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

160 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19)
design.3 Many of the aviation problems subsequently assigned by NACA
to the Navy and War Departments were, since they lacked research facilities,
turned over to the Bureau as it "became the scientific laboratory for the two
military services."
The initial attempt to mobilize the scientific and technical resources
of the Nation began in the Naval Consulting Board, appointed by Secretary
of the Navy Daniels in mid-1915. Headed by Thomas Edison, then in his
68th year, with Willis R. Whitney, Frank J. Sprague, L. H. Baekeland, and
Elmer A. Sperry on his staff, the Board, for lack &f firm direction, made
little headway and found its wartime activity limited to screening the tens
of thousands of inventions submitted to the Government by a war-stimulated
public. A year later, in July 1916, the National Academy of Sciences, with
President Wilson's concurrence, formed a National Research Council (NRC)
as its operating subsidiary under George E. Hale, director of the Mount
Wilson Observatory, to establish cooperation between existing Government,
educational, and industrial research organizations. Important posts went
to Dr. Stratton of the Bureau and Dr. Charles D. Walcott, Secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution and director of NACA, as Government representa-
tives on NRC. Industrial representatives included Gano Dunn of the J. C.
White Engineering Corp. and John J. Carty, president of American Telephone
& Telegraph; and Michael Pupin of Columbia University represented
educational institutions.5
in February 1917 the Council of National Defense requested the NRC
to act as its agency for the organization of scientific information and person.
nel, the Naval Cbnsulting Board to act as its committee on inventions. While
neutrality tottered, the emergency councils and committees met and waited
for a directive. No estimate, not even a guess, could be made of our possible
troop commitment. The Nation was perilously close to war, yet few in
this country even realized the nature of the conflict in Europe, that apart
'Letter, Secretary of NACA to Secretary of Commerce, Dec. 18, 1915 (NBS Box 3, AG).
For further details on the establishment of NACA and its relation to the Bureau, see NBS
Box 7, IDS.
NACA, established with an appropriation of $5,000, or "such part thereof as may be
needed," was the predecessor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) whose budget in fiscal year 1964 was approximately one million times the
initial appropriation to NACA.
Hearings * * * 1919 (Jan. 25, 1918), p. 960. Bureau records for December 1917,
said Redfield, indicated that demands for scientific work from the military services came
in at the rate of one every 20 minutes during that month (With Congress and Cabinet,
New York: Doubleday, Page, 1924, p. 100). By then, Stratton reported (Hearings * * *
1919, p. 960), military research constituted 95 percent of Bureau work.
Letter, Hale to Secretary of Commerce, May 15, 1916 (NBS Box 296, APY-Hale). For
the wartime organization of science, see Robert M. Yerkes, ed., The New World of
Science: Its Development During the War (New York: Century, 1920), pp. 33 if.