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

REVISING THE ORGANIC ACT 147
Dorsey became the radium specialist as he began making intercomparisons
of sealed radium standards and started an investigation of the gamma-ray
method of radium measurement. Soon Dorsey and his assistants were study-
ing the properties of radioactive substances, the alpha-ray activity of powd-
ered radium salts, of uranium mixtures, radium ores and radium emanations.
in a few short months he, like all who were handling radium at that time,
had burned the thumbs and the index and middle fingers on both his hands.
By 1919, as a result of the amount of radium and luminescent materials con-
taining radium handled during the war, he had developed typical "X-ray
hands," characterized by ulcerative tissue, whitlows below the nails, pro.
nounced lack of sensitivity of touch in the fingers, and extreme sensitivity to
cold.95
Dr. Dorsey left the Bureau in 1920 and, away from radium, his hands
though permanently scarred improved rapidly. His book, Physics of Radio-
activity, based in part on a Bureau circular he began in 1915 and never
completed, was prepared as a text for the medical profession and came out in
1 921.98 For almost a decade he practiced privately as a consultant physicist
in radium. He returned to the Bureau in 1928 'with independent status and
until his retirement in 1943 carried out a number of research projects in
physics and acted as advisory consultant to the radium and X-ray section
of the optics division.97
"REVISING" THE ORGANIC ACT
The year 1913 was a milestone in the history of the Bureau, a time of re-
appraisal and redirection. Much of the testing of standards, measuring in-
struments, and materials was now "organized on an accurate routine basis
and * * * handled with dispatch, through increased efficiency of appli-
ances and methods of testing?' 98 Fundamental research in the scientific di-
visions continued at a high level, but the principal energies of the Bureau
were directed to investigations for the Federal and State governments, for in-
Dorsey, Physics of Radioactivity, pp. 175—177.
°°Announcements of the circular appeared in NBS Annual Reports 1915 and 1916.
Dr. Dorsey, whose research for his book on "water substance" was conducted in that
period, was the second of three workers given independent status at the Bureau, free
from all administrative duties. The others were Dr. Edgar Buckingham, 1923, to
continue his work in theoretical thermodynamics, and Dr. Louis B. Tuckerman, in 1937,
to carry out research in aeronautical mechanics. Memo, Hugh L. Dryden to Division N
section chiefs, Dec. 20, 1937 (NBS Box 403, ID-Misc).
°'NBS Annual Report 1913, p. 36.