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

TESTING GOVERNMENT MATERIALS 131
In many of the codes it was assumed that brick, mortar, plaster, cement, and
metals were uniformly fire resistant. No distinction was made between the
various kinds and compositions of bricks, cements, metals, and other mate-
rials. Rules for their use had been set up without any real knowledge of
their melting points or their behavior at high temperatures, without any real
knowledge of the stress and support limits of common building materials
under attack by fire.
In a joint undertaking with the National Fire Protection Association
and the Underwriters' Laboratories, the Bureau aimed at a thorough study
of the behavior and safety of building materials in various types of construc-
tion under all possible fire conditions. The study would furnish architects,
builders, State and city building bureaus, and insurance interests with funda-
mental engineering data long needed but nowhere available. In nominal
charge of the program was Simon H. Ingberg, born in Norway and trained
in structural engineering in this country, who was with a midwestern con-
struction company when the Bureau brought him to Washington to plan the
investigation. Less than a year later a fire-resistance section was established
in the heat division, with Ingberg in charge.
But so broad became the scope of the investigation that it soon in-
volved almost every one of the scientific and engineering laboratories of the
Bureau. It included high-temperature measurements, fire tests, and thermal
conductivity studies by the heat division; solution of composition and con-
struction problems by the chemistry and structural materials divisions; elec-
trical wiring and safety code studies by the electrical division; and the be-
havior of structural materials under heat as a special study in the weights and
measures division.63
Besides data furnished city and State authorities on the fire-resistant
and heat-insulating properties of common building materials and those used
in fire-resistive construction, on fire tests of building columns, wood and
metal frame partitions and walls, the Bureau evolved a standard time-tem-
perature curve which specified the furnace temperatures to which the elements
of a structure became subject in any period of time up to 8 hours. Building
materials and construction design were classified by their hours of ultimate
fire resistance, making it possible to set up regulations that would insure
building into any structure a reasonable degree of fire resistance.64
As the program developed, panel-testing furnaces were constructed
and partial buildings, steel and concrete columns and numerous other struc-
tures were erected and destroyed in endless controlled tests. For years
Bureau members in the project made hurried trips out of Washington to probe
63NBS Annual Report 1914, PP. 29—30.
See BH14, "Recommended minimum requirements for fire resistance in buildings"
(J. S. Taylor, 1931), summarizing more than a decade of research.