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

124 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16)
explained, were principally to unify existing laws and regulations, to ensure
the adequacy and safety of electrical service, and to establish procedures for
inspection laboratories set up by the State commissions.47
Still educating the public and the utilities, another circular issued in
1917 described the scope of Bureau investigations on behalf of the utilities,
its gas and electric work, gas analysis studies, the progress made in gaining
acceptance of the national electrical safety code, its work on electrolysis, and
its railroad investigations. All these were to continue and be extended as new
problems arose, while in the planning stage were a gas safety code and circu-
lars on street lighting and on telephone service and apparatus.48
The Bureau was well on the way to becoming the clearinghouse Dr.
Stratton intended, its investigations springing from the need of the utilities
to avoid long.drawn out or expensive litigation, or unfair and inconsistent
regulation by local authority. As a spokesman for the Bureau said, it
assembled facts in field and laboratory studies and reduced them to standard
practices, "which may be adopted or not as those concerned may elect, and
the published record of which will be available to all." Held temporarily
in check by the war, by 1920 special appropriations to the Bureau for public
utility standards were exceeded only by those for industrial research, the
testing of structural materials, and the testing of Government materials.
TESTING GOVERNMENT MATERIALS
While electrical, optical, pyrometrical and other fundamental
ment work at the Bureau grew steadily in the years prior to the war, struc-
tural and miscellaneous materials research and testing and calibration soared.
In the period 191 1—17 the volume of testing work at the Bureau almost tripled,
with engineering, structural and miscellaneous materials tests alone rising
from 38 percent to 84 percent of the total.5° The establishment of a General
Supply Committee in the Treasury Department in 1910, encouraging purchase
by specification and standardization of miscellaneous supplies bought for the
NBS C56, "Standards for electric service" (1916, 2d ed., 1923).
48 NBS C68, "Public utility service standards of quality and safety" (1917). Of the cir-
culars projected, only that on standards of telephone service later appeared in a new
publication, as NBS C112 (1921).
48 Wade, "The NBS and standards for public utilities."
5° In the fiscal year 1910—11, approximately 62 percent of the 80,100 tests and calibrations
carried out in the Bureau laboratories were in weights and measures, temperature, optics,
photometry, and chemistry, the remaining 38 percent in engineeting, structural, and mis-
cellaneous materials. By 1916, less than 16 percent of the year's total of 217,400 tests and
calibrations were in basic measurements; all else comprised physical and mechanical tests
of materials. In 1917, as the Bureau shifted to wartime research, the number declined
to 155,800, still almost 80 percent in materials. See NBS Annual Reports 1911—17.