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

THE BEGINNING OF GOVERNMENT TESTING 101
much help in the theoretical field of the physical sciences as he
can obtain at the Bureau of Standards."
Stratton proposed a 3-year cycle of evening courses in physics,
mathematics, and chemistry, each course to be given 2 hours a week
for 30 weeks, at $25 per course. The first subjects offered in the fall
of 1908 were in differential equations, given by Dr. John A. Anderson,
who came out weekly from the Hopkins physics department; theoretical
mechanics, taught by Dr. Albert F. Zahm of Catholic University; and
thermodynamics, by Dr. Edgar Buckingham of the Bureau.
Dr. Rosa was to have given a weekly 4-hour course in experimental
methods in electrical measurement that same autumn when a call for
consultations on electrical standards at the British and German physical
laboratories took him abroad. The course was given instead by three
of the students who had signed up for it, Dellinger, then working in the
resistance and electromotive force section, Curtis in the inductance and
capacity section, and Agnew in the electrical instruments section. Upon
his return in January 1909, Rosa completed the course with a• series of
lectures on advanced electrical measurements.
In the spring of 1909 a committee composed of Stratton, Rosa,
Hillebrand, Wolff, Waidner, Burgess, Dorsey, Nutting, Waters, and Fischer
was set up to direct the graduate program. To the classes already in prog-
ress, Dorsey began teaching a new course in electricity and magnetism and
Dr. Kanolt began another in physical chemistry.
Including advanced work taken earlier at the University of Michigan,
Harvey Curtis completed the course work at the Bureau in the spring of 1910.
With his thesis on "Mica condensers as standards of capacity," based on a
recently completed investigation published that same year in the Bulletin
of the Bureau, he went to Ann Arbor, passed his orals, and returned with his
degree.°2
The cyclic system of graduate course work established by Dr. Stratton
continued for the next 50 years, and what was begun as an expedient to keep
promising personnel, came to attract them as well. In 1960, 1,322 members
of Bureau laboratories and affiliates were taking a total of 72 undergraduate
and graduate courses offered in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engi.
91
Quoted in H. L. Curtis, Recollections of a Scientist: An Autobiography (privately
printed at Bonn, Germany: L. Leopold Press, 1958), p. 27.
92
Ibid., pp. 22, 26—30. Three years later, in 1913, Dr. Curtis became an associate
physicist at the Bureau, in 1918 physicist, in 1924 senior physicist, and in 1928 principal
physicist. He published a book on electrical measurements and almost 50 papers prior
to his retirement from the Bureau in January 1947. The retirement was purely statutory.
Like many other long-time employees of the Bureau, Curtis continued to experiment as a
guest worker in his old laboratory, coming in daily until shortly before his death at the
age of 80.