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

THE AIRPLANE IN THE LABORATORY 179
that could be produced only at high cost. The tensile strength established
for one kind of steel wire, for example, had proved clearly beyond the re-
quirements and wholly impractical to make. In another case the Bureau
found that a cement specification so limited the magnesium content that it
cut off the most important cement-producing district in the United Sates.48
And in at least one instance the War Industries Board had to act "to kill a
general standardization suggestion that evolved in the War Department
during an attack of unusually severe standardization fever. To have re-
duced all machine tools to uniform standards [as recommended] would
have stifled production for many
Despite the follies committed in the name of standardization, the prac.
tice emerged from the war as an indispensable consideration in the coming
age of mass production. The war demonstrated not only the usefulness to
manufacturers of specifications and standards, as the Bureau had long and
patiently pointed out, but their inescapable necessity. For the Bureau to
have supplied in those few months the thousands of standards asked for by
agencies and industries in the grip of war was out of the question. The
major effort of the Bureau was restricted to an attempt to codify Government
procedures and to formulate, where it could, responsible and comprehensive
specifications for materials and products it was equipped and staffed to deal
with.5°
The hope of the Bureau that the impulse toward conservation, toward
sensible husbandry of resources through standardization, might continue
in the postwar period was soon dashed. Industry 'no sooner turned from
war production to the consumer market again than it reverted to all its former
wasteful practices. It was brought up short by the severe postwar depres-
sion that struck late in 1920. Under the leadership of the Department of
Commerce and the National Bureau of Standards, industry was again in-
structed in its wartime lesson. Conservation and standardization became
key words of the decade.
THE AIRPLANE IN THE LABORATORY
So rapid was the wartime development of air power and air strategy
that by 1917 some at the Bureau seriously believed that "victory was likely
to go to the side having the largest and most effective types of machines51
Yet in no aspect of scientific, technological, or industrial capability was
America so utterly unprepared as it was in aviation. The airplane that first
48 Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), pp. 929,945.
'° Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War, p. 454.
5° "War Work," p. 16.
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