was hired to head up a procurement

team, and then Dick Penn was hired to head up a

site preparation team. I had all these groups, Guy

Chamberlin and his main staff, and many more

meet monthly with the full Executive Board in an ADP Policy Committee which I chaired personally.

I became a sort of program manager and I am sure a real pain in the rear end to many people. The

whole thing started in early 1980 and led to a budget request in FY 1982 of $9.7 million in what was

to be a first installment in a five-year, $27 million

item for computing capability. The plan was to have a new computer by 1983. But with real money

appearing we began to get all kinds of help in how

to spend it. The Department decided to combine

us into a big DOC Central Facility, Congressman

Brooks requested a GAO study, and on and on. We were told to get an interim computer and then

to negotiate a lease/purchase arrangement. I really

can't remember all the difficulties and disappointments. I do remember Burt Colvin threatening to commit hari-kari on the rug in my office about once every month. The effort was truly Herculean

and full of pain and suffering all the way. But we

prevailed. A new computer was delivered and ac- cepted in 1985 and became fully operational in

1986. We kept on adding through annual appropriations and in a decade invested about $60 million

in scientific computing. There were many concomitant and beneficial effects on the way. Our administrative computing went onto an entirely different

and more suitable machine belonging to DOC in

Suitland. Our networking became much more so- phisticated, new staff skilled in advance scientific

computing were attracted to the Applied Mathematics Division, and first-rate mathematical software was made available on the new machine. We

also tackled another program that had tied us up in

knots and confused and complicated the problem

of scientific computing. That was office automation

which we approached in a separate way. Here I was

helped, not to say pushed, by Patsy Saunders who

was then in the Program Office, but who later was

set up with her own group to deal with the problems. We knew each office had different word processors and associated software, little was

interchangeable, and secretaries and administrative

aides were having lots of problems, and many were

too scared to ask for help. Their immediate bosses

ended up helping because there was nowhere else to turn. Many ended up as what I called Ph.D.s

with screwdrivers. Some, such as Merrill Hessel,

out of desperation, designed complete administrative systems on their own, and that formed a great source of knowledge and expertise. In principal,

the solution was simple: standardize the PCs and

word processors; standardize the software; provide

training classes, local help groups, a "PC Newsletter," and understanding and sympathetic help from

Patsy's group. If you used the standards you got all kinds of help. If you didn't use the standards you were on your own. I think it worked.

That is quite a lot of time to spend on telephones, office automation, and computers, but they

took a lot of effort. I should also mention, before

leaving this general area, the big help laboratory

automation was given by Julian Whitaker's group,

for example, in the standardization and stocking of

microprocessors and related items in our store- rooms. At a place like NBS there are many nontechnical things you can do to support your staff

and to try to keep up morale. Some of these can be

quite small in terms of cost, such as an annual

Christmas visit to all the support groups, which was

hard on the Director's feet and even harder on Guy

Chamberlin. Others were truly pioneering such as

that of the Standards Committee for Women in

converting Bowman House into a day-care center.

In the same year we opened an exercise facility and

encouraged aerobic dance classes, jogging,

bicycling, volley ball, softball, soccer, and, in fact,

any non-country club type grunt, groan, and sweat

exercise. We did this knowing that exercise is a wonderful antidote to stress — and there had been

plenty of it at NBS — as well as being generally beneficial to health and, therefore, efficiency. We also

37
converted the modular house, no longer needed

by CBT for energy conservation studies, to be the

headquarters for NBS Radio Amateur Club. We

also let them put up fairly big antennas all over John Brewer's grass. Finally, I am proud to say we

encouraged and helped with establishing this Association of Alumni, because so many made such a request following the Allen V. Astin Memorial

Symposium in 1985.

I have saved until last a personal view of my last two or three years as Director. Apart from my

years as a researcher with Ralph Hudson in the

Low Temperature Laboratory, they were my happiest at NBS. During this time there developed a very close relationship first with Bud Brown, the

Deputy Secretary, and then Bill Verity, the Secretary. It makes a big difference when you feel your

boss understands and likes what you do. You will

recall that one of the first things the Reagan Administration did was to abolish the Office of the

Assistant Secretary for Science and Technology in

DOC. That meant the Director reported directly to the Secretary.

Mr. Baldrige did visit NBS many times; he liked our work, understood our mission, approved of it and went to bat for us a number of times. Mr.

Baldrige did meet each year with our Visiting Committee for at least an hour and showed genuine

interest in what they had to say. But he did not

have time to see us often, and his deputy, Jim

Wright, was a financial type who dealt mainly

through the budget shop.

I do remember vividly Baldrige's statement to me on departing from NBS after his first visit. "Ernie," he said, "you have the best damned lab in

the whole Federal government and nobody knows

anything about it." This shook me up no end, especially after all I thought we had learned in Roberts'

day. I did try to protest that the R&D side of industry knew us well and that we were well covered

in the Trade Press. His reaction was immediate

and full of scorn. What he wanted was coverage

that would be read by industrial CEO's and the

like. So I got Mat Heyman to go to work on

Baldrige's request and, after a lot of hard work, I was able to send him in 1987 a box of clippings for

the year from such journals as the New York Times

,

Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Business

Week, USA Today, and many more. I got a very

nice letter back expressing his appreciation for

what we had accomplished.

My relationship with Bud Brown got off to a rocky start in a matter connected with the Congressman Walker episode I described earlier. A big

change for the better came with the "Emerging

Technologies Report" first published in 1988. It all started at one of the quarterly management-by-objectives meetings we were required to attend down

at DOC. When someone asked us a question, after a rather long and tedious session, as to how we

knew that such and such a technology would be

important to U.S. industry, I replied, in a some- what testy way, that everybody knew what technologies were emerging in this way. Bud seized on

this, told me he was setting up a DOC Task Force

with me as Chairman to list those technologies and

state which industries would likely be affected and

what the impact would be on the GNP by the year

2000. I saw this as a great opportunity because I knew we could do the job. I plucked out Ken Gordon from the Program Office to help me. The initial job was really quite easy, so we went further.

We listed what we thought would be the barriers to the deployment of these technologies of U.S. industry. Bud was delighted. He got all the Assistant

Secretaries and Under Secretaries together several

times and had them comment on the report. Only a few minor changes were made in the barriers section, and then Bud decided he wanted to launch

the report at a big press conference. Mat Heyman

was dead set against it. "It's not news," he said

"nobody will show up." We all had made the mistake again that we thought we were dealing with

information that was rather obvious and commonly

available. What we hadn't figured on was that this was the first time such information had ever been

assembled in this way in a short, concise report.

Bud had his way, the press conference was a great

success, and Bud and I were off on the speaking

circuit. I'm glad that these reports are now being

updated and improved by NIST and that others

such as DOC and OSTP have followed suit. After Malcolm Baldrige's tragic death in 1987,

Bill Verity became Secretary and immediately

came out to NBS for a visit. He and I hit it off right

away, and I like to think it started on the steps in

front of the Administration Building. He had just

arrived, and we were trying to look relaxed as Mark

Heifer was taking pictures. Trying to make small

talk, I remarked that when I was a boy in Yorkshire

my father used to take me to see the matches of

the champion Yorkshire County Cricket Team.

The success of the team was due in no small part to a famous left-handed spin bowler by the name of

Verity. Captain Verity, as he later became, was

tragically killed in the Italian campaign in World

War II. Anyway, I started to tell the Secretary the

story and he immediately interrupted and said,

"Yes, I know, Hedley Verity from Hebden Bridge."

Now Hebden Bridge is one of those small WestRiding of Yorkshire villages nobody who lived

more than fifty miles away had ever heard of. And

who would know Verity's given name was Hedley?

Apparently the Secretary's grandfather, or great38
grandfather, I don't remember, came from that

area, and Bill Verity himself had been back there

as a young man to play in a golf tournament. Everywhere he went the first and only things the locals

wanted to know was whether he was any relation to Hedley Verity. Perhaps I attach too much importance to this story, but I think it is worth telling to

friends. Anyway, it was a pleasure to work with Mr.

Verity, and he helped us in many ways, not the

least of them in getting the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award off the ground.

The assignment of managing the award came to us very quickly after Congress named the award as a memorial to Malcolm Baldrige. Mr. Verity

thought the award was a good thing for the country, wanted it to rival the Deming Award in Japan,

and wanted it implemented during his tenure as Secretary. That meant moving very quickly, especially against the difficulty that no funds were provided and most of the work was to be done by the

private sector. It was not just a matter of getting

the job done, it was a question also of mobilizing

the private sector to do it. Fortunately for us, Curt

Reimann felt he knew how to proceed. Curt had

been trying for some time, but without success, to get the Executive Board to start a program at NBS

on Quality Control, broadly construed and going

beyond the measurements and standards aspects of

it. Curt had made himself very knowledgeable with

quality control methods used throughout the world

and had made many contacts with the professional

community inside the United States. When the

Malcolm Baldrige Award came along it provided a good opportunity to get started on quality control

methods, and Curt was the right person for the job,

in fact the only person. The scope of the job would

have stunned most people. Funds had to be raised

from the private sector; various professional advisory groups were needed; a large number of qualified examiners had to be recruited; and they all had to be paid somehow. Curt went to work and

the response from the private sector, much of it volunteer effort, was outstanding. Sandy McDonnell of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation and

John Hudiburg, CEO of Florida Power and Light,

agreed to chair the fundraising effort, and many

people went to work defining the exact nature of

the program and the rigorous criteria for success. Inside the government we all went to work for Curt

Reimann. Bill Verity asked for a progress report

every week and saw to it that no bureaucratic roadblocks stood in our way. I remember one critical

period where we were trying to get a firm commitment from the President to present the awards personally and a firm date at which to do it. Things

dragged on with no White House response, so I explained the critical state of affairs to the Secretary. Right away he had Curt and myself go with

him over to the White House for a half-hour meeting with Reagan's Appointment Secretary. He let me make the pitch which was one of the most passionate ones I have made in my life — my reputation

with Curt depended on it — and we got the commitment. President Reagan presented the first awards

on November 14, 1988, and then Vice President

Bush and several cabinet officers came also.

Verity was ecstatic. Curt got a bonus, and since I was not eligible for bonuses, Verity gave me the

Secretary of Commerce's Medal which was the first time the medal had ever been given to a government official. More important, the award established a very high reputation for thoroughness and

objectivity. The application guidelines have now

become so well known and highly regarded that

they are widely used as a sort of textbook or roadmap to quality control by industry. This year it

is expected that some quarter of a million copies

will be used for that purpose.

By this time, things had also moved rapidly on

other fronts. The Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act was passed containing, in Subtitle B, new

programs for NBS and a name change. The bill made it clear that NIST had an important new as- signment over and above the functions of the

Organic Act. The intent was clear to have NIST

"... assist industry in the development of technologies and procedures needed to improve quality

and modernize manufacturing processes ..." and

also implicit that this new function should receive

equal if not greater emphasis than that of providing

basic standards and measurements. Congress was

tired of the mission of NBS being narrowly construed. Congress wanted to expand our vision, our

influence and our funding and help us achieve our

full potential in the way we worked with industry,

small as well as large. To duck such a challenge, even if we could, would not only be faint-hearted

but foolish; we would have become the mother of

yet another agency by starving ourselves.

On another front, Secretary Verity wanted to en- hance the role of technology in the Department.

He believed the use of technology was vitally important to the U.S. economy, indeed his own company had thrived on it. He wanted to create a

position of Under Secretary of Commerce for

Technology and he looked for support for this idea.

The Patent and Trademark Office and NTIA did

not want to stop reporting directly to the Secretary.

That left us, NTIS, and what was left of OPTI.

What to do? We would have another level of re- porting inserted again and I didn't like that idea

much; all the new Under Secretary might have to do would be to manage me. But the principal I thought was overwhelmingly important, namely the

39
principal of having the state of civilian technology a major concern of the Commerce Department.

Herbert Hoover believed this to be a vital role and,

in more recent times, Herb Hollomon and Jordan

Baruch had tried to revive that idea. The fact that

recent efforts had not flourished did not indicate to me that they were wrong, but rather that one had

not found an acceptable way to go about it. So at that stage we threw our energies into trying to help

Verity pull it off. He was successful and the position was quickly established. He tried to get some- one from industry to come in to do the job, but at that late stage in Reagan's second term it was

hopeless. Accordingly he asked me to do the job

and I agreed, but only on an acting basis. I knew I would be retiring the following March and I wanted to retire as Director of NIST, not as Under

Secretary. After all, I had been at NBS nearly

thirty-six years, and I wanted to leave the association of a working lifetime with some affection and

feeling of intimacy with my colleagues. During the

few months I was Acting Under Secretary and

working in the Commerce Department, I saw

quickly what Verity saw and I am sure what Hollomon and others saw, and that is the potential of

DOC to become a much more powerful force in

supporting the U.S. economy. DOC has so many

connections and pipelines to companies throughout the United States, and many formal Advisory

Committees representing all industrial sectors. The

broad range of activity in economic data, trade

statistics, trade issues, exports and imports, and

many areas of technology are all broad and impressive when you get close enough to see them. But

the connections with industry are not used in any

coordinated way. When a situation becomes important nationally it is seldom that DOC becomes the

lead agency; more often it is State or Defense or Treasury, or the Special Trade Representative or

the White House itself. DOC operates more like a conglomerate than an entity with an overall unified

goal. I had always supposed, and I think most people suppose, that DOC is rather weak and just

needs stronger leadership. I found that this was not

the reason for the prevailing situation, after all Baldrige and Verity were very strong leaders.

In my opinion resistance comes from two

sources. The first is from industry itself. It doesn't

want government meddling in its affairs— government can only screw things up. A strong, coherent

Department of Commerce intimately and powerfully involved in all issues that affect industrial

enterprises is the last thing industry wants. The

second source of resistance resides in the basic

Administration's belief in the free market system

and a total rejection of any notion of an industrial

policy. I do not see any reason to believe that this

situation is going to change. It is true that there is increasing concern for the state of the economy,

but government action is centered on the White

House, not the Department of Commerce. That

being the case, it seems to me that NBS/NIST is forced to plan strategies and tactics based solely on

Administration and Congress support for R&D

generally and civilian technology in particular,

bearing in mind always the need to be as clear as possible about the accepted and respective roles

for industry and government and by following these

roles scrupulously. But this is good for NIST; we

know how to do it, it is the way we were brought

up. So what we have to do is to keep the faith and

keep on leaning.

40
41
Robert A. Kamper

Introduction by Emanuel Horowitz

Now, to tell you about how the West was won,

we have Dr. Robert Kamper who is Director of the

NIST Boulder Laboratory. Bob joined the Bureau

of Standards in 1963 as a physicist in the Cryogenics Division. In 1978, he became Chief of the Electromagnetic Technology Division, and in 1982 he

put another hat on top of his Division Chief hat

and became Director of the Boulder Laboratory.

So he's doing double duty. Whoever is taking care

of payroll here, please note that, O.K.? For those

of you whom are not familiar with the Boulder

Laboratory, at least not to the extent that you

should be, we are going to hear from Dr. Kamper

about some of the interesting things that go on

there. Bob.

42
HISTORY OF THE BOULDER LABORATORIES

Robert A. Kamper

This brief description of the origin and achievements of the NIST Boulder Laboratories does not

pretend to be a scholarly work of history. It is my

personal view of the story, based on direct observation in the period from 1963 to the present, and on

the really scholarly works that describe events before then. The examples I have chosen to illustrate

the technical achievements of the Boulder Laboratories reflect my own sense of what was significant.

To any reader who wants more than this, I rec- ommend reading Achievement in Radio by Wilbert

Snyder and Charles Bragaw, which tells a large

part of the story with meticulous attention to accuracy in every detail. I have also seen parts of unfinished manuscripts by Elio Passaglia and by

Brickwedde, Hammel, and Keller, that I would rec- ommend as fascinating reading if ever they are

published.

The story started after World War II. Microwave

radio had proved its military significance during

the war, and in the ensuing Cold War there was a

large national program to refine its application to surveillance, navigation, communication, and so on. The Bureau was to mount an expanded program in

radio propagation and standards to support all this,

but could not accommodate it on the site it occu- pied on Connecticut Avenue. The Director of the

Bureau at the time was Edward Condon, and

guided by a policy of the time that all new Federal

buildings should be outside Washington, he took

up the search for a site on which to expand the

Bureau.

The policy probably intended that new buildings

should be in the outer suburbs such as Gaithersburg, but Condon took it as a mandate to search

nationwide for the ideal location for radio re- search. His top three candidates were Palo Alto in

California, Charlottesville in Virginia, and Boulder

in Colorado. His choice of Boulder was probably

based on many considerations, including personal

preference, but one strong factor was a vigorous

campaign by the Boulder Chamber of Commerce,

organized by its manager, Frances Reich, to attract the Bureau to Boulder. The campaign included an

offer to donate a 217-acre site for the new laboratory campus. The offer was accepted, and in one

week the Chamber of Commerce raised the

$70,000 needed to buy the land by public subscription.

Funds for the new building were appropriated in

1950 and construction began. The NBS Boulder

Laboratories were dedicated by President

Eisenhower in 1954.

But meanwhile another project, to build a large

hydrogen liquefier, began in much greater haste. In

1949, somewhat earlier than expected, the Russians had successfully tested a nuclear bomb. The

response in the U.S. was to give high priority to the

development of the deuterium fusion bomb. At the

time, this was thought to require a copious supply

of liquid hydrogen, and the Bureau received a contract from the Atomic Energy Commission to as- semble a team of low-temperature physicists and

engineers to design and build the world's largest

hydrogen liquefier at the Boulder site, to supply

liquid hydrogen for the development effort at Los

Alamos. The project was completed in little over a year by a major feat of engineering. The liquefier

was capable of a producing 350 liters per hour and

was housed in a building designed to survive an

explosion. It was never tested in this respect. The

whole cryogenics program had an outstanding

safety record.

Soon after the completion of the hydrogen liquefier it was discovered that liquid deuterium was not

the best fuel for a bomb. Lithium deuteride was

better and did not require liquid hydrogen for its production. Overnight the liquefier lost its original

purpose, but the whole field of cryogenic engineering was about to enter a golden age with the advent

of the space program. To design large rockets

burning a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid

oxygen required the establishment of a whole new

field of engineering, and the Cryogenic Engineering Laboratory that was established with Russell

Scott as its first director played a prominent part in

that. The original NBS hydrogen liquefier has been

dwarfed by the plants that now supply the space

program. A single launch of the space shuttle

would have taken nearly a year's production from

it. The Cryogenic Engineering Laboratory had

other big projects besides developing engineering

data for the space program. It made a major contribution to the development of the large liquid hydrogen bubble chamber at the Lawrence Berkeley

Laboratory. It established the quantitative basis for

custody transfer of cryogenic fluids, first liquid nitrogen and later liquefied natural gas. It contributed to the development of new refrigeration

technology, including a miniature high-speed ex- pansion turbine that ran on gas bearings, and the

most recent accomplishment: the "Coola Hoop," a

refrigerator with no moving parts that can reach

43
65 K. It consists of a pulse-tube refrigerator driven

by thermal oscillation, developed in collaboration

with Los Alamos.

As the space program matured, most of the

Cryogenic Engineering Laboratory was absorbed

by the Center for Chemical Engineering and

turned its attention from cryogenic fluids to the

great variety of fluids and processes used in chemical engineering. The new challenge in developing

thermodynamic data was to encompass mixtures,

which was done using a combination of measured

data, empirical correlations, and theoretical equations of state. This work depends on a large

amount of numerical computation. It came into its own with the search for a substitute for chlorinated

fluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerants that would be

more benign to the ozone layer. Another field that

was taken up was the study of basic chemical engineering processes, particularly separation of mixtures. Various projects studied separation through

semipermeable membranes, immiscible liquids,

and with supercritical carbon dioxide. These

projects in chemical engineering are still in progress now. Another program that started in the old Cryogenic Engineering Laboratory was the study of

structural materials. This was of great importance

to the space program, because at low temperatures

many materials suffered phase transformations

that caused them to become brittle. This program

later evolved into the study of the strength and reliability of welded joints and into nondestructive

testing of materials and structures. The staff of this

program became involved in testing the welded

joints in the Alaska oil pipeline and in investigating

the causes of several catastrophes in which buildings had collapsed.

In 1958 the Radio Standards Laboratory was

completed and opened with due ceremony. It mounted an ambitious program to develop and re- fine the basic standards and measurement techniques for all the quantities that affect the

performance of microwave components and sys- tems: power, voltage, attenuation, impedance, and

so on. An extensive calibration service, which at

first served mainly the procurement and mainte- nance functions of the armed services, was offered.

Many of the standards developed at that time

have served to this day. The microcalorimeter, the

micropot, the piston attenuator, and standard

waveguide sections are still in routine use. But

measurement technique has evolved through sev- eral generations. At first microwave measurements

depended upon tuning out the imperfections of the

measurement system at each frequency at which a measurement was to be made. This was a laborious

process requiring good hands and much patience

on the part of the measurement technician. The

result was very accurate measurements but a very

low rate of production. The first venture into au- tomation was made in the early '70s. A commercial

automated network analyzer was bought and modified by the addition of inductive voltage dividers to provide a reference that would upgrade its accuracy to the level required to provide a national calibration service. The result was a very complex

system that was prone to partial and total failures

that made it difficult to operate routinely, but it remained as the workhorse of the calibration ser- vice for many years. It was then superseded by the

fruits of another project that started at about the

same time: the six-port. This was invented by Cletus Hoer in the early '70s and slowly developed into a superb calibration system that is simple to calibrate and checks its own stability and errors, under

full computer control. This is the new workhorse of

the calibration service.

Another project, which started in the early '60s, was the measurement of the velocity of electromagnetic waves using a microwave interferometer. The

idea was to measure the frequency and wavelength

and deduce the velocity. The problem was to correct for the small distortion of the waves caused by

diffraction at the edges of the beam. This correction was calculated by David Kerns and Paul

Wacker, who then realized that the same calculation could give the relationship between the distribution of fields close to an antenna and the

radiation pattern in the far field, where plane waves have developed. The accurate measurement

of the radiation patterns of antennas has become

an important matter with the development of the

antennas with very high performance used for

radar and satellite communications. Alan Newell was in charge of building a near-field antenna scan- ner to make the measurements from which a computer could calculate radiation patterns using

Kerns and Wacker's method. This facility has been

heavily used, and about a dozen copies have been

built in various companies around the United

States.

The Time and Frequency Service came to Boulder with the Radio Standards Laboratory. The

first atomic clock, an ammonia maser, had been

developed by Harold Lyons in Washington. Strictly

speaking this was not a clock, but a frequency stan- dard. It was superseded by a standard based on a resonance of the cesium atom, which is detected by

a change in the deflection of a beam of cesium

atoms projected through a nonuniform magnetic

field. The first cesium beam standard, NBS-1, was

built in Washington and then moved to Boulder. It was then succeeded by several generations of improved models, culminating in NBS-6, the present

standard. Its successor, NIST-7, is already under

construction. It will also use the cesium resonance,

44
but will detect it by an optical technique. This will

eliminate some sources of error in NBS-6 and cre- ate a standard about an order of magnitude more

accurate. The next generation of frequency standards will take several years to develop and will be

radically different. It will be based on a resonance

of the mercury ion, suspended in an electromagnetic trap and controlled and monitored by a laser.

The action of the laser cools the mercury ion to a very low temperature, at which it hangs, suspended

and almost motionless, resonating with extremely

low external perturbation. This already exists as a

spectacular scientific demonstration, and David

Wineland and his group are working to refine it into a frequency standard that may be a thousand

times more accurate than NBS-6.

The resonance of the cesium atom that is used

for a frequency standard is at a convenient mi- crowave frequency. The resonance of the mercury

ion lies in the ultraviolet. Some time ago the Time

and Frequency Division won a place in the 1974

Guinness Book of World Records by bridging a similar gap to measure the frequency of a visible

(iodine) laser. This feat required a large team of

people and won much acclaim. It established the

basis for a new definition of the meter, in terms of

the second and the velocity of light. It will need to be repeated routinely when the mercury ion is adopted for a frequency standard.

The national time scale is maintained by a set of

about a dozen small, commercial cesium beam

standards that are designed for continuous running. They are calibrated annually against NBS-6.

The time scale must also be coordinated with those

of the other nations that maintain frequency standards of similar quality. The mathematical problem

of finding the best weighted average among a collection of clocks, all prone to small fluctuations,

was solved by David Allan and James Barnes.

Their solution depends on a measure of stability

known as the Allan variance, which is used in all serious time keeping.

The middle '60s saw several major events at the

Bureau. The headquarters moved from Connecticut Avenue to Gaithersburg. The Radio Propagation Laboratory was spun off to become the

nucleus, in Boulder, of the Environmental Science

Services Administration (ESSA), which later became the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Institute for

Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) was also spun

off and later became part of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration

(NTIA). And the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) was formed.

JILA is shared by NIST and the University of

Colorado (CU). It was established in 1962 with

Lew Branscomb as its first Chairman. It occupies a

building on the CU campus. The permanent staff

consists of about a dozen NIST employees (the

Quantum Physics Division) and an equal number

of CU faculty members. Then there are Visiting

Fellows, Postdoctoral Fellows, graduate students,

and so on, to make up a total of about 150 people.

JILA's mission in laboratory astrophysics is very

broadly interpreted, and its staff has made many

distinguished contributions to science and to instrumentation. To take a few examples: Jan Hall

and Dick Barger were pioneers of the frequency

stabilization of lasers, one of the advances that

took these devices from being "a solution looking

for a problem" to become the superb tools for

metrology that they are today. Jim Faller and Peter

Bender took prominent parts in designing the ex- periment to monitor the distance to the moon,

using a laser ranging system that included a reflec- tor placed on the moon's surface by the Apollo as- tronauts. Jim Faller developed an instrument to measure the acceleration of gravity with an uncertainty of only a few parts per billion, which also

eliminated the need for a vibration-free platform.

This instrument made a radical change in the

whole business of measuring gravity. In this diverse

program there are also people studying astro- physics.

To return to the main NIST campus in Boulder,

the early '70s saw an extension of the radio standards program into lasers and optics. The program

to measure the frequency of lasers started then. So

also did a program to establish the consistent measurement of laser power. This enabled lasers to be

categorized for safety regulations and met some

interesting challenges from the Department of

Defense at the extremes of the range of power. At

the high end was the challenge to measure the

power of high-energy lasers. These were intended

to be all-destructive weapons, but the measuring

instrument had to survive. At the low end was the

challenge of measuring the energy of pulses at the

femtojoule level at which the receivers for laser

target designators ("smart bombs") and range

finders operate. These challenges have all been

met.

The mid '70s brought the spectacular rise of the

optical fiber telecommunications and a program at the Bureau of Standards to establish the necessary

measurement techniques. At first the transmission

characteristics of the fibers themselves were the

limiting factors in telecommunication systems and

received greatest attention at the Bureau. Later,

the program expanded to encompass the lasers,

detectors, amplifiers, and integrated optical

components of the increasingly sophisticated

systems being developed by the industry. One

prominent aspect of this work is the measurement

of very short pulses of light. This has led to the

45
development of a sampling source, using mode

locking and soliton compression in optical fibers,

that has been built into a complete and surprisingly

simple all-optical sampling system.

The last major program I will mention is in su- perconductivity. This started in the early '60s in the

flurry of excitement generated by the discoveries of

the high-field superconductors, that made big magnets feasible, and the Josephson effect, that

opened up a new field of electronics. The superconductivity program at the Boulder laboratories of

the Bureau has its roots in both the cryogenics program and the radio standards program.

Superconductors have been used in some impressive engineering successes, such as the Tevatron at the Fermilab in Chicago, the experimental

magnetically levitated train in Japan, and magnetic

resonance imaging. But they have unique and

tricky engineering characteristics that have also led

to some expensive and embarrassing failures. One

part of our superconductivity program is exploring,

defining, and measuring these characteristics, to enable reliable engineering data to be generated.

One of the accomplishments of this part of the program was Jack Ekin's discovery and exploration of

the drastic effect of elastic strain on the currentcarrying capacity of superconductors. A specialty of

this program has been the refinement of magnetic

measurements on superconductors. This has become the nucleus of a new program to develop

magnetic measurements and standards for other

fields of technology, particularly magnetic recording. With the discovery of the high-temperature

superconductors, the field of measurements and

standards has become wilder country, and the

group has a fine opportunity to pursue the

Bureau's traditional function of taming it. The

larger part of the superconductivity program is in

electronics. It was started to improve the art of

electrical measurements and physical standards

and has remained among the leaders in the development of superconducting electronics. The technology has evolved dramatically from the early

days, when Josephson junctions resembled the

crystals and cat's whiskers of early radio, to the

present when the group has a complete facility to fabricate microcircuits containing many thousands

of nearly identical Josephson junctions using

equipment and methods similar to those of modern

semiconductor electronics. The accomplishments

of this program include some of the early pioneering of magneto-encephalography, a radically new

voltage-measuring system, that is its own standard,

and a new principle for radiometry. The program is advancing into high-temperature superconducting

electronics, single-flux quantum logic, and singlecharge tunneling.

It is not only during working hours that our staff

members bring fame to the Bureau. NIST has the

distinction, unique among Federal agencies, of having a newly discovered dinosaur named after it. Two members of our chemical engineering staff,

Jim Filla and Jim Siegwarth, are amateur paleontologists. They spend their weekends digging

among the copious dinosaur quarries of Colorado

and Wyoming with Professor Robert Bakker of the

University of Colorado. Recently they discovered a new, small dinosaur whose existence has thrown interesting light on the mystery of why the dinosaurs

disappeared. Professor Bakker named it Drinker

Nisti, the genus in honor of a famous paleontologist and the species in honor of NIST.

46
47
Robert S. Walleigh

Introduction by Emanuel Horowitz

The move from Van Ness Street and Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington, D.C., to the

Gaithersburg site was both a momentous opportunity and a unique experience for those of us who

went through it. The planning was largely in the

hands of Bob Walleigh, the NBS Associate Director for Administration. Bob spent 35 years at NBS,

having come to the laboratory in 1943, and he retired in 1978. He is currently a Consultant with the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Bob told me during one of our planning sessions,

"There are some things I'm going to be talking

about today, but there are others I will remain si- lent on." I think we all know what he means. For

some special insights into the move to Gaithersburg, Bob Walleigh.

48
THE GATTHERSBURG SITE

Robert S. Walleigh

The decision to build new laboratories for the

National Bureau of Standards was made in September 1955. Prior to that, Bureau Directors had

tried for many years to get appropriations for an

Administration Building which would house the

Director's Office and the service activities. The

records of the Bureau show that a well-developed

plan for an Administration Building had been used

as a basis for a request in 1934 for funds from the

Works Project Administration (WPA) in the days

of Franklin Roosevelt, but the funds were not

forthcoming. Even in those days, much of the Bureau staff was located in substandard temporary

buildings, some of which had been built for specialpurpose experiments in World War I. The problem was made worse during World War

II when other temporary buildings were erected for

activities related to the war effort. Thus, following

World War II, there was a serious problem in managing the Bureau's work. The employees of every

division were scattered in several buildings, the

worst example being a division which was housed in

17 different buildings. There were about 100 buildings in all; one third of the space was temporary

and another third was substandard. The efforts

continued to get major improvements on the Bureau site to eliminate temporary buildings and to build an Administration Building and some laboratory facilities. One request for such a development

with a $30 million price tag got nowhere. Some relief came when the guided missiles work of the

Bureau was relocated to a former hospital facility

in Corona, California. The next real relief came

with the approval of a new building for the

Bureau's radio work. However, the Congress stipulated that the work must be out of the Washington

area. Boulder, Colorado, was selected as the site

for this laboratory which was dedicated in 1954.

In the meantime, Congress had approved $2 million for the renovation of the electrical system at the old site on Connecticut Avenue. This was a very welcome improvement. Unfortunately, it came

at a time when the effective application of the

more modern instrumentation was requiring a sta- ble control of the operating environment and a variety of special supporting services. This resulted in

more and more demands for air conditioning

equipment to control the heat and humidity in laboratories, thus adding greatly to the electrical load,

and this had not been factored into the modernization of the electrical system. Incidentally, no provision was made for air conditioning for the comfort

of the employees. In those days this was called

"creature comfort." The number of requests for air

conditioning to control the laboratory temperature

and humidity, but which were in whole or in part

intended for creature comfort, began to grow, and

it became necessary to require that the approval of

air conditioning be made at the highest level in the

Bureau.

I have often thought that the attention which

was directed at the National Bureau of Standards

by the AD-X2 incident may have been a major factor in finally causing the Administration to direct

some serious attention to the Bureau and to its need for a new laboratory and office facilities. The

firing of Director Allen Astin and the anger which

that generated in the Bureau staff led to a threat of

wholesale resignations from the Bureau and to a subsequent rehiring of Dr. Astin. This was followed

by the study by the Kelly Committee, some of the

most prestigious scientists in the United States who

were asked to look at the validity of the Bureau's

work and who subsequently made a number of rec- ommendations concerning the Bureau. The national attention brought to the Bureau by the firing

and rehiring of the Director, front-page headlines,

and the study by the Kelly Committee, kept the

Bureau in the limelight for quite some time. It also

brought to the attention of the Administration a

realization that the National Bureau of Standards

was indeed a national resource whose scientific

work was of the highest caliber. This total vindication and support by an objective group from outside the National Bureau of Standards was a message to the Administration and to the Congress

which could not have been made as effectively by

the Bureau itself. When the decision was made in 1955 to relocate,

action was begun immediately to begin preparations for a budget request, for an estimate of costs

and for a decision on a recommended location. The

General Services Administration (GSA) was called

upon to assist in this effort. Since the total area in

all the Bureau's buildings approached 1 million

square feet, it was decided that we would seek

about 1 million assignable square feet to house

some 3,000 employees. The GSA developed an es- timate of $40 million for a "monolithic block-type

structure," in essence a cube which was the

smallest possible configuration and the most eco- nomical to build. The Bureau developed an estimate of $23 million in addition for equipment and

for the relocation. Armed with this information,

49
NBS sought and got an appropriation of $930,000

for site acquisition and preliminary planning.

The decision as to where the laboratories should

be built was based on many factors. First of all the

Administration, in offering the Director the opportunity to plan new laboratories, had made a determination that the Bureau did not need to be in

Washington D.C. This decision was made at a time

when the atom bomb was having a serious influ- ence on the locations of facilities. The Bureau was

told that it had to relocate if it was going to build

new laboratories and that the location had to be at

least 20 miles from the White House.

In considering a new site, the first concern was

for the Bureau's primary resource, its staff. In that

period of time, the demands for scientists and engi- neers were very strong, and Government salaries were quite low as compared with those in private

industry. Therefore, we had to be very careful in

the selection of the site since, if the staff did not

like the location or were too inconvenienced by it, they could easily get jobs elsewhere. We had lost

one-half of our staff in the move of the guided missile work to Corona and in the move of the radio

work to Boulder, Colorado. Taking this into consideration, the Director decided on the following

criteria for a new site:

1. The site should be reasonably accessible by

automobile from the homes of the majority

of the Bureau's professional staff.

2. The site should be near high-speed roads for

ready access to Washington and its airports.

3. The site should contain at least 400 acres in

order to provide freedom from sources of vi- bration, noise, and radiation from potential

neighbors, as well as to allow for expansion.

4. The terrain should be relatively flat and

high.

5. Utilities should be reasonably accessible.

In order to meet dispersal criteria, the relocation

site had to be at least 20 miles from the center of

Washington and could not be in the Washington/

Baltimore corridor.

When the original site for the old Bureau had

been selected in 1901, it had been chosen to

provide a rural location and the city had subsequently completely surrounded it. The prospect for

the relocation to a new rural site had a special appeal. A task group containing NBS and Public

Buildings Service employees considered nearly 100

locations and narrowed the list to about five for

detailed examination by the Bureau's management.

I can remember taking Dr. Astin out to see this

site. Route 240, which subsequently was renumbered Interstate Highway 70S and which now is called Interstate 270, was still under construction.

We climbed a slight incline at the northwest corner

of the site and looked over a barbed wire fence.

Almost the entire area that we had under consideration and the surrounding areas were farms. Since

the growing season had not started, there were no

crops visible and the only signs of life were a few

cattle. There were a few farmhouses and farm

buildings on the proposed site and on surrounding

farms, but other than that, no development whatsoever. Both Clopper Road and Quince Orchard Road

were very narrow country roads. The site was exactly 20 air miles from the center of Washington.

Except for the southern boundary, the site was

bounded entirely by roads. It was 550 acres. Dr.

Astin agreed that this was the most desirable site

from all those that had been considered.

Not long after that Dr. Astin called me into his

office. With him was Dewitt Hyde, the Congressman for the area of Maryland in which the proposed site was located. He said that he had been

asked to intercede on behalf of some homeowners

who lived on the site which we were proposing as the new Bureau location. It seemed that it had

been the practice of the Diamond family, who were

the principal landowners at the site, to give to their sons and daughters an acre or so for a home along

Quince Orchard Road. There were about six such

homes on a small enclave. A member of one of

these families actually worked at the National

Bureau of Standards and he had learned that the

Bureau had this site under consideration. Congressman Hyde said that those families were in fa- vor of the move of the Bureau to that site, but

asked that consideration be given to omitting their

properties. A subsequent decision was made to leave out this enclave, the decision being made at least in part because the cost of those few acres and their homes would have driven up the entire

cost of the site. However, because this information of the site

had leaked to this one Bureau employee, it was

feared that land speculators might also have heard

of this recommended choice. For that reason it was

decided that we would use the authority of the Secretary of Commerce to take the land through a Declaration of Taking and let the courts decide on

the value. As soon as the appropriation was made

for the acquisition of the site, a Declaration of

Taking was filed July 6, 1956. The price for the 550

acres was subsequently determined to be about

$500,000. (Incidentally, we had to acquire an additional ten acres in 1961 when the Reactor Building was added to the planning.)

Shortly thereafter an architect was chosen for

the preliminary plan. The Bureau recommended

the firm of Voorhees, Walker, Smith, and Smith, a New York firm which had experience in designing

50
many modern laboratories following World War II. The firm had designed Bell Telephone Laboratories, the DuPont Research Laboratories, the Ford

Laboratories, General Foods, and many more totalling more than 10 million square feet of laboratory space.

The GSA received proposals from several architectural engineering firms, but when the several

proposals were reviewed by a panel of GSA and

NBS employees, the New York Firm of Voorhees,

Walker, Smith, and Smith was selected. The architects placed a number of members on their staff at the Connecticut Avenue site to collect information

on the needs of the Bureau for the new facilities,

working directly with the Division and Section

Chiefs. They also made preliminary studies of the

site at Gaithersburg. During this period several

members of the top staff of the Bureau, along with

members of the architects and Public Buildings

Service, made visits to other laboratories to see how such laboratories had been constructed, and to take advantage of the good ideas and reject the bad

ideas which had evolved from their construction ex- periences.

In the early spring of 1957 a visit was made to the offices of the architect in New York for a re- port on the planning preparatory to appropriation

hearings. The Public Buildings Service and the

NBS officials were stunned when the architects

gave an estimate of over $100 million for the new

facilities plus the $23 million which the Bureau had

estimated the year before as the costs for new

equipment and relocation. The architects had provided 30 percent more space than the 1 million

square feet which had been agreed to in the original request. The plans were reviewed and major

cuts were made to reduce the size of the facility to

1 million square feet, and to reduce correspondingly the cost of the facility. Despite these cuts, the

Bureau was in the embarrassing position of having

to go before the Congress in the certain knowledge

that the estimates which had been developed by

GSA the year before were grossly understated and

could not possibly produce the laboratories which

the Bureau needed. The hearing was one of the

most difficult which Dr. Astin was to have. He had

established a reputation with the Congress for being a good administrator and for being honest and

open with the Appropriations Subcommittee. It was difficult for him to be placed in the role where

his word was open to question because of the prior

gross underestimate of the facilities cost. Following the hearings, GSA, NBS, and the ar- chitects worked jointly to devise means for further

savings in the costs of the proposed new facilities. A decision was made to make all laboratory spaces

windowless, making it possible to place laboratories back to back. Thus the buildings could be doubled in width more closely approaching a cube, an

ideal in terms of minimizing the cost of building

construction. This modification alone made it possible to save about $4 million. Also eliminated from

the planning were a proposed railroad spur and helicopter landing facilities.

The Director had appointed a committee of NBS

scientists 1 to make recommendations on desirable

criteria to be considered in the development of the

designs for the new facilities. The report of the

committee made in September 1957 included rec- ommendations that the space be flexible so that

laboratory changes could be made quickly; that

suitable conference rooms, dining rooms, library,

cafeteria, shops, and administrative divisions be located centrally and be conveniently located with re- spect to laboratories. It also made some specific

recommendations with respect to the size of doorways, lighting levels, and ventilation. Most of the

criteria were adopted in the planning.

I have mentioned earlier that I had thought the

AD-X2 incident and its attendant publicity had

been a significant factor in causing the Administration to support new facilities. However, the outside

support for the program had slowed almost to a

halt after the hearings which reported on the stunning increase in the estimated cost of the facilities. But, on October 4, 1957, an event occurred which

shook the confidence of the American public in its beliefs that America led the world in it's scientific

achievements. On that date Soviet scientists

launched Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite. It made headline news around the world. It is my

opinion that this event was a significant factor in

making it possible for the National Bureau of Standards to obtain a supplemental appropriation of $3

million for the planning of the new facilities. The first efforts were directed to another study

of a general plan which would incorporate all or most of the facilities in a single structure. The

study concluded that it was neither feasible nor

economical to do this, but out of this planning

there did evolve the basic concept that placed the

Director's Office and staff, the central support

activities, conference rooms, dining rooms, library,

and shops at the center of the site, surrounded by

general-purpose laboratory buildings, which would

accommodate all of those laboratory activities

which did not require truly special-purpose space.

The general-purpose laboratories would be

connected with each other and with the central

support facilities by full height, all-weather corridors. While the Bureau and the architects were en- gaging in their efforts to consolidate the buildings,

1 Herbert Broida, Allen Franklin, John Hoffman, Ralph Kotter, Lawrence Kushner, and Leo Wall, with Lewis Branscomb as Chairman.

51
Dr. Wallace Brode distributed a humorous bulletin

showing a number of suggested configurations,

each with appropriate comments. I can remember

his comment on a five-sided figure saying that he

abandoned that idea because it might be mistaken

for the Pentagon in time of war.

It was first thought that NBS could rely on its existing administrative structure for developing

NBS requirements for the new facilities, but it was

soon found that neither the architects nor GSA

could provide the backup services which they had

assured would be available, and a Gaithersburg

planning group was established within the Plant

Division. This group was given the responsibility of

working with the divisions and developing their re- quirements, conveying those requirements to the

architects, reviewing plans and specifications, and

preparing and supervising contracts for the move

and occupancy. One of the first steps was to assign

to each technical division space for its generalpurpose laboratory and office needs. The specialpurpose laboratory needs were considered on an

individual basis, and assignments of space were made only after a thorough review to justify the

need.

Despite the fact that a site had been acquired

and that an appropriation had been received for

planning, there was still a large percentage of the

staff which did not believe that the Bureau would

ever move, and it was difficult to get them to place

the priority needed to keep the planning going forward at a reasonable rate. In fact, there were many

on the staff who were strongly opposed to any

thought of leaving the Washington site. Partly for

this reason it was decided to designate a Gaithersburg planning representative for each of the Bureau's 15 technical divisions and for each of the

support divisions to expedite and coordinate input

from the staff. A questionnaire was devised which

would be helpful in determining requirements on a room-by-room basis. In all, the questionnaire provided for 11 pages of detailed information on each

laboratory module. By June 1960 planning had progressed to the point where the architects were able

to produce and deliver to NBS a model of the facilities. This model was presented to the Associate

Directors on June 1, 1960, and to the press on June

2. Pictures appeared in the newspapers the following day. An NBS Standard article showing a picture

of me pointing at the model appeared a few days

later. Someone at the Bureau sent me a copy of

that NBS Standard with a notation beneath the

photograph "Walleigh's Falleigh."

It should be mentioned that Bureau scientists

had been asked at an early stage to make measure- ments at various points on the new site of the existing levels of radiation, of vibration, and of noise. I can remember that one such report stated that the

vibration of the earth from the rustling of the

leaves in the trees caused more detectable vibration than the motion of the passing of the automobiles and trucks on Highway 70S. The health

physics scientists measured radiation at the site, including soil and water samples. They also measured radiation in wells in the vicinity of the site. Those measurements have continued although the

number of wells which are now monitored has been

reduced because many of them are now capped off

since water and sewage utilities have been installed

in the communities. At one time there were 40

dosimeters installed along our five miles of perimeter fence. Today there are 16, the new ones being

much more sensitive than the old ones. They are checked quarterly. Grass samples are checked ev- ery two weeks in growing season, and soil samples

are checked monthly.

We have continued to be very sensitive to any

developments in the area which might cause problems to our sensitive measuring devices. I remember a few years back, when we were apprised of

possible expansion of the Gaithersburg Airport,

that we commissioned fly-over tests of our site by

both propeller planes and jets.

In the planning of our facilities, serious consideration was given at all stages to protect ourselves

from our own sources of noise and vibration and

radiation. Our steam and chilled water facility was

kept distant from other buildings, as was our electric substation. In our buildings, the necessary fans

and transformers were isolated from the building

structure through three levels of isolation. Wiring

in the building was placed in metal conduits. An

electromagnetic interference specialist was named

who was authorized to provide advice and solutions

to individual cases as they arose in the planning.

We have also worked closely with local Government bodies in the development of zoning stan- dards which would protect the environment not

only of our site, but of the county in general.

Following the approval of the site model by the

Director, we went through a series of reviews of our plans by Government bodies. We made a presentation to the National Capitol Planning Commission which approved the planning, but also

directed that a large part of the site be preserved in

what they called a "green area," that is, an area which is not to be developed. Our approved master

plan has a line across it marking that green area. When we went before the Fine Arts Commission, we were admonished not to use our rooftops

for experiments. Members of the Fine Arts

Commission noted that the roofs of many of our

buildings at the old site on Connecticut Avenue

had been used for many types of experiments and

that the roof lines were generally quite unsightly.

They directed that the roof lines be kept clean. In

52
consideration of that direction, we planned our

roofs at Gaithersburg so that they do not lend

themselves readily to experiments. So far as I know, the only items which have been mounted on

any roofs are the two or three antennas used for

communication on the top of our Administration

Building.

As the planning progressed, it was soon decided

that it was not feasible to proceed with construction in one large package. Some buildings were

more urgently required than others. Some facilities

were more difficult to design than others. Furthermore, additional facilities and additional requirements continued to be added, and these required

changes in the planning as it proceeded. One facility was even dropped. Consequently, the decision

was made to proceed in phases, and appropriations

were sought one phase at a time. As we went before the Congress each year for our appropriation,

it was necessary to explain that the costs of construction were escalating because of inflation which

in those days was running at about 3 percent per

year. On a facility with a total cost of more than

$100 million, that amounted to an escalation of

more than $3 million each year.

When it was announced that we were going to proceed in several phases of the construction, some

Bureau employees and some managers expressed

dismay thinking that we might end up with only

part of the construction completed and with some

of the staff in Washington and some in Gaithersburg. We were fortunate in that we were able to get the appropriations needed to keep the building

programs going forward, once construction was begun.

The first phase of construction included the Engineering Mechanics laboratory, the Steam and

Chilled Water Plant, and the Substation. The longawaited ground breaking occurred on Wednesday,

June 14, 1961. After arriving by helicopter, the Secretary of Commerce, Luther Hodges, turned the

first spadeful of earth. The gold-plated shovel used

for the ground breaking had been used originally to break ground for the Chemistry Building in 1915 at the old site. With the beginning of construction, some of the

skepticism of the staff concerning the reality of the

construction of such facilities was abated. To stimulate interest, group visits to the site were ar- ranged, and staff was also encouraged to go out

and make visits on their own. The employee newspaper, the NBS Standard, contained one or more

articles on the progress in each issue, and there were occasional talks to staff in the East Building

Lecture Room. The planning for the remaining

phases of construction proceeded more rapidly,

and the Congress, despite some problems, appropriated funds which made it possible for construction contracts to be let as planning for a phase was

completed. The first occupancy of Phase I at Gaithersburg was in 1963. The second phase of

construction included the Administration Building,

Radiation Physics, Supply and Plant, Shops, and

Service. Construction of Phase II began in 1962.

The move of the Director's Office to the Administration Building was in 1965, about one year before the dedication. There is a little story

connected with the move of the Director's Office.

Dr. Astin had decided that when the Director's Office was moved to Gaithersburg he wanted the flag

to be raised over the site. We asked GSA to put

out a contract for the flagpole. They said that they

had not planned to erect the flagpole until the end

of construction and they suggested that NBS put

out a contract, which we did. GSA had provided us with set of drawings and specifications. Each year

when appropriation hearings are held, it is necessary that the agency submit a listing of all of its contracts. This list is usually reviewed toward the

end of the hearing. At the particular hearing at which the contract for the flagpole was listed, the

Congressman from West Virginia asked the Director, "What is this item for a flagpole for $45,000?"

Unfortunately, I had to be elsewhere for another

hearing, so I was not present at the appropriation

hearing. While Dr. Astin had been briefed on the

contract list, he could only remember that we had

contracted for a flagpole and that it was 90 feet in

height. The Congressman soon did some dividing

and said, "Dr. Astin, that is $500 a foot." Dr. Astin

had forgotten that the contract also provided for

the removal of a small farm building, the leveling

and sodding of the site in front of the administration building, and the provision of a granite walkway. The flagpole itself had cost $9,000. It seemed

almost every year after that Congressman Rooney

of Brooklyn took delight in asking about the flagpole. It was all in good humor, but the printed

records of the hearings sound more ominous than

they were. How many of you have ever looked at the base of the flagpole? Incised in the granite base

is a quotation from George Washington at the

Constitutional Convention in 1787, "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can re- pair." Dr. Astin chose that quotation as appropriate for NBS.

As I look back, there are many interesting incidents which come to mind, unusual occurrences which left an impression on me. One of these was

the early discovery on the site of some field stones

which seemed to be markers for three graves. It was decided that this was the case and arrangements were made for reburials in a cemetery. In

the process of the reburials, it was found that there

53
were actually seven graves. In the reburial, prayers were said by a Catholic Priest, a Protestant Minister, and a Jewish Rabbi.

In another incident as construction proceeded,

the water main burst at night near the center of the

site, and before the water could be brought under

control, it had washed away earth, leaving a hole

almost an acre in size. Incidentally, to provide flexibility water comes onto our site in two 20-inch

mains, one from the east and one from the north.

Either main is capable of supplying all of our

needs.

In still another incident, the 550-volt switch gear

at our substation exploded and burned. An investigation followed. The investigation concluded that a mouse or a squirrel had gotten into the switchgear.

The switchgear standards were changed to provide

more space between the elements. Incidentally, to assure continuity of electric power service to our

site, the power to our substation is fed in by three

separate power lines, each of which is more than ca- pable of supplying all of our power needs.

There were two separate occasions which I recall

quite clearly when recommendations were made to the Secretary of Commerce that I be fired. One

came from the office of a Senator after I told the

Senator's aides that I could not make an additional

million dollars available for the construction of a

special facility because the funds for that facility were separate from those of the general construction facilities. They did not believe me.

In another case a Senator tried to coerce us into

giving a move contract on a noncompetitive basis to the contractor who had developed the specifications for the move. The contractor, who was well

qualified, had taken the contract with the full knowledge that it contained a provision that the

contractor who prepared the move proposal could

not bid on that proposal because the contractor

would be in a favored position. In both cases the

Secretary of Commerce was completely supportive

of the position I had taken, and I was not fired. I did

suffer some nervous moments, however, on both

occasions.

In another incident connected with the moving, I was visited by two young men from the Teamsters

Union. They looked like husky football players, who

advised me not to let our first move contract to the

low bidder who was a non-union contractor. They

said that if we did, the Teamsters would picket the

site so that the union members of the construction crews could not come upon the site. We did let the

contract and, as luck would have it, their pickets appeared on a day when Secretary of Commerce John

Connor was on the site. When I gave him the message about the pickets he told me he had no concerns with crossing the picket lines. We were

fortunate that the other unions found some loophole for bypassing those picket lines and they were

soon removed.

The Administration Building was a part of the

second phase of construction. We had planned to have a cornerstone laid at the base of the Administration Building, a cornerstone to commemorate

the construction of the entire site. We had a corner- stone prepared with the names of President

Kennedy, Secretary Hodges, Assistant Secretary

Hollomon, and Allen Astin. President Kennedy was

assassinated before that stone could be laid. A sec- ond stone was then prepared for President Johnson,

but the Administration decided that he should

make fewer public appearances because of increased fears of assassination. As some of you

know, there was no formal cornerstone ceremony,

and instead a simple date stone was then placed near the entrance to the Administration Building.

A metal plaque placed on the interior wall of the

Administration Building near the entrance was unveiled when the dedication of the site took place in

1966, 25 years ago. Those two cornerstones, bearing

the names of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, were still stored somewhere in the recesses of the

Supply and Plant Building when I left here several

years ago. The dedication in 1966 represented the

culmination of the planning and construction of facilities, but the actual construction of the final

phases continued somewhat beyond that.

There had been five principal phases of construction in all for the Gaithersburg facilities. The

largest of them was Phase III, the seven General

Purpose Laboratory Buildings. Phase III was actually divided into two parts, Phase IIIA for the footings and foundations and IIIB for the structures. In

addition to the five major phases, two additional

separate contracts were placed, one for the Reactor

and the other for the Non-Magnetic facility. Construction of the last of the buildings in the Gaithersburg Relocation was in 1969. In all, the buildings

contained over 2.2 million gross square feet, with over 1.3 million assignable. The total cost exceeded

$120 million.

The ten years that I spent on the planning and

construction of these facilities were certainly some

of the busiest and most rewarding of my career. Thousands of decisions had to be made in those

years, and it was very gratifying that there were so many well-qualified people at the National Bureau

of Standards to assist in or to make those decisions.

The services of the Gaithersburg Planning Group,

the division representatives, the committee of scientists who established the criteria for the laboratories, the Laboratory Services Committee, the

Laboratory Furniture Committee, the Office Furniture Committee, the electromagnetic interference

54
coordinator, and many others provided services

which cannot be adequately recognized in words.

The work of each of these would be a story worth

hearing in itself. Finally, I want to acknowledge the

confidence and support I received from Allen

Astin throughout this period. Whenever I went to him for advice or for a recommendation, he was

always thoughtful and considerate and prompt in

his response. These laboratories are a memorial to him.

55
Hi

Lawrence M. Kushner

Introduction by Emanuel Horowitz

We now come to a very special part of the program, which we call "Spinoffs from the NBS Laboratory." Dr. Larry Kushner will be the moderator

of this session. He joined the NBS in 1948 as a

physical chemist in the Chemistry Division. In

1961, he became the Chief of the Metallurgy Division, taking over from Dr. James Hoffman, Jack

Hoffman's father. It is interesting that two

chemists, Jim Hoffman and Larry, headed the

Metallurgy Division for about 10 years. In 1969,

Dr. Astin appointed Larry as the Deputy Director

of NBS. For a time, he also served as the Acting

Director of this laboratory. He then received a

presidential appointment as a commissioner of the

Consumer Products Safety Commission and served

there, according to those who followed his work,

extraordinarily well, until he returned to NBS. Almost all roads lead back to NBS. On his retirement

from NBS, he joined the MITRE Corporation and

became a consulting scientist. Since his retirement

from the MITRE Corporation, Larry has undertaken a very serious task. He's trying to improve his

golf game, so that he will no longer be humiliated

by his champion golf partner and wife, Shirley.

Larry Kushner.

56
SPINOFFS: AN ADDITIONAL MEASURE OF SUCCESS

INTRODUCTION OF PANEL

Lawrence M. Kushner

Never mind the Teamsters. One of the panelists

has threatened me with bodily harm if I take too

much time in the introduction here. I'm going to

try to move expeditiously. The final portion of to- day's program is devoted to organizational spinoffs

from the Bureau, several of which went on to

become important laboratories in their own right.

This panel discussion actually reflects a special

pride in this uniquely NBS mode of operation,

which has been commonplace throughout the Bureau's history. After all, for most of the first half of

the Bureau's existence, it was undeniably the Government's principle multi-disciplinary physical sci- ence and engineering laboratory. As situations arose in which a Government agency's responsibilities required the rapid initiation of a laboratory

program, the Bureau was invariably turned to. As

that agency's requirements subsequently grew, the

work was enlarged, and the agency itself became

better able to manage its own technical work, the

performing groups at NBS were transferred, often

taking on their own identities as important laboratories.

We have three panelists this afternoon who are going to talk about three of the very well-known

spinoffs from the Bureau, but without attempting

to be complete, I'd like to mention just a few others. In 1953, the Bureau's Guided Missile Laboratory in Corona, California, was transferred to the

Navy, becoming the Naval Ordnance Laboratory,

Corona. The Bureau's Institute for Numerical

Analysis, then working on Navy and Air Force

problems, was transferred to UCLA in 1954. In the

late 1960s, several long-standing product testing

operations at the Bureau were transferred to GSA,

the Government Services Administration, nucleating that agency's own in-house testing laboratory.

In 1973, several groups were transferred to the

newly created Consumer Products Safety Commission, as the nucleus of that agency's Product Safety

Laboratory. There have been many, many other

spinoffs. As I say, I can't possibly list them all. There are problems of definition as to what constitutes a legitimate spinoff, I guess. But Steffen

Peiser reminds me that while no spinoffs as such

were involved, the Bureau, through individual staff

members acting as consultants, had a profound influence on the establishment of the Korea Standards Research Institute, the Taiwanese Centre for

Measurement Standards, the Turkish Standards

Institute, and the Japanese National Research

Laboratory of Metrology. In retrospect, we may

have been too helpful for our own good.

57
Introduction by Lawrence M. Kushner

I'd like to introduce the first speaker, one of the

Bureau's more colorful members over the years,

Jake Rabinow. Jake was born in Russia, educated

in New York City, with a bachelor's and graduate

degree in electrical engineering. After a few jobs

during the Depression, he ended up here at the

Bureau in 1938 as a mechanical engineer. His tal- ents were very quickly recognized. He rose quickly,

ultimately becoming Chief of the Electromechanical Ordnance Division. In 1954, he was a personal

spinoff from the Bureau. He left and formed his

own company, which was subsequently taken over by the Control Data Corporation, of which he became a vice president. In 1968, he also formed an

additional company of his own, which was subsequently acquired by Harmon Kardon Corporation.

In 1972, he rejoined the Bureau, and in April 1989,

he finally retired from Government service and is now a consultant to NIST in connection with the

evaluation of inventions. Jake is one of the nation's

most highly honored inventors. He holds over 200

patents, several fistfuls of important national

awards and recognitions, and it is a pleasure for me

to introduce the person who threatened me physically, Jake Rabinow.

58
DIAMOND ORDNANCE FUZE LABORATORY AND NATIONAL

INVENTORS COUNCIL

Jacob Rabinow

I asked you to make a short introduction. You're

cutting into my time. As a matter of fact, if Chet

Page is here I'd like to tell about the time he and I were arguing. We both speak very fast. Cledo

Brunneti came over and listened to us and said,

"You people speak too fast." Chet stopped for a moment and said, "You listen too slowly," and

kept going. Please listen fast. My first story is not about a spinoff, but about a

spin-in. It's about the National Inventors Council

(NIC). It's worth telling but I have only five minutes for it. In August 1940, the Secretary of Commerce, who was then Harry Hopkins, at the

suggestion of scientists, engineers, and others, felt that we had to get the lay inventors (that is, the

non-professionals, and perhaps the professionals

who are not part of large organizations) to submit

inventions to the Government to help the war effort. This was based on the philosophy and the fact

that most of the great inventions for military use were not made by military people but were made

by civilians. If there were time I would give you a long list, but it's interesting that it's the civilians

who do this. This relates to something I'll talk

about later. Anyway, the way it operated, the Secretary of Commerce would invite famous inventors,

engineers, scientists, physicists, and chemists to serve the country by giving advice to him or to his

subordinates. The technical people served without

pay. Eventually they had a staff to help them.

The first chairman of the NIC was Charles Kettering, Director of Research of General Motors.

After his death, Dr. Stark Draper became the

chairman.

It would be a revolving kind of organization, so every year there would be some new members. I joined this outfit in the 1960s. It was a very great

pleasure to work with people who were much

smarter than me. I was once asked the definition of

a genius. I said, "A genius is a guy you meet at a

cocktail party. He asks you, 'What do you do for a

living?' You say, 'I build reading machines.' He

says, 'What are they?' So you start explaining, and

five minutes after you start he knows more than

you do."

Anyway, this system existed for quite a while. I'll give you just a few numbers. By the end of the war

the Council had received over half a million submissions. Most of them were junk, as you'd expect

to get from amateurs: perpetual motion machines,

enclosed turbines that have no outlet, accelerations

produced without ejecting any material, all kinds of

wonderful things. Of these, some 500 were considered promising, and they were sent to various Government agencies to get support. By the end of the

war, 106 of those were actually in production. The

reason I tell you this story is because the Bureau of

Standards was very much involved in this work.

The Committee used the Bureau to evaluate inventions. Of this quarter of a million, some 700 were

evaluated by the staff here.

I wish I could tell you some of the stories about

some of the inventions, silly and otherwise. The

overall mail that this group received over its life- time was 625,000 submissions. Many of them were

not considered inventions because we would get a postcard saying, "I have a perpetual motion machine that will win all the wars," or "I have a weapon that doesn't require anything, but it kills everybody." But the thing that was interesting is that some of the ideas were good. For example, the

mercury battery was one of the submissions. This is the little battery that went into hearing aids, and

eventually led to the development of many other

small batteries. It was invented by Sam Rubin, who

eventually became a member of the Council. The

production of those things was so enormous that if you compute only the taxes on the profits, they

would have certainly paid for the Inventors Council

many times over. The National Inventors Council

was a wonderful group of people, and it was a most

exciting thing to work with them.

In 1974, Betsy Ancker-Johnson who was Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Science and Technology, decided that this organization should be

abolished. The Bureau of Standards, by that time,

was handling the paperwork, the publishing of documents, handling travel, etc. We published a couple of books. She decided to save some money, so she abolished the National Inventors Council. She

felt that it had run its course and she had enough

advice without it. She thought that she could save

six jobs (which she didn't). The jobs continued, be- cause the Bureau's Council people were not working on this project anyway.

At the same time, Congress in its wisdom knew

that we were helping inventors, so it wrote us into a

bill called the Federal Nonnuclear Energy Research and Development Act of 1974. There's a paragraph that says the Bureau of Standards shall

59
evaluate promising inventions submitted by individual inventors and small companies for the purpose

of obtaining direct grants from the Administrator.

So, instead of six jobs, which we were going to save, we now had some 28. George Lewett manages this

work. We evaluate inventions again, only this time

the Government does give grants to inventors. The

way it works is that we receive the submission; we

evaluate it (I say we because I work there as a consultant); we decide that some of them are good; we

send them to the Department of Energy with a rec- ommendation to support the invention. This takes a book about an inch thick because everybody

wants documentation so they won't be caught ignorant of how the device works and how much it will

cost. We have looked over some 30,000 in the last

five or six years, of which about 500 have been considered good enough to get grants. The grants produce industrial products and I'm told that so far

the total production has produced some $400 million worth of business. The taxes on this would certainly pay for our work.

The only thing I want to say to this audience is that it's hard to say whether such efforts are worth

doing except for these statistics. But it does give

the individual inventor a feeling that the Government can do something good for him. George

Lewett would like to expand the work so that not

only energy-related inventions would be evaluated.

By the way, that's a pretty sloppy limitation. Almost anything can be assumed to be energy-related. But George would like to support all kinds of

inventions, because many people do have good

ideas. As a matter of fact, all my friends are inventors. They always come to me with the statement

that they have a million-dollar invention. Someday,

somebody will come to me and say, "I have a $100,000 invention," and I'll drop dead.

Now I have to tell you about the Harry Diamond

Ordnance Laboratories, which was an NBS spinoff.

In 1940, the President issued an Executive Order

to set up a group called the Office of Scientific

Research and Development (OSRD). This group

was to no longer use the lay public. It collected

scientists who could really help, and people from

industry. The Government also set up the National

Defense Research Committee (NDRC) which a year later became part of the OSRD. The purpose

of this effort was to set up facilities (in laboratories, universities, and private industry) where there

was any hope of helping the war effort which was

already coming. There were some 12 committees

organized to coordinate the work. Vannevar Bush

was the first chairman of the OSRD, and Dr.

James B. Conant became chairman of the NDRC

and served from 1941 to 1945.

The way I became involved in this work is probably worth telling. I had two degrees, as you heard,

in electrical engineering. I came out of school in

1934, and I worked in radio factories for $12 a week. That was before President Roosevelt did a

terrible thing and made the minimum wage $14 a week. My boss at that time complained that he

couldn't make a living by paying people $14 a week.

Occasionally when I lecture, I mention this to stu- dents and they ask, "Do you mean a week, or do

you mean an hour?" I say, "I mean a week."

I took some competitive exams and did very well

on the electrical engineering exam. I got 99, and

Izzy Rotkin here in the audience got 100. After I came to the Bureau (and I think this is also worth

telling) one of the men with whom I worked said, "I marked your exam paper." The Bureau of Standards was marshaled to mark the papers because

80,000 people took those exams. I said, "Thank you

for giving me a 99." He said, "You didn't get a 99."

I said, "But I have a paper from the Civil Service

Commission saying I got 99 on the competitive

exam." He said, "You didn't get it. What happened

is that the people in New York City and other

northern places did very well, but some southern

states didn't get a single engineer with a mark of

60, which was required. Since it is a competitive

exam, we just raised everybody by a formula. Then

some unfortunate people finally passed, but not in

sufficient numbers, so we raised it by another formula." I said, "What did I really get?" He said, "I have no idea." Anyway, I did much worse on the

mechanical engineering exam. At one time in 1938

I was looking for my civil service papers, and

through a series of accidents, I became a mechanical engineer at NBS, which I still am, I suppose.

I got involved with ordnance work after being

here for a couple of years. I was a P-l, which is the

lowest rank. My boss was Mr. Stutz. He was a Section Chief. Above him was Dr. Hugh Dryden. One

day in 1941 Dryden said to me, "Come." I said,

"Where?" "Come." If Dr. Dryden could use one

word, that's all he would use. If he could use no

words, he would just motion. He took me to an- other building, opened a door, and there I saw a beehive of activity. A better way to put it is to say it was a madhouse. This was the ordnance group. He

called over a young man and said, "Bill, this is Jake. He has some mechanical aptitude." That's

the highest compliment I ever got from him or from anyone. He walked out and thus I was introduced into the proximity fuze work.

Bill was Bill McLean, who was a Ph.D. in

physics. He was also the best engineer I ever knew.

He eventually invented the sidewinder missile. He

really was quite a guy. I said, "What do you do

here?" He said, "You'll see." We worked on all sorts of things at the same time. We had no organization—no sections, no divisions, no nothing, no

paperwork. Somebody paid for whatever we did.

60
Who paid, I have no idea. If you wanted something, you picked up the phone and called Bell

Labs, Eastman Kodak, Zenith, Philco. They all worked for us. "I want the following," and you got

it, usually without paying for it either because they

were patriotic or because it was too much trouble

to charge. The swindles that developed later (the

racket of writing proposals, evaluating proposals,

competitive bidding for R&D, which is nonsense to

start with) simply didn't exist. We worked on everything at the same time. After half a year of this I stopped Dr. Dryden and asked, "Dr. Dryden, who

is my boss? For whom do I work? What is the organization?" He said, "Jake, don't be stupid. I have

no idea."

I'll tell you some of the things we worked on. We

worked on proximity fuzes, which are gadgets that

trigger a bomb or a rocket when it gets close to the

target. We worked on toss bombing, which is a technique of throwing bombs, not simply dropping

them. That's the way all big bombs are thrown now. You can throw a bomb one way and you go the

other way. That's very useful when you're throwing an H-bomb or an A-bomb. We worked on guided

missiles, which were the first completely automatic

weapons of that type. We worked on trench mortar

shells and fuzes for them. As a matter of fact,

printed circuits were invented for these fuzes by a contractor and Harry Diamond loved the idea, so we revolutionized the making of electronic devices.

We worked on hand grenades; we worked on rockets. We actually made rockets that were loaded at the Bureau and then fired north of Van Ness

Street. Bill McLean and I used to fire rockets in

among the trees behind the Hot Shoppe on

Connecticut Avenue. North of Van Ness Street

were woods. There were very few buildings. In

those days, nobody cared if there were explosions.

People pretended they didn't hear them. We used

to fire three-inch rockets among the trees there.

One of the rockets got away from me and it was

going for the Hot Shoppe. The rocket hit a high

tree and it never hit the Hot Shoppe. These rockets

didn't have any warhead; they were dummies. But

it would have made one hell of a hole in the roof of

the restaurant.

We had wonderful bosses: Astin, Hinman, Diamond, Condon, Ellett. Ellett, by the way, was my

first boss. He was a professor of physics from Iowa

State University. The people were not only our

bosses, but one of the wonderful things about the

people was that they were personally involved with

what we were doing. That is, they would come and

watch the test. Sometimes they would go to the

proving grounds with us. They also permitted us to do a lot of bootleg work. The result of that bootleg

work was that we could do many interesting things.

We had a lot of money so there was no question

about having to justify the work. For instance, I worked on record players. How does a needle track a groove? If Edison had known how complicated

that was, he would never have invented the record

player. We built a reading machine here. We built

the first magnetic disk file for computers because

we worked with the Census Bureau, helping them

buy the first UNIVAC. What happened was the

Census Bureau wanted to buy the first UNIVAC

for the 1950 census (to get rid of some of the

punchcard problems) and they didn't know how to order it. Nobody else did, so they asked the Bureau

to help them. We helped them to write some of the

specs. One of the wonderful things you do when

you are trying to buy something so new, is that you

write the specs after the developers do what they

do. You keep modifying the specs as they modify

the machine, and in the end, the specs agree with

the machine. It's really quite wonderful. This is the

way most research is done.

For examples of more such work I built a heart

pump for a group at George Washington University. Henry Kalmus, whom was with me one day

watching an operation on a dog, was told by the

doctors that they would like to know how fast the

blood flowed through the veins and arteries. So

Kalmus invented an ultrasonic system of sending

sound waves through the blood, without cutting

into the organ. He could tell by the phase shift and

the frequency shifts how fast the blood flowed. I walked into the guided missile laboratory one day

and saw water pipes all over the floor. I said,

"What's that?" He said, "My boss is having a fit. I'm testing the ultrasonic flowmeter, and he

doesn't think that flowmeters belong in a guided

missile laboratory." But in those days, we got away

with it. As a result of this there's a Rabinow Law: Everything you do illegally, you do efficiently. I think I don't need to explain this to you. The paperwork is zero when you do this kind of work. There's one

other great virtue that people don't realize. When

you do formal work, if it doesn't work you keep

doing it. You hope that you can drag it out long

enough to be a success or long enough so you will

not get blamed. When you do things illegally, if it doesn't work, you bury it real quick. You don't

drag it out.

The organization grew. We were very rich. In

1952, the national election was coming (I debated

whether I should really name the party that won,

and I decided that you people know it was the Republican Party). We heard an interesting rumor before the election, that if the Republicans won, the

Ordnance Labs would be broken away from the

Bureau and given to a private company, which I

will not name, as a prize of war. There are a few

laboratories which are run by industry for a "dollar

61
a year," and this was going to be one of them. We

didn't like that very much. Of course, the election was won by the Republicans, and as you heard this

morning, the battery additive hit the fan. I use the

analogy carefully. Then we heard another rumor

that we would not be given to private industry, but

we would be taken over by the Department of Defense. The way that was to happen was that the

Kelly Committee (that you heard about this morning), said that we were the tail of the dog, and the

tail was bigger than the dog. We were very rich. We

had by this time some 1,600 people, mostly in

Washington, some in Corona. Apparently, the

Kelly Committee, perhaps because they really felt that the Bureau should do more basic work, more

scientific work, and less technology like we were

doing (or partly maybe to get the Secretary of

Commerce off the hook), felt that the Bureau

should be split.

I had worked in many arsenals during the war. We often traveled to arsenals to test weapons. A

military laboratory is a very formal institution.

They're very worried about improper explosions,

which happen. The directing officer is rotated ev- ery two or three years. He never knows who his successor will be, so the officers don't like to criti- cize each other. Generally, the administration of

arsenals develops a stiff and formal attitude, certainly not good for guys like me. I heard General

Simon, head of Army R&D, once tell us that "you

cannot do original research in a military establishment. You have to have a civilian laboratory with

whatever craziness it has."

Next rumor we heard was that we would become

a military laboratory. One fine morning, Harold

Goldberg, who was Chief of one of the divisions,

Mike Domsitz, who was another, and I, who

headed a third, were called into a conference with

General Simon and Allen Astin. They informed us

that after all due consideration we would become a

military laboratory. I said, "But General, I have a couple of questions to ask you. You know that

that's not a good thing to do. Why can't we be

some kind of civilian lab?" He said, "I'm sorry, Jack, but rules are rules. I have to live with the

Government. We decided to do this as the best

thing, if we don't want to give you to the private

industry that wanted to have you. I don't think they

deserve you. We spent a lot of money forming you.

We like the organization. We'll take you over and

do the best we can with you." I said, "General, how

many bosses will I have in the next 20 years?" He

said, "Six or seven." I said, "What are the chances

they all will like me and tolerate the way I operate?" He said, "No chance at all." I said, "Yes, I know. I'm quitting because I've been offered more

money than I get here, and because I want to develop my own inventions. I want to try to do some

consulting." The other two Division Chiefs also

quit at the same time.

By this time, I was a P-8. I had started as a P-l.

You have to understand what a P-8 is. Some of you

know. By the time I was a P-8, God was a P-9, and

I could get three times as much in salary. But I didn't do that. I decided that I'd open my own

company with one mechanic, and since I had offers to do consulting work, I decided on that. What

happened was, of course, the ordnance work of

NBS was transferred. But these Division Chiefs were asked to stay for 6 months to smooth over the

transfer, which we did. Harry Diamond Laboratory

stayed physically at the same site for some time.

I was a spinoff. So was the Harry Diamond Lab.

Spinoff is a crazy word when you get kicked out. There was another spinoff at the same time. Bruno

Weinschel, who worked in the Ordnance Laboratory, left in 1952 and formed Weinschel Engineering in Gaithersburg and was very successful. He

and I differed in what we did. I did only industrial

R&D and no production. I did no military work at

all. That wasn't because of any moral commitments. I was very proud of my military work. I re- mained an unpaid consultant to the Pentagon for

many years. But I wanted to know if I could still do

something where a dollar was a dollar. In ordnance

work, in military research to this day, you lose all sense of value. If you want to use diamonds for a bearing, you use diamonds. If you want platinum,

you get platinum. If you want to make a device that

should cost two bucks and it costs two thousand,

nobody objects, because nobody knows. I wanted to know if I could still do engineering— after all, I'd

been an engineer once— where a buck was still a buck. So I worked for private industry. I did get

involved with the Post Office some years later, but even here a buck was very tight and competition was tough. I found it was a different world. I have

nothing but contempt for much of the way ord- nance work is done now. Not the technology, but

the pricing and the competitive bidding, and the nonsense about evaluation by another bidder, and

the Government engineer sitting at a desk and

handing out money. The half-life of an engineer

today is five years. If he hands out money, after five

years he doesn't know what he's doing, so that the

work is always done on contract. I don't understand why we don't fight wars on contract and give

it to highest bidder.

The spinoff was the Harry Diamond Labs,

Rabinow Engineering, and Weinschel Engineering.

That's all I can tell you. I wish there was time to answer questions, because I skipped so much. Oh!

62
I have to tell you one sequel to this tale. People

later said, "That rumor about the company taking us over was only a rumor." That was a fact. The

way it happened is very interesting. I asked General Simon if it was true. He said, "Yes, the story is true." And then, as the years go by, who should

become a client of Rabinow Engineering but that

same company, and I got to know the Chairman of

the Board, who was a very nice guy. They wanted

us to build some robots for them. He said to me

one day at lunch, "Jack, where did you work before

you had your own company?" I said, "I worked at the Bureau of Standards." He said, "What did you

do?" I said, "I worked in the Ordnance Department." He said, "Oh! That was the thing we were

going to take over and run for the Government for

nothing." I said, "Why would you want to do

that?" He said, "Patriotism." And for all I know,

he meant it.

63
ft

Paul J. Brown

Introduction by Lawrence M. Kushner

Our next speaker is Paul Brown. Paul is going to

talk about the transfer from NBS to the Department of Transportation, of a good bit of work here

that had to do with automotive safety that was ini- tiated in the period after World War II, and grew

at the Bureau as the Department of Transportation

was established and put money into the Bureau to conduct research and testing on important automotive components. Our speaker, Paul Brown, is an

engineer. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in engineering administration from Washington University in St. Louis. He joined the Bureau in 1966 after having a number of engineering management positions in

industry. At the Bureau, he headed up the automotive safety work. In 1972, the entire package of au- tomotive safety research and testing at the Bureau

was transferred to the Department of Transportation becoming the technical arm of the then new

National Highway Traffic Safety Agency. I regard

this spinoff as in the classic mold, that is, the Bureau taking on some early work when an agency

didn't have its own technical capabilities, building

it up to a point at which it was viable, and then

when the other agency was ready to accept it, transferring it to the agency.

I'd like now to call on Paul Brown, who when

leaving the Department of Transportation, went to the Department of Energy, where he became involved and very much interested in electric vehicles. Now, in his "retirement," is the Executive

Director of the Electrical Vehicle Association of

the Americas. Paul Brown.

64
AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY LABORATORY

Paul J. Brown

Introduction

It is indeed an honor and a privilege to be part of

this Symposium in Celebration of the Ninetieth

Anniversary of NBS/NIST. Some 24 years ago, in

1967, the National Bureau of Standards established an automotive safety laboratory at the old site at Connecticut and Van Ness in Washington, D.C.

Accompanying me today is my close friend and

colleague, Dr. F. Cecil Brenner. As a scientist-engineer team we recruited the staff, planned the

programs and fought for funding each year from

the Department of Transportation. Dr. Brenner

also was directly responsible for the management

of the Tire Division's research programs. Representing the staff of that laboratory, we can state that we were proud to have been part of the history

of the National Bureau of Standards.

Let us go back in time to the fall of 1966. There

was a concern over the growing number of fatalities

on our nation's highways that had reached over

50,000 a year, as well as some 3 million serious injuries a year, that led to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of

1966. On September 9, 1966, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Act, he stated that this effort was second only to Vietnam in the priorities of

his Administration.

/. Laboratory History and Mission

The Office of Vehicle Systems Research in NBS

was established by a Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Secretary of Commerce, Alexander Trowbridge, and the Secretary of

Transportation, Alan Boyd. Boyd had been the

Undersecretary of Commerce for Transportation

under Trowbridge and became the first Secretary

of Transportation when the Department was cre- ated by Congress in 1966.

The Office of Vehicle Systems Research

(OVSR) was funded by the interagency transfer of

funds from the Department of Transportation until

the transfer into the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 1972 in ac- cordance with the original Memorandum of

Understanding. In March 1972 the entire laboratory facility and professional staff were transferred

to the Department of Transportation, and our name was changed to the Safety Research Laboratory. The laboratory was located in the Industrial

Building of the old NBS until we were relocated

during the Nixon Administration to leased facilities

in Riverdale, Maryland.

The objectives of the laboratory were to provide

the scientific and technical bases for motor vehicle

safety performance standards in three areas: tire

systems, braking systems, and occupant restraint

systems. An additional important and challenging

task was to provide the technical basis for a Uniform Quality Grading System for Tires.

2. Occupant Restraint Systems

Prior to the passage of the National Traffic and

Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, the National

Bureau of Standards was responsible for the implementation of a seat belt law. That law did not re- quire that the auto industry install seat belts in

cars, but if they elected to install seat belts, the

belts had to meet or exceed the design standards

promulgated under the seat belt law. The specifications and methods of testing the design standard

for seat belts were developed by NBS in consultation and consensus with seat belt companies and

the auto industry. The testing of seat belt assemblies was done on the OVSR Instron. Important

design standards for strength, elongation, flexing,

stain and moisture resistance, and retractor performance were established to ensure that seat belt re- straint systems installed in motor vehicles

operating on U.S. highways would protect the motoring public.

One of the major tasks of OVSR/NBS was to

improve the dynamic performance of the available

anthropomorphic dummies to better simulate human reactions in the automotive crash. A unique

and very economical sled was designed and fabricated by OVSR to provide a dynamic test of occu- pant restraint systems and to evaluate

anthropomorphic dummy performance. The impact

pulse of the vehicle is simulated by a belt over a cam that pulls the sled in reverse. On the Daisy Decelerator at the Holloman Air

Force Base, the Air Force and the NBS conducted

human volunteer experiments on car seats with lap

belts alone, and lap belts and shoulder harnesses in

levels up to 16g which represents a 17 mph auto

crash into a barrier. With identical tests on dummies we could determine what changes in dummy

design were necessary to improve the human fi- delity of test dummies. The high-speed motion pictures and test data were shared with the

automotive safety community in a special meeting

65
in the NBS Red Auditorium in Gaithersburg. Some

200 members of the automotive safety community,

including overseas guests, attended this meeting.

Our human volunteer test data were used and cited

in the Federal Register as justification for mandating

shoulder harnesses in motor vehicles.

The discomfort and inconvenience of seat belts

and shoulder harnesses were early issues that contributed to the low usage rates. OVSR conducted a study of existing and experimental restraint systems

with a number of different-sized male and female

volunteers to make recommendations for improvement in retractor location and the use of inertia

reel retractors.

3. Braking Systems

A dual-end inertial dynamometer designed and

built to the OVSR specification was used to test and evaluate braking systems of automobiles and

trucks. On the dynamometer, inertia discs were

used to simulate any vehicle from a small compact

passenger car to a large truck or bus up to 80,000

pounds gross vehicular weight.

In a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Army

at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, we were able to conduct tests using a number of instrumented tractor-trailer rigs for wet pavement performance in

straight-ahead stopping, lane changes, and brakingin-a-turn maneuvers. In these tests on the Aberdeen 11-mile strip and skid pad that NBS

installed, we were able to test and evaluate the ef- fectiveness of the new anti-skid braking systems.

The braking system performance for repeated

stops, fading, and brake lining or disc wear can be

evaluated on the dynamometer. The ducts over the

test specimen simulate the cooling of the brakes

that occurs in the wheel well as the vehicle travels over the road.

Correlation of the laboratory dynamometer tests with vehicle road braking performance was obtained through instrumented vehicles on test tracks. Laboratory and vehicle test methods for

safety performance standards for vehicle braking

systems and brake components such as lining and

disc pads, cups, seals, and cylinders, were developed by OVSR. A chemical laboratory at OVSR

also developed the safety standards for hydraulic

brake fluids, and pioneered by field and laboratory

tests the determination of the adverse affects of

water pickup by brake fluids over time on lowering

the reflux boiling temperature.

4. Tire Systems

Tire research at NBS preceded the Motor Vehicle Safety Law by many years. Early in automotive

history, an "NBS Tire Test Wheel" was developed

to evaluate the strength of various materials for

tires. The test wheel was being used by the tire and

auto industries to determine the load-carrying ca- pacity of pneumatic tires at different velocities.

OVSR ran a large number of tire tests in the laboratory and in vehicle tests to verify the load ratings

for the initial tire safety standards.

Skidding on wet pavements was determined from

accident statistics to be the predominant tirerelated safety issue particularly with worn tires. Skid trailers were used to measure the coefficient

of friction of pavements using a standard tire. OVSR used and modified a skid trailer for the

measurement of new and used tires. The laboratory also tested tires on vehicles in spin out maneuvers on a Standard J Turn at Texas A&M. One of

the results of this research was the requirement to place treadwear indicators in the bottom of the

grooves in tires, which required replacement of the

tires when the tires were worn to 1/8 inch of the

bottom of the groove.

The laboratory also developed a Mobile Tire

Traction Dynamometer to measure braking, driving, or cornering traction over a wide range of driving conditions. The dynamometer is a towed trailer

similar to the skid trailer with watering capability

to measure wet pavement performance but with

the added capability of changing the steering, camber, and braking during road operation.

5. The Uniform Tire Quality Grading System

One of the biggest challenges to the Safety Laboratory was the development of the controversial

Uniform Quality Grading System for Tires mandated by the law. From a host of tire performance

attributes, treadwear, traction, and temperature re- sistance were selected for the grading system. To

measure treadwear, the laboratory established a prescribed test on the public roads in Texas. For

wet traction, the laboratory constructed standard

concrete and asphalt skid pads. To measure temperature resistance, the laboratory tire test wheels were used.

It is significant to note that the tire industry was

opposed to any quality grading system for tires

from their marketing point of view. They spent

considerable resources in fighting the rulemaking

all the way to the Supreme Court where the Government's position was sustained in large part due

to the technical and scientific basis provided by the

laboratory. However, one of the tire companies

that strongly opposed the rulemaking is now citing

the grading of its tires under the Government sys- tem in its advertising.

Operating out of the Goodfellow Air Force Base

in San Angelo, Texas, the Safety Research Laboratory developed the test procedures for measuring

66
treadwear on this course. Convoys of vehicles with

test tires were run over Texas public roads to determine the treadwear after a day's run. Wear

measurements were made by a laser device developed by the laboratory to measure and record precisely to within ten-thousandths of an inch the wear

of the day's operation. Tests were completed to tire

wearout. This data determined that comparative

treadwear ratings could be made after 6,400 miles

and a break-in of 800 miles of operation over the

NHTSA prescribed course. To measure wet traction performance, two standard skid pads were constructed at the Goodfellow

Air Force Base, one concrete and one asphalt for

the comparative testing and grading of tires. On the sidewall of your tires, the treadwear, wet

traction, and temperature resistance properties are graded in accordance with the test procedures and

the test facility established by the laboratory at the

Goodfellow Air Force Base. We believe that the

tire grading system will enable you to make an informed choice in your selection of replacement

tires.

Summary and Conclusions

This then has been a quick overview of the Office of Vehicle Systems Research that was spawned

in the National Bureau of Standards. We are con- vinced that the laboratory made a significant contribution to the development of safety performance

standards for motor vehicles that have resulted in

the saving of lives and reduction of injuries on our

nation's highways. Thank you for inviting us back

today to participate in your 90th Anniversary.

67
C. Gordon Little

Introduction by Lawrence M. Kushner

Our final speaker this afternoon is Dr. Gordon

Little, who is going to talk about the Central Radio

Propagation Laboratory and its spinoff from the

Bureau. Dr. Little was educated in Manchester,

England, where he received a bachelor of science

degree in 1948, and a Ph.D. in radio astronomy in

1952. In 1953, he came to the United States, where

he became Deputy Director and Research Professor in the Geophysical Institute at the University of

Alaska. He was there until 1958, at which time he

left to join the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory at Boulder. He transferred with the CRPL to the Environmental Science Services Administration, that is ESSA, in 1965. It subsequently became

part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1970. Dr. Little resigned from

NOAA in 1986, and since 1987 he has been with

the Navy, based in Monterey, California, but he is a Senior Fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Dr. Gordon Little.

68
CENTRAL RADIO PROPAGATION LABORATORY

C. Gordon Little

Fifty years ago, at the outbreak of World War II, the United States combined Chiefs of Staff were

faced with many technical problems. One of the

most important of these was how to communicate

with aircraft, ships, and armies overseas. The only

known way to communicate with such locations beyond the horizon was by reflecting high frequency

(HF) radio waves off the ionosphere — that is, off

the electrically conducting ionized layers of the upper atmosphere. The range of radio frequencies effective for this purpose was known to be very

variable. Over the previous 10 to 15 years, the NBS

had identified strong diurnal, annual, and sunspot

cycle variations, which depended also on latitude,

and less strongly on longitude. Moreover, these "irregular" variations were at times greatly disturbed

by ionospheric storms triggered by activity on the

sun. However, by 1939, NBS had begun to prepare

predictions of ionospheric radio wave propagation

conditions one to three months in advance. With

the onset of war, NBS was asked by the Joint

Chiefs of Staff to accept the wartime responsibility

for providing the armed services with radio communication research and services.

In response, then, the National Bureau of Standards formed the Interservice Radio Propagation

Laboratory (IRPL) in the summer of 1942. Its activities included the regular radio standards activities of the Bureau of Standards. IRPL served the

war effort very successfully. Even before the end of

the war, it was recognized that there would be a peacetime need for continued, centralized radio

propagation and radio standards research and ser- vices to support the civilian as well as the military

establishment. So, with interagency and Congressional approval, the wartime IRPL was replaced in

May 1946 by the NBS Central Radio Propagation

Laboratory.

CRPL grew steadily, then, within the National

Bureau of Standards in Washington during the late

1940s, rapidly straining the facilities at the Van

Ness site. During this period, CRPL made many

important contributions, especially in developing

ionospheric and tropospheric forward scatter sys- tems, which greatly expanded the range of frequencies available and the reliability of communication

beyond the horizon. In 1954, in response to the

overcrowding at the Van Ness site, and influenced

by a policy of decentralizing the Government functions from Washington, CRPL completed the move

to Boulder, Colorado. There it had, of course, access to much more space, to a much more varied

terrain and climate, and to a major university.

In the period 1954 to 1965, CRPL continued to expand its radio standards and radio wave propagation studies within NBS, Boulder. But then, in

1965, a major reorganization occurred within the

Department of Commerce. Studies initiated by Dr.

Hollomon, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce

for Science and Technology, had identified many

important similarities between three of his science

agencies; specifically, the Weather Bureau, the

Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the Central Radio

Propagation Laboratory of NBS. And so, in 1965, a new Department of Commerce agency, the Environmental Science Services Administration

(ESSA) was formed by merging these three organizations, with the notable change, of course, that

the radio standards activities stayed with the National Bureau of Standards' Institute for Basic

Standards.

In ESSA, the Central Radio Propagation Lab

was renamed the Institute for Telecommunication

Sciences and Aeronomy (ITSA) and joined three

sister institutes from the Weather Bureau and the

Coast and Geodetic Survey, namely the Institutes

for Atmospheric Science, for Oceanography, and

for Earth Sciences. Together then, these four institutes formed the ESSA Institutes for Environmental Research (IER). These institutes were

headquartered in Boulder, although scattered in

different locations across the country. They re- ported to Boulder, and through Boulder to the Director of IER, located in Boulder, who reported to the Administrator of ESSA in Washington.

The creation of a single, geophysically oriented

research organization from four very different re- search components of greatly different size and

with quite different histories, stature, and traditions, was quite an important challenge. To this

challenge, CRPL/ITSA was very influential. It was

much the largest unit in terms of size and it had

grown up within the National Bureau of Standards—that is to say, within a research organization—whereas the other three institutes had grown

up in operational agencies, whose prime mission

was not research. I personally count myself very

fortunate to have spent the formative years of my

Federal research and research administration career within an excellent organization, the NBS.

NBS, and NIST, of course, is an agency which

understands that its research products are

69
produced low in the organization by its scores of

Section Chiefs and hundreds of Project Leaders,

and not, of course, by top management. They rec- ognize that effective upward and downward communication of new results, new needs, new

priorities, is extremely important to the vitality and

success of the organization. Therefore, it is ex- tremely important that the number of levels in the

hierarchy be kept at a minimum. This is true not

only because such levels consume valuable re- sources, but perhaps more especially because each

level inevitably delays the upward and downward

flow of signals, and typically, unfortunately, to some extent each level distorts, attenuates, and

masks the signals flowing through it. Perhaps one

of the most important contributions CRPL/ITSA

made to the process of forming the research arm of

ESSA was to ensure that in 1967 we succeeded in

persuading the ESSA administrator to abolish the

Institute Director level. So the four Institute Director offices and the associated staffs were dispersed.

One or two left, but in many cases they went down

into the research labs. This allowed the lab directors to report directly to the Director of the Environmental Research Laboratories. I must admit

that this had the additional, though unadvertised,

advantage of ensuring that the Director of IER

would be so busy that he would not have time to micromanage the ten labs. This was a significant

hazard when we had one Director and four Institute Directors and their associated staffs. The single goal traditionally uniting CRPL/ITSA

was to study, understand, model, and predict the

interaction of waves, acoustic and electromagnetic,

with the propagation medium and its boundaries.

But just as there are two sides to a single coin, so there are two reasons why we needed to study

these interactions— first, to understand their effects on telecommunication systems, and second, to use these interactions to provide information about

the propagation media. In other words, to exploit

the interactions, not for telecommunication purposes, but for environmental remote sensing —

a

typical example, as the telecommunication people

would say, of "One man's signal is another man's

noise."

The move of CRPL/ITSA into the Environmental Science Services Administration accentuated

rather than softened this dichotomy between the

two sides of the CRPL coin. Considering first the

telecommunication side of the coin, studies within

the Department of Commerce, stimulated by

ITSA, concluded that the telecommunication policy formation and research needs of the United

States Government were not being met. And so, in

1967, the Department of Commerce formed within

itself the Office of Telecommunications, and within

IER, the two telecommunication labs were united

to form the Institute for Telecommunication Sci- ences (ITS), still remaining within ESSA. In re- sponse to continued studies, in 1970 the Office of

Telecommunications Policy (OTP) was formed in

the Executive Office of the President. At that time,

ITS was transferred from ESSA to the Office of

Telecommunications of the DOC. Then in 1977, a further reorganization combined the policy formation functions of OTP with the policy implementation and supporting research functions of the

Office of Telecommunications in the Department

of Commerce into a new single agency, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Currently in 1991, ITS is still performing some propagation research, especially

to extend radio telecommunications to the higher

millimeter wave frequencies, i.e., the shorter millimeter wavelengths. But its mission has expanded

to include research in support of telecommunications policy formation by OTP, telecommunication

standards (both national and international) technology for telecommunication system evaluation,

and technology transfer to industry. Thus, 25 years

after leaving NBS, ITS is very much alive and hard

at work.

Turning now to the environmental science side

of the CRPL coin, 1967 also saw evolution of the

environmental science component of CRPL/ITSA.

A new lab, the Wave Propagation Laboratory, was

formed to develop new remote sensing techniques

applicable to research and services in the Earth's

atmosphere and ocean. Then in 1970, a further

Federal reorganization added some non-DOC activities, chiefly from the Navy, to ESSA, and ESSA

was given the new name National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). With the

simultaneous transfer of ITS from ESSA/NOAA to OT/DOC, the Institutes for Environmental Research were given their present title, the Environmental Research Laboratories (ERL) of NOAA.

Their headquarters continue to be in Boulder.

For the past two decades, the environmental

science components derived from CRPL have

flourished in ERL, initially in the form of three

labs. The Aeronomy Laboratory has conducted

research on chemical and physical processes in the

Earth's atmosphere to advance the capability to monitor, to predict, and to control its quality.

Currently, their major focuses are research on air

quality and climate, with special emphasis on such

areas as stratospheric ozone depletion, tropospheric ozone production by pollutants, and the

greenhouse effect, acid rain, and climate change.

So a very broad range of air quality and climate

change studies are continuously pursued within the

Aeronomy Laboratory. The Space Environment Laboratory performs research and services

directed towards understanding, monitoring, and

70
forecasting solar and geomagnetic events. These

can have undesirable, harmful, and costly effects

on activities on Earth or in near-Earth environments. They may even be health- or life-threatening. As part of these activities, the Space

Environment Laboratory operates in Boulder,

jointly with the U.S. Air Force Weather Service,

the Space Environment Services Center. This Center provides solar terrestrial prediction services 24

hours a day, year in and year out, for users in the

nation's military and civilian organizations. The

Wave Propagation Laboratory is NOAA's remote

sensing lab. It focuses on studies of the interactions

of acoustic and electromagnetic waves with the at- mosphere and the ocean, with particular reference

to their use for remote sensing purposes. It develops and evaluates new geophysical remote sensing

concepts and systems, and applies the unique advantages of these newly developed remote sensing

techniques, which typically provide two to six

orders of magnitude more data than an individual

thermometer or wind sensor. It seeks, through the

transfer of these new remote sensing technologies

to others, to advance the nation's atmospheric and

oceanographic research, and its atmospheric and

oceanographic forecasting and warning services.

Spinoffs from the Wave Propagation Laboratory,

specifically the PROFS (Program for Regional Observing and Forecasting Services) and the Profiler

Program, a clear air Doppler wind profiling system,

helped form a fourth laboratory, the Forecast System Laboratory. This lab focuses on the development and transfer of new forecast systems for the

nation's weather services or for the National Ocean

Service.

In conclusion, I believe that the National Bureau

of Standards/NIST may well be proud of the impact achieved over the years, and still being

achieved, by its 1965 spinoff child, the Central

Radio Propagation Laboratory.

71
LETTER FROM FREDERICK J. SCHLINK

In early years, around 1900, before a Bureau of

Standards was conceived, buying and selling were

completely uncontrolled by public authorities. The

basis for the vitally needed controls was established

in March 1901 with passage of the law creating a National Bureau of Standards. The Bureau's

Weights and Measures Division came first. It performed newly established pioneering services for

the ultimate consumer by checking the accuracy of

weights essential in industry and trade. The newly

created Federal weight, length, and volume standards were put to widespread use by officers

known as sealers of weights and measures. Their

work provided protection in all the states against

short-weight cheating by thousands of grocers,

butchers, and other retail merchants.

Before weights and measures testing administrations had been developed in states, counties, and

cities, a large proportion of scales in use were

found inaccurate to a degree that caused millions

of dollars of losses to consumers. One of the Bureau's most important services for consumers was the convening of conferences,

which began in 1912 and were held annually

(except in wartime). These conferences were at- tended by weights and measures officials, whose

duties included tests that prevented fraud by merchants in their use of inaccurate scales, and dry and

liquid measures. These well-attended conferences

established tolerances or permissible errors (unavoidable in all commercial measurements).

* * * *

I graduated in 1912 from the University of Illi- nois. I had majored in physics and mechanical engineering and received a B.S. degree. I worked at two

engineering jobs in the Chicago area before I came

to the Bureau of Standards in 1913. At the Bureau

I worked with Mr. Louis Fischer, Dr. Arthur

Pienkowski, Roy Ferner, Fay Holbrook, and

Clarence Briggs. I was testing scales and writing

about scale design and accuracy.

About 1913, track scales, which accounted for

more than $2 billion in freight revenues, had become notorious for inaccuracy. In 1915, very large errors were reported, and 75 to 80 percent of the

scales tested were found completely unfit for ser- vice in establishing charges to shippers of every kind

of product transported by rail. In 1918 I was one of a team of three men using

specially designed equipment built into a box car, capable of placing on a railroad track scale large

iron weights weighing 10,000 lb. each, to a total of

105,000 lb. The railway scale testing equipment was

Frederick J. Schlink (NBS 1913-19), celebrated

his 99th birthday last October 20, 1991, and is the

oldest NBS alumnus. In conjunction with the 90th

anniversary of the Bureau, he was invited to attend

this Symposium. Although he was not able to do

this, he wrote some recollections of NBS in the

teens and of his subsequent career. His letter is re- produced here.

moved into the states of New Jersey, New York,

Connecticut, and Vermont. A second test car was

built; it traveled to the Midwest and southern

states. Of ordinary scales tested in one nine-year

period between 1902 and 1911, errors were com- mon with huge losses for consumers. Around 1918 my paper on variance of instrument

readings was published as the Bureau's Scientific

Paper No. 328 and by a leading engineering and sci- entific journal, Engineering, of London. At that time

it was unusual that an American technical article

would be republished in full in a foreign journal.

Engineering was the most influential of English technical and scientific journals of the period.

I also wrote a number of articles on scales of several types and their design, causes of errors, and

72
other subjects of interest to engineers. Gene Gressley, Professor of History at the University of Wyoming, has filed copies of my articles, estimated at about 75 in number. They have been placed in the

University's American Heritage Center Archives.

In about 1916 I was assigned to an important

task in Chicago. There I worked for several months

at a factory where I conducted acceptance tests for

the Post Office Department on 42,000 postal scales

of a novel type. To reduce costs and weight, these

scales were made chiefly of a sheet metal. Also

tested for accuracy at the same factory were several

hundred thousand auxiliary weights that were part

of the scale assembly.

In one period, the Bureau of Standards took

steps to provide information and printed matter directly useful to consumers. The Bureau published

three major Circulars: Measurements for the Household, Safety for the Household, and Materials for the

Household, (1915-1918). These three books were

an outstanding success, with large sales through the

Government Printing Office. I had a modest part

in the work reflected in these books.

The Bureau received large sums of money from

Federal agencies, for which it conducted hundreds

of tests. One Congressman objected to these financial arrangements on the grounds that they decreased the dependence of the Bureau's projects

and equipment purchases on funds appropriated,

directly, by Congressional action. Another legislator was disturbed by the fact that large appropriated sums were all coming from "a little two-page

law" (the Bureau's Organic Act).

The National Bureau of Standards' policy of not

publishing the names of products which it had

found ineffective or misrepresented, reflects the

hard times which the Bureau had with AD-X2 (an

ineffective chemical product alleged to revive

"dead" storage batteries). The summary dismissal

of Director Astin by the Secretary of Commerce

was universally condemned, with the result that Dr.

Astin was soon reinstated.

Several states and some professional societies

have felt that the public interest warranted bringing

facts about undesirable or unsafe products to public

notice. Connecticut and North Dakota, and the

American Medical Association follow a policy of

naming names where the public interest warrants

this (as it often does).

An officer in the Adjutant General's office of one

of the military services announced that it was absolutely illegal for any Government agency to participate (as many did) in the operations of private

non-governmental bodies such as the American

Standards Association. Their "mixed memberships" made cooperation by official Government

agencies quite improper, he asserted. The Bureau

of Standards remained active in the work of the

American Standards Association and continued

Government representation on the ASA board and

on working committees under the auspices of the

Association.

In 1917 I was appointed Technical Assistant to National Bureau of Standards Director, Dr. Samuel

Stratton. In the same year I received the M.E. degree at the University of Illinois. At the Bureau, and

subsequently in my work as Technical Director and

President of Consumers' Research (a non-profit

consumer product testing organization founded in

1928), my greatest satisfaction was finding inexpensive ways of building devices usable in testing products for accuracy and reliability (postal scales are an

example). I wrote several papers on mechanical

hysteresis as a factor in instrument calibration, and

explained how one could minimize accuracy-disturbing effects of friction. Several papers growing

out of these findings were published by the Bureau

of Standards, and also by the Franklin Institute.

In 1919, while engaged in research at the National Bureau of Standards, I was awarded the Edward Longstreth Medal of the Franklin Institute of

Pennsylvania, for the design of a novel type of

weighing scale of improved precision. While at the

Bureau, I developed certain specialized weighing

and measuring instruments, for which patents were

assigned to the Bureau for free use of the public. I was responsible for the design of several novel test- ing instruments and devices used in the producttesting activities of Consumers' Research. A

number of these have been duplicated by industry

for use in their laboratories, with CR's permission,

and without charge.

In 1919 I organized an instruments control department for a major manufacturer's numerous

pressure and temperature instruments. I prepared

and published specifications for recording thermometers and for pressure gauges. These instruments are vital in the control of manufacturing

processes, and likewise essential for the safety of

persons living or working in close proximity to equipment operating at high pressures and temperatures. After leaving the Bureau, I was employed from

1920 to 1922 by Western Electric Co. in New York

City. My duties were chiefly as a test engineer on

the new automatic telephone equipment being developed for the Bell System.

In 1922 I was appointed Assistant Secretary of

the American National Standards Association,

where I was engaged in assisting Secretary Paul Agnew in numerous administrative duties relating to many aspects of the national voluntary standards

movement.

For many years I served as a member of the Underwriters Laboratories consumer advisory council

and reviewed safety requirements proposed for

73
adoption by the National Standards Institute (UL

is the world's outstanding testing laboratory concentrating on products related to public safety).

Beginning around 1980, 1 served for several years

on a screening and review committee of the American National Standards Institute. I retained an active interest in this committee's work until 1990. I was awarded Honorary Life Membership in the Institute and was named a Life Fellow of several professional societies, including the Franklin Institute

and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. After 1927, I lectured often on consumer subjects, including a short course for graduate home

economics students at the University of Tennessee.

I was co-author of two best-selling books. The

first, Your Money's Worth , was published in 1927.

The second book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, published in 1933, led to the development of badly

needed Federal food and drug regulations. The

earlier book attracted much attention to the public

importance of the work of scientists and engineers

in the Bureau of Standards. It discussed the possibility that the results of the Bureau's research, test- ing, and standards activities could be applied to the

great benefit of consumers in their day-by-day

dealings in the market place.

I am honored in having been able to play a modest part in the early days of NBS, and to record

some facts of interest in the origins and evolution

of a great Federal agency. NBS has been unique in

productivity and service to science and engineering over a period of nine eventful decades. It has been

my good fortune to achieve the title of the oldest

living practitioner of physical science and engineering in the operations of a great and indispensable

Federal institution.

74
NIST-114A U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

(REV. 3-90) NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA SHEET

1 . PUBLICATION OR REPORT NUMBER

NIST/SP-825

2. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER

3. PUBLICATION DATE

April 1992

4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE

NBS/NIST, A Historical Perspective: A Symposium in

Celebration of NIST's Ninetieth Anniversary, March 4, 1991

S. AUTHOR(S)

Karma A. Beal, Editor

6. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION (IF JOINT OR OTHER THAN NIST, SEE INSTRUCTIONS)

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE

NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY

GAITHERSBURG, MD 20899

7. CONTRACT/GRANT NUMBER

8. TYPE OF REPORT AND PERIOD COVERED

Final

9. SPONSORING ORGANIZATION NAME AND COMPLETE ADDRESS (STREET, CITY, STATE, ZIP)

National Institute of Standards and Technology and

Standards Alumni Association, NIST, Gaithersburg , MD 20899

10. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES

11. ABSTRACT (A 200-WORD OR LESS FACTUAL SUMMARY OF MOST SIGNIFICANT INFORMATION. IF DOCUMENT INCLUDES A SIGNIFICANT BIBUOGRAPHY OR

UTERATURE SURVEY, MENTION IT HERE.)

This publication contains the proceedings of NBS/NIST, A Historical

Perspective: A Symposium in Celebration of NIST's Ninetieth Anniversary,

held March 4, 1991, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The symposium, co-sponsored by the Standards Alumni Association and NIST,

highlighted the NBS/NIST contributions to industry over its 90-year

history. The nine papers provide new and interesting insights on

significant historical events and personalities that shaped and influenced

NBS/NIST. Papers include: "Current View," John W. Lyons; "Historical

Perspective: 1901-1970," Elio Passaglia; "Historical Perspective: 1969-

1973," Lewis M. Branscomb; "Historical Perspective: 1973-1988," Ernest

Ambler; "History of the Boulder Laboratories," Robert A. Kamper; "The

Gaithersburg Site," Robert S. Walleigh; "Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory

and National Inventors Council," Jacob Rabinow; "Automotive Safety

Laboratory," Paul J. Brown; and "Central Radio Propagation Laboratory," C.

Gordon Little.

12. KEY WORDS (6 TO 12 ENTRIES; ALPHABETICAL ORDER; CAPITALIZE ONLY PROPER NAMES; AND SEPARATE KEY WORDS BY SEMICOLONS)

Automotive Safety Laboratory; Boulder Laboratories; Central Radio

Propagation Laboratory; Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory; Gaithersburg

Site; JILA; National Bureau of Standards; National Institute of Standards

and Technology

13. AVAILABILITY 14. NUMBER OF PRINTED PAGES

X

UNLIMITED

FOR OFFICIAL DISTRIBUTION. DO NOT RELEASE TO NATIONAL TECHNICAL INFORMATION SERVICE (NTIS).

78

X

ORDER FROM SUPERINTENDENT OF DOCUMENTS, U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE,

WASHINGTON, DC 20402.

15. PRICE

X ORDER FROM NATIONAL TECHNICAL INFORMATION SERVICE (NTIS), SPRINGFIELD, VA 22161.

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