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

96 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10)
gated. Soon after, the Bureau itself established a fifth field laboratory, at
Allentown, Pa., to sample and test cement produced in plants there for the
Navy and War
Well before this augmentation of the Bureau, its test program had
already crowded into the last of the laboratories available in North and
South buildings. Planning expansion of both the Bureau's work in struc-
tural materials and that of the former Geological Survey group, Dr. Stratton
asked Congress for new mammoth testing machines and a special building
to house them. The funds were approved and a 1.million-pound crushing
machine for compression tests of brick, stone, cement, and concretes, another
of 230,000-pound capacity, a 100,000-pound universal (compression and
tension) machine, and a specially designed 2,300,000-pound Emery universal
testing machine, for breakdown and exhaustion tests of girders and other
large structural members, all built to Bureau specifications, were ordered.55
Well before they arrived, West building, a four-story laboratory situated
between North and South buildings, was completed in December 1909 at a
cost of $175,000.
Surpassing West building's giant Emery machine in capacity if not
design was the Olsen machine acquired with the Pittsburgh laboratory. It
was the most powerful testing machine in the country at that time, capable
of exerting a force of 10 million pounds slowly and irresistibly in destruction
tests of massive masonry columns. Structural materials testing at the
Bureau and its field stations, nowhere contemplated in the organic act, 'began
to expand.
In 1911, with almost no further increase in staff over the previous
year, the number of tests and calibrations leaped from 50,000 to more than
80,000, almost 77 percent of them for the Government. The Bureau was to
maintain this level until we entered the war in 1917.
Largely as a consequence of the Government testing program, author-
ized personnel for the Bureau, including the group transferred from the
Geological Survey, rose from 87 to 269 between. 1906 and 1911. Acquiring
that number of trained scientists and craftsmen—and keeping them—had
for some time become a serious problem. The Bureau could not compete
in salaries either with the. larger universities or with industry, and the increas-
ing interest of manufacturers in the application of science to industry made
them particularly eager to entice specialists away from the Bureau. Industry
was willing to pay twice the Government salary for men it wanted and even
'4Annual Report, Department of the Interior, 1910 p. 297; ibid. 1911, p. 377; NBS Annual
Report 1911, pp. 26—28.
Detailed descriptions and correspondence concerning the acquisition of these ma-
chines will be found in NBS Box 5, El.