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

162 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19)
and Government, and in particular the two Government bureaus "oriented
to industrial problems—Standards and Mines." 10
Until 1917 the war in Europe had little impact on the Bureau of
Standards. Personnel increases remained normal, the volume of Govern-
ment testing rose briefly in 1916 and then subsided, and industrial testing
actually declined between 1914 and 1917. Uncertain of their requirements,
the military services made few demands. In 1915 the Signal Corps requested
some tests of airplane frames, wing fabrics, and engines. The NACA
asked for a study of the characteristics of airplane propellers. In 1916
the Navy Department sought tests of steels going into its new warships. That
same year Army Ordnance, soon to be swamped in problems, asked only for
a study of several failures it had encountered in elevating gun screws.
Although heavy industry began producing munitions for the Allies in
1914, no call was made on the Bureau for certification of the gages used in
their manufacture." But with something like prescience, Louis A. Fischer
urged Dr. Stratton to seek out a gage expert and organize a special laboratory.
Harold L. Van Keuren was brought in and set to work planning the labora-
tory. It was one of the few areas in which this country was prepared when
we entered the war.12 Stratton also became concerned as German sources
of chemical laboratory ware and high-grade optical glass were cut off, and
early in 1916 he sought funds for additional furnaces and kilns at the Pitts-
burgh laboratory of the Bureau to undertake their experimental production.
The gage laboratory and glass plant were not the first such resources
acquired by the Bureau. Well aware that in the testing of materials, analysis
could not be separated from synthesis, Stratton had acquired five of these
small-scale "factories" before the war. Learning that the machinery firm
of Pusey and Jones in Wilmington was constructing several small paper
mills for paper research companies, Stratton had managed to obtain one of
10 Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, p. 304.
Export of American explosives, principally to England, increased from $6 million in
1914 to $467 million in 1916. Bureau correspondence with the Secretaries of War
and Navy in 1915—16 reported that munitions drawings were going to manufacturers
with rio mention of the necessary gages or with insufficient gages, and warned of the
"grave danger that [these war supplies] would not fit when delivered to the field"
(NARG 40, file 67009/43). Not surprising, many of the shells on arrival overseas proved
to be "of a low standard," and in June 1916 the British War Mission established its own
gage testing laboratory in New York. It came too late. In the Battle of the Somme
that opened in July 1916, "the faultiness of the [American.madei ammunition in the
preliminary artillery barrage was particularly severe * * * [resulting in] numerous
premature bursts, falling short of shells, and unexploded shells." Brian Gardner, The
Big Push (London: Cassell, 1961), pp. 63, 86.
"NBS Annual Report, 1917, pp. 20—21; SWS Address, 15th Annual Conference on
Weights and Measures, May 23, 1922 (NBS Historical File).