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

120 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16)
made soil a fine conductor of electricity, and current straying from the
trolley tracks into nearby water pipes and gas mains ate away the metal
by electrolytic action as the current flowed out again.
The same condition was found elsewhere in the lead sheathing
around telephone and telegraph wires that had been put underground after
the series of city conflagrations around the turn of the century. When elec-
trolytic pitting and corrosion was also discovered on underground light and
power cables, at the foot of bridge structures, and in the reinforced con-
crete supports of piers and buildings, the press, the utilities, and construction
people raised cries of alarm. Losses were estimated in the millions of
dollars as a result of leakage from gas and water mains, the necessity
of repairs and replacement, and devaluation of capital investment, to say
nothing of the fire hazard traceable to electrolysis and the losses due to
interruption of service.
lii 1910 Stratton reported to a Senate committee that the problem
had become nationwide, and the Bureau was granted a special 3.year
appropriation to investigate earth electrolysis and find ways to mitigate
its effects. Dr. Rosa's first move was to bring in Burton McCollum and
Kirk H. Logan, two talented young electrical engineers then teaching in
the Midwest, to head the investigation.
Working with municipal authorities and engineers in St. Louis,
Chicago, Philadelphia, in Elyria, Ohio, and Springfield, Mass., McCollum
and Logan identified the nature of the problem, developed procedures to
enable utility engineers to make their own electrolysis surveys, and as the
congressional appropriations came to an end, had devised an insulated
feeder system as one way of mitigating electrolytic corrosion. The street
railways, confronted with litigation brought by the utilities and hoping
for a more economical solution than insulation, pressed the Bureau to
continue its research. Aware that the problem was yet far from solution,
the Bureau resumed the investigation under its regular funds.
With the organization in 1919 of the American Committee on Elec.
trolysis, representing the principal national associations of utility com-
panies, a research subcommittee was appointed to work with the Bureau.
Of considerable importance was the development by the Bureau of an
earth-current meter in 1921. In maintenance testing of pipe systems that
the utilities established, it accurately measured the currents directly re-
sponsible for electrolytic corrosion and hence the rate of corrosion. Al.
though electrolysis seemed impossible to eliminate entirely, almost 20
methods of mitigating it were devised by Bureau and utility
NBS Annual Reports 1911, et seq.; NBS C401, "Abstracts * * * of NBS publica-
tions on stray-current electrolysis" (Shepard, 1933).