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

NEW THINGS IN RADIO COMMUNICATION 191
base Michelson rangefinder, another instrument he had designed for the
Navy.76
It was a time of crash programs, of improvisations, of hurried applica-
tion of basic principles, of hastily contrived instruments and equipment. In
optics as in other areas of research the Bureau worked in largely untried
ground. Some of its efforts saw service, some came too late. The same
experience befell the scientists and technicians in the nearby radio
laboratories.
"NEW THINGS IN RADIO COMMUNICATION"
When the war came, the Bureau radio laboratories under Dellinger
and Kolster, as well as the adjacent Navy radio laboratory and that operated
by the Signal Corps, were still relatively small affairs and for the most part
more concerned with basic radio phenomena than with their practical applica-
tions. How far behind other nations the United States was in radio com-
munications became known when the French scientific mission that arrived
in the spring of 1917 left with the Bureau some of the scientific apparatus in
use overseas. Included was a great variety of radio equipment developed
around the electron tube.
Although the electron or vacuum tube amplifier was the invention of
Fessenden and De Forest in this country, its use was practically unknown
to our military departments, which still used damped wave apparatus that
limited them to code telegraph.77 A decade of patent litigation centering
around the vacuum tube had blunted the growth of radio here at home. (It
happened again with color television in the 1950's and 1960's.) The French,
on the other hand, with government control of rights to the vacuum tube,
used it in all their radio apparatus, in wire telephony, and in their radio
telephone.
Outraged by the stifling consequences of the litigation, Strattton ex-
claimed to Congress: "It is time we should be working out the new things in
radio communication instead of depending on foreign countries for scientific
developments." 78 But even the Bureau had been helpless as the experimental
Letter, SWS to Chief, Navy Bureau of Ordnance, Aug. 8, 1918 (NBS Box 4, AGC).
Report attached to letter, SWS to War Production Branch, Mar. 5, 1919 (NBS Box 15,
IRG), also notes an optical striae investigation made by Michelson at the Bureau. See
NBS S333 (Michelson, 1919).
Southworth, Forty Years of Radio Research, p. 38; "War Work," p. 233.
78 Hearings * * * 1919 (Jan. 25, 1918), p. 978. For an account of the litigation in-
volving De Forest's audion tube, the British and American Marconi Companies' Fleming
valve, the General Electric audion of 1913, and Western Electric's audion of 1917, see
Schubert, The Electric Word, pp. 126—131.