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

156 ELECTRICITY, RAILROADS, AND RADIO (1911-16)
new table of contents drew attention to the fact that the 8 divisions of the
Bureau were engaged in more than 225 separate investigations. Following
notes on administration and statistical data on the year's work, the report
for the first time appended a list of current Bureau needs, including a new
building to house the structural materials work, a radio laboratory, additional
ground, and more scientific assistance. And where 300 copies of the Bureau
report had been printed the year before, a thousand copies of the 1914 re-
port were distributed.
Most striking of all in the amplified annual report of 1914 was the
restatement of the functions, aims, and purposes of the Bureau that appeared
in the preface. Still concerned with the "extension of the general purposes
of the Bureau," Dr. Stratton sought to clarify the new scope of work for
which the Bureau had become responsible. The organic act was unchanged,
he said, but a more "convenient" classification of functions as now authorized
and exercised made the Bureau responsible for standards of measurement,
standard values of constants, standards of quality, and standards of mechan-
ical performance. In the report the next year Stratton amended this list to
include a fifth function, standards of practice.119
Standards of measurement, he wrote in the annual report, included
their custody, construction, and comparison, with methods of comparison
presently available ranging from those "capable of measuring the thousandth
part of a milligram to the large testing machines capable of measuring a
load of thousands of tons." Standard values of constants, requiring accurate
and authenticated determinations of the many fixed relations between physical
quantities, ranged from the relation between heat and mechanical energy,
required in designing steam engines and boilers, to the amount of heat
required to turn liquid ammonia into vapor or to melt a pound of ice, as in
the refrigeration industry.
Standards of quality, "confined almost exclusively to Government
purchases," involved the physical and chemical investigation of materials to
prepare methods of measurement and uniform specifications for their compo-
sition or manufacture. Standards of performance, whether of an engine,
boiler, or pump, an electric generator or motor, a weighing device, or a
telescope, involved the use of standards of measurement, standard values of
constants, and standards of quality, and sought to arrive at specifications
based on correct scientific and mechanical principles. A function only
"° This classification may have evolved from Dr. Stratton's remarks at a congressional
hearing several months before. In a discussion of the investigations in public utility
services, the Bureau was, he said, concerned with standards of engineering, comprising
standards of practice, standards of construction and operation, standards of service, and
standard methods of testing, all of which involved standards of measurement and quality.
Hearings * * * 1915 (Feb. 26, 1914), p. 980.