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

148 ELECTRICiTY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16)
dustry and the public. utilities.99 The Bureau had grown far beyond the
confines of its organic act and in directions unforeseen.
Seemingly taking all knowledge for its province, the Bureau was currently
engaged in over 200 different projects, its Baconian scope of research
demanding an extraordinary spirit of cooperation. in his annual report
that year Stratton said of this spirit that it alone "minimized the somewhat
narrowing effects of a rigid division system. Each problem when studied in
a * broad scientific spirit leads into every specialty
*
Cooperation
had been "particularly notable in the development of standards for gas, in
the researches upon metals, and the methods of testing the properties of ma-
terials, in the study of electrolysis experimentally in the, field, in the struc-
tural materials investigation, and in many other cases where success depends
upon many specialties." It had 'been most striking "in the gradual develop.
ment of the public-service commission work of the Bureau. This is an out-
growth of the weights and measures activity of the Bureau, of the cooperation
with the Interstate Commerce Commission, and with other regulative and
inspection services, notably the wireless service, the regulation of navigation,
municipal gas regulation, standardization of specifications for materials, and
central-station power service * * * simply [applying] measurements and
standards to new fields * * * Such work is an extension of the general
purpose of the Bureau as a whole, cooperation in all movements which have
for their object increase in efficiency in all fields through measurements and
standards." 100
It was this "extension of the general purpose of the Bureau" that had
resulted in its extraordinary growth. In a little more than a decade appro-
priations for the Bureau 'had risen from $32,000 to almost half a million dol-
lars a year, with that much again appropriated in 1913 for a new electrical
laboratory, additional land, and special test equipment. in addition to the
field laboratory at Pittsburgh, three new divisions—engineering research,
metallurgy, and structural and miscellaneous materials—had been added to
the original five in Washington, and Bureau personnel had risen from 13 to
more than 280, of whom at least 50 were high-grade physicists.
Congress sometimes worried about those physicists. Other agencies
in the Government didn't seem to need them. "What is a physicist?" Mr.
Leonidas F. Livingston of the House Appropriations Subcommittee asked.
"I was asked on the floor of the House what in the name of common sense a
physicist is, and I could not answer." 101 At a Senate hearing, Mr. Lee S.
"The bureau is, to a certain extent, a clearing house for technical information
* * *
cooperating with all movements tending to improve conditions in which standards of
quality or standards of measurement are involved." M18, "The National Bureau of
Standards" (1911), p. 7.
Annual Report 1913, p. 3.
Hearings * * * 1912 (Dec. 2, 1910), p. 263.