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

THE BUREAU TURNS TO WAR RESEARCH 161
from a titanic struggle of armies it was a war of technology, of materiel, of
massive and mechanized production. But of this the military services
showed little cognition. Except for an answer to the growing U-boat menace,
neither the Army nor Navy appeared to know what would be required of
them or what science and technology could do for them.
Even when war was declared on April 6, 1917, the Nation was slow to
awake to the fact that it was unprepared. Few believed that American
troops in any number would be involved.6 Two months later, in a show of
the flag, Pershing took token elements of the First Division to France, and a
month later cabled home the first unvarnished reports on the desperate plight
of the Allied armies. Three years of carnage on a battlefront that had not
changed by 10 kilometers in either direction had bled the British white.
French morale was at its nadir and the armies close to mutiny. Pershing
reported he would need 1 million men by the spring of 1918 and 3,200,000
in France by early
To send that initial force overseas and produce and supply the moun-
tains of material it must have, the scientific, economic, and social life of the
Nation became mobilized as never before in its history.8 There was no time
for long drawn out research. For most of its war machine, the Nation
had to rely on the research of the Allies. Artillery, ammunition, communica-
tion equipment, aircraft, and armored plate, all of Allied design, had to
be adapted to American raw materials and American methods and machines.
The scientific resources of the country were to be utilized principally in
developing new sources and substitutes for war-scarce materials, devising
new instruments and equipment for the Armed Forces, and accelerating
standardization and mass production techniques in industry.9 The demand
for weapons, armor, engines, rails, trucks, and other heavy duty equipment
was to make it a metallurgists' war; the need for substitute materials, for
nitrates, for the agents and materials of gas warfare made it a chemists'
war. Confronted at last with the nature of its task, the Council of National
Defense began by mobilizing the laboratories of the universities, of industry,
8 Frederic L. Paxson, American Democracy and the World War, 3 vols. (Boston:
Houghton, Muffin, 1936—48), II, 9.
John J. Pershing, My Experiences in the War (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1931),
I, 94.—99; II, 122—123. See also Prof. J. S. Ames' report from Europe in May 1917,
quoted in The Autobiography of Robert A. Mihikan, pp. 157—158.
Neither the Civil War nor the Spanish-American War "presented the necessity to con-
vert to military use the maximum power of the Nation, nor to create for their use elab-
orate machines and weapons unknown to peace." Where earlier war manufacture was
peace manufacture expanded, "in 1917—18 it was new manufacture upon an unknown
scale." Paxson, II, 35.
"The first important moving assembly line in this country, at the Ford plant just outside
Detroit, went into operation in May 1913, cutting the production time of a car from 12 to
less than 6 hours.