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

86 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10)
in the business district were razed before the fire burned out, 30 hours after
it began.62
For over a quarter of a century the National Board of Fire Under-
writers and the National Fire Protection Association •had been advocating
standard couplings for all fire departments but had received little support.
Shortly after the disaster, a Baltimore steamship line called on the Secretary of
Commerce for help with shipboard hose and couplings and the Bureau of
Standards was asked to investigate. Thus several months before its own
humiliating experience, Stratton had already set Albert Merrill of the engi-
neering instruments section to work on the problem of fire.hose couplings.63
Before the investigation ended, over 600 sizes and variations in fire.hose
couplings were collected across the country.
In 1905, a year after Merrill began his study, the National Fire Pro-
tection Association, with the active concurrence of the Bureau, adopted as
the national standard what it considered the most serviceable hose coupling
then in use, together with an interchangeable device for nonstandard cou-
plings. But the expense of converting or replacing fire hose, as well as
normal civic inertia, made agreement in the cities of the Nation a slow proc-
ess. By 1914, 9 years later, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers
reported that only 287 of 8,000 cities and towns had fire.hose couplings and
hydrant outlets conforming to the standard. Up to 1917, 897 cities had
agreed to adopt them, but only 390 had put them in service. By 1924 the
number of cities with standard fire-hose couplings had risen to 700. Con-
version was to continue at this slow pace. In many cases, municipalities
would make the change only when they had experienced their own version
of the Baltimore fire.64
Efforts at standardization in another direction offered somewhat
better, and certainly more spectacular, results. They began in the spring
of 1901 when Louis A. Fischer visited some of the larger cities in New York
State to inquire about their inspection of commercial weights and measures.
The answers were discouraging. On his return he made a compilation of
the laws of all the States relating to weights and measures, revealing a hope-
less tangle of regulations, as remarkable for their variety as for their inade-
quacy. Fischer's section subsequently drew up designs for simple, accurate,
Harold A. Williams, Baltimore Afire (Baltimore: Schneidereith, 1954), pp. 11, 20, 43.
°' Stratton and Rosa, Proc. AIEE, 24, 1070 (1905).
NBS C50, "National standard hose couplings and fittings for public fire service" (1914,
2d ed., 1917). Press release, American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC),
June 25, 1924, "Screw threads for fire hose couplings approved as American standard"
(NBS Box 77, IDA).
NOTE.—C designates Circular of the NBS, as M, when cited hereafter will designate an
NBS Miscellaneous Publication.