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

STANDARDS FOR THE CONSUMER 133
in the debris of large city fires for additional data for their studies. Re-
search and technological papers, handbooks and circulars recorded the results
of the long-term investigation, and were reduced to rules and specifications
in new and revised building and fire codes issued by city and State author-
ities and by fire insurance associations. Fire research continues in the build-
ing research division of the Bureau to the present day.
Bureau records suggest that in its second decade, despite more than a
score of other research projects going on, three investigations were para-
mount, certainly in the eyes of the public, and of great interest to their Con-
gressman at budget time. These were the weights and measures, public
utility standards, and structural and miscellaneous materials programs. And
it was the results of these investigations that were levied on for a remarkable
series of circulars that came out just before the war, designed not for Fed-
eral or State agencies or for industry, but for the ordinary citizen, the
ultimate consumer.
STANDARDS FOR THE CONSUMER
The publication of lamp specifications in Circular 13 in 1907—the
first of its kind—raised a problem that long plagued the Bureau. The cir-
cular, available to the public for 10 cents, was a technical report, as were later
circulars on textiles, inks, soaps, paper, paint, varnish, and other materials.
It was filled with complex data and it made no mention of brand names.
How then was the ordinary consumer to identify the lamps or other products
tested by the Bureau without the laboratory apparatus described in the
circular?
in England, the National Physical Laboratory, governed by the Royal
Society, was largely supported by private funds, with only meager assistance
from the British Government. It was therefore relatively independent, and
free if it chose to make open recommendations of products it tested. The
National Bureau of Standards, on the 'other hand, was an agency of the Fed-
eral Government. It had come intO being at a time when business and in-
dustrial interests were synonymous with the national interest. Without
power to enforce adoption of standards or specifications, the Bureau could
only offer its technical findings to Government purchasing agencies and by
making them public suggest that their adoption was in the best interests of
industry
Dr. Stratton insisted from the start that the Bureau must be free to
make test results public, but in doing so the Bureau must show no bias. All
products and materials tested had therefore to remain anonymous. Yet in
hearings before Congress, Stratton made much of the fact that the test and