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

178 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19)
cut from 6,000 to a hundred varieties, and steel pens reduced from 132 to
30 styles. Mail order catalogs best reflected the new austerity as their customary
bulk fell away by more than half.
As a result of simplification and standardization, labor savings in
the manufacture of products from clothing to coffins reportedly reached as
high as 35 percent. Savings over prewar consumption of materials in some
instances rose to 50 percent as simplicity ruled and plentiful wood, paper,
zinc, and cotton replaced the steel, tinplate, copper, brass, bronze, pig tin,
nickel, and raw wooi consumed by war.45 The country had experienced
nothing like it before, and the impact of this husbandry of resources reached
into every home, every office, factory, institution, and government agency
in the Nation.
Reviewing the wartime economy drive shortly after the armistice,
the Bureau had to admit that despite more than a decade of testing of Government
purchases,
*
no very pronounced demand for standardization among * *
the different Government departments * * * had existed prior to
the war. Large as the orders for * * * materials had been in
normal times, the necessity for complete standardization was not
very evident. When, however, as a result of the war many Government
bureaus [began] buying goods of about the same kind at
the same time, it soon became necessary to have some sort of standard
specifications.46
It must be admitted that in the case of the military departments, which
had been left free to develop their own purchasing procedures, the new order
of the day, for all its intrinsic value, permitted a latitude of interpretation
that sometimes worked mischief. Specifications arbitrarily arrived at often
defeated their purpose, as when General Electric complained to the Bureau
that it frequently received greatly differing specifications for identical items
of electrical apparatus ordered by the Army and Navy.47 Asked at a congressional
hearing why the Government had requirements or specifications
that manufacturers found all but impossible to meet, Stratton replied that
these were not Bureau specifications. New department or bureau heads,
particularly in the War Department, who suddenly became "specificationminded"
were apt to set up standards for materials on their own initiative
Grosvenor B. Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind
the Line, 1917—1918 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1924), pp. 209—231; Bernard M. Baruch,
American Industry in the War: A Report of the War Industries Board (1921), edited by
R. H. Hippeihauser (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1941), pp. 65—69.
46 War Work, pp. 151—152.
Letter, General Electric to NBS, Mar. 10, 1917 (NBS Box 7, IE). For a note on the
Standardization Section of the General Staff, set up in August 1918, see NBS Annual
Report 1919, p. 52.