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

REVISING THE ORGANIC ACT 151
once in practical applications of these services to meet the needs of Govern-
ment and industry. The resulting activities, nowhere referred to in the
organic act, fell within the province of the• Bureau only through broad in-
terpretation of the clauses calling for "the solution of problems which arise
in connection with standards" and "the determination of * * * properties
of materials" (ignoring the qualifying clause in the latter case, "when such
data are of great importance to scientific or manufacturing * interests *
The standards intended in the organic act were physical standards
of measurement, but in the technological and engineering fields entered
through Government testing, in the preparation of standard samples, and in
structural and miscellaneous materials testing, "standards" had come to
mean specifications of materials and codes of practice. Other research
agencies in the Government began to question the broad interpretation of the
Bureau act and its extended use of the term "standards," but not Congress,
which found Bureau investigations highly productive of visible and tangible
results.
The Bureau was further encouraged by the method adopted by Congress
to expand Bureau activities—that is, by the appropriation of specific
funds for special investigations.106 This began in 1910 with the appropriations
for the weights and measures crusade and the investigation of gaslight
standards and continued thereafter, with special appropriations for one
or more new projects almost annually, until 1936. By the thirties, grown
to double the amount of direct appropriations by Congress, they had become
administratively unwieldly. In 1936 all Bureau operations and activities
funded by Congress were consolidated in four general categories: administration,
testing, research and development, and standards for commerce.
With the first of the special appropriations the Bureau set up two
categories of personnel, those engaged in fundamental research and routine
work and paid from statutory funds, and those brought in for its special
investigations and paid from specific appropriations. Although most of the
special investigations went on for a decade or more, in some instances, as
funds were withdrawn, those portions of the investigation that the Bureau
thought ought to be permanent were transferred, with their staff, to the
regular work of the Bureau. Thus the Bureau grew, but not without some
friction.
It seems possible that it was criticism of certain of the Bureau research
in this period that first alerted Stratton to a hazard in the latitude of research
permitted in the wording of the organic act. In 1908 the Bureau of Chemistry
in the Department of Agriculture 'had complained that the Bureau of
Standards was duplicating work specifically delegated to Chemistry, including
determination of the quality of volumetric apparatus, testing sugar
The chart showing these special appropriations from 1910 to 1935 appears as app. G.