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

138 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16)
circulars may be traced in some degree to the muckraking and reform move-
ments of the period, the "safety" circular, as the introduction said, was
prompted by the increase in hazards "in modern times from the service of
gas and electricity and the use of such dangerous articles as matches, volatile
oils, poisons, and the like."
Drawing on the mass of safety code data gathered by the electrical,
chemistry, engineering, and materials divisions of the Bureau, the 127-page
handbook on safety in the home covered electrical hazards, lightning hazards,
gas, fire, and chemical hazards, and in a final chapter covered falls, cuts,
scalds, burns and other miscellaneous accidents in the home.
Nothing since the Bureau's weights and measures crusade made so
great an impression on the public as did the publication of these circulars,
and for years the Bureau was identified in the public mind with testing of
household materials and appliances and besieged with correspondence re-
questing personal help with home problems. Reported for the most part
in specialized publications and periodicals, the work of the Bureau in
electricity, in thermometry, photometry, calorimetry, radiometry, polar-
imetry, and spectroscopy, in metallurgy and in chemistry, was known only
in scientific and technical circles. It came as a shock to Dr. Stratton when
late in 1915 the Secretary of Commerce told him that Thomas Edison, un-
aware of the fundamental research carried on at the Bureau, had suggested
that the Government establish such a laboratory.76
Four years later, better acquainted with the Bureau, Edison wrote
saying that its recent publication, The Principles Underlying Radio Com-
munications, was "the greatest book on this subject that I have ever read
* * * Usually, books on radio communication are fairly bristling with
mathematics, and I am at a loss in trying to read them." The early radio
work at the Bureau introduced a large public to the scientific research of
which it was capable.
RADIO, RADIUM, AND X RAYS
In the autumn of 1904 a young man came to the Bureau with a new
book and an assignment in a new field of physics, neither of which aroused
more than passing interest at the time. He was Dr. Louis W. Austin, an
assistant professor of physics at Wisconsin who had spent the past 2 years as
a guest worker at the Reichsanstalt in Berlin. Returning home by way of
Personal letter, Secretary of Commerce to Secretary of the Navy, Oct. 11, 1915 (NBS
Box 3, AG).
Letter, Edison to SWS, Apr. 25, 1919 (NBS Box 4, AGC). He referred to Radio
Pamphlet 40, prepared by the Bureau and issued by the Signal Corps in March 1919.