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

118 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16)
As the railroads, as well as manufacturing concerns and State
agencies, set up inspection procedures under Bureau direction and large-
capacity scales began to register more nearly true (i.e., with a tolerable
error of 200 pounds in 100,000 pounds gross weight), the Bureau test cars
with their master scales still continued their rounds, adjusting track scales and
calibrating the scale cars that were acquired by the railroads. At a standstill
during the war, the Bureau cars resumed their travels across the Nation into
the 1930's, when the depression curtailed all but a fraction of this work.3°
Yet another railroad investigation was prompted by a series of alarm-
ing statistics that appeared in the Interstate Commerce Commission annual
report for 1912. Legislation enacted 2 years previously had for the first
time required monthly reports of railroad accidents, and the returns, dis-
closing deaths and injuries resulting from collisions and derailments alone
at the rate of almost 13,000 a year, shocked the Commission into further
study. Going back into records for the years 1902 to 1912, the ICC came
up with a total of 41,578 derailments caused by broken rails, broken wheels,
flanges, and. axles. Faulty maintenance, inferior iron and steel, severe
service, and excessive wheel loads were suspected. The Secretary of Com-
merce urged the Bureau to make a thorough study of the cause of railroad
accidents and related problems.31
Specimens of failed parts, sent to the Bureau by the ICC and the
railroads, were subjected to chemical, microscopic, and mechanical tests.
In every instance of rail failure, hidden defects or splits, identified as
transverse fissures, were found in the interior of the rails. In track in-
spections made by the Bureau in the field, as many as four or five of these
fissures or points of internal stress were found in a single mile of track.32
With the cooperation of the big steel companies, the recently
organized metallurgical division at the Bureau and the engineering and
chemical divisions began an investigation of the constitutents of railroad
iron and steel, of heat stress and heat treatment and related problems in the
manufacturing process. Here seemed to be the source of failed rails and
wheels. The steel industry, behind Europe in this tec}mology, had insuffi-
30 See track scale testing appropriations, NBS Annual Report 1934, p. 76.
In 1917 Bureau scale testing was extended to the scales used in weighing coal at mines
(NBS Annual Report 1918, pp. 28—30), and in 1936 to vehicle or truck scales (NBS
Annual Report 1937, pp. 61—62). As the programs began, the relative gross errors in the
scales on which miners' wages were based and those on which safe operation on the
highway depended matched or even exceeded those found earlier in railroad scales.
"ICC Annual Report Dec. 16, 1912, pp. 53, 63; letter, Secretary of Commerce Redfield to
SWS, July 1, 1913, and attached correspondence, 1913—15 (NBS Box 11, IM).
3° "Report on the formation of transverse fissures in steel parts * * (ICC Report by
James E. Howard, NBS engineer physicist, 1923) L/C: TF258.U6.