Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

78 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10)
methods for testing a variety of chemical measuring apparatus in large quan-
tities, for which there had been insistent demands. Apparatus designed at
the Reichsanstalt for testing aneroid barometers had been secured, and in
the planning stage was a new program, the testing of watches and other time-
measuring apparatus.
As primary standards, the heat and thermometry section had acquired
a number of specially constructed mercury thermometers in Paris, verified
at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in the range —30 to
550 °C. Gas-filled thermometers and copper-constantan thermocouples, also
at Sèvres, were available for low temperature work down to — 200
°C. In addition, Dr. Waidner had himself constructed as further primary
standards several platinum resistance thermometers in the interval between
100 and 600 °C, as well as the necessary apparatus for their comparison.
As working standards in this same interval were special mercury thermom-
eters of both French and German make, and these were intercompared from
time to time with the platinum resistance thermometers.
The Bureau was therefore prepared to certify almost any precision
thermometer used in scientific work, most low-temperature engineering and
industrial thermometers, and all ordinary commercial thermometers. In
addition, special apparatus had recently been designed and constructed for
testing clinical thermometers on a large scale, permitting 600 of them to be
read at any given temperature in half an hour.
For high-temperature measurements between 600 and 1,600 °C,
the Bureau had as primary standards a number of thermocouples acquired
in Berlin, their scale that used at the Reichsanstalt. (Here it might be
mentioned that America's dependence upon German science and technology
before World War I was never more clearly demonstrated than in the cir-
cumstances of the Bureau's acquisition of its initial basic instrumentation.)
With its German instruments, the Bureau was ready to test and calibrate
extreme range thermocouples, platinum resistance thermometers, and ex-
pansion and optical pyrometers; determine the melting points of metals and
alloys, as well as their specific heats and coefficients of expansion at high
temperatures; and to determine the calorific value of any fuel in common use.
Establishment of these standard scales and the development of the
necessary testing apparatus had taken most of the effort of this section since
1901. Now with much of the basic work completed, Waidner and Burgess
were beginning exploratory research in some of the problems raised by
these scales.
Work in the light and optical instruments section had thus far been
chiefly confined to preliminary investigations in spectroscopic methods of
analysis •and the determination of standard wavelengths and their use in
optical methods of measurement. While waiting on facilities to be provided