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

144 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16)
work or from the Koister Radio Corp. set up to trade on his name. He died
"a magnificent failure," as he called himself, in 1950.88
Until 1917 the electrical work of the Bureau centered around the
power industry. There was almost no research in wire telephony or tele-
graphy, radio research was just beginning, and except for Kolster's radio
direction finder, Bureau efforts were concentrated on more precise deter-
minations of the laws and physical quantities involved in radio apparatus,
in trying to maintain and improve measurements and standards, and supply-
ing basic information.89 Nevertheless, some tests and calibrations had been
made of available radio apparatus, of circuit components, of various kinds
of detectors (electrolytic, Fleming valve, audion), and of the new continuous-
wave techniques that were coming in with radiotelephony, putting an end
to damped-wave (spark) transmission. For use with Koister's direction
finder, the radio section had devised an automatic device that sent out a
characteristic signal once every minute, to guide incoming ships in fog. Un-
able as yet to obtain specialized equipment from industry, the laboratories
also built and installed a number of radiotelegraphic units on Coast Survey
steamers and tenders of the Bureau of Lighthouses, enabling the latter to
maintain communication between lighthouses and ships at sea.9°
The Bureau received its first special appropriation for radio research
from Congress, the sum of $10,000 "for the investigation and standardiza-
tion of methods and instruments employed in radio communication," in
1915. A year later Congress appropriated $50,000 for the construction of
a radio laboratory building, a two-story structure erected south of the elec-
trical laboratory, with two 150-foot antenna towers adjacent to the labora-
tory. The ensuing pioneer work in radio at the Bureau was to prove its
worth when war came.
Radio and radioactivity, as previously noted, arrived at the Bureau
on the same day in 1911, but laboratory interest in radium and radiation,
phenomena actually far removed from radio, did not begin until late in
1913. It may well have been the use of electrical methods for the measure-•
ment of radioactive quantities that made it seem logical to establish this
work in Rosa's division. Or it may have been, as Dr. N. Ernest Dorsey said,
that the disintegration hypothesis promulgated by Rutherford, together with
his conjectures on the structure of the atom and the phenomena associated
with radioactivity, were all "bound up with our ideas of electricity." 91
"Letter, Lloyd Espenschied, Bell Telephone Laboratories, to A. V. Astin, Feb. 18, 1954,
and attached correspondence on early radio at NBS (NBS Historical File).
89
George C. Southworth, Forty Years of Radio Research (New York: Gordon and
Breach, 1962), p. 32.
9°
NBS Annual Report 1916, pp. 55—56.
Dorsey, Physics of Radioactivity (Baltimore: Williams and Williams, 1921), p. 33.