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

198 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19)
The use of the three-electrode (triode) electron tube was practically unknown to our
military forces prior to 1917, and all of their apparatus was of the damped-wave type.
The Bureau began testing electron tubes, as shown here, a month after we entered the
war, and reported testing 467 of them up to mid-1919.
assumption that radio was essentially an instrument of navigation and of
national defense, and therefore must be under Government control, as it was
in Europe, bills to that end were offered in Congress on behalf of the Navy
Department in January 1917 and again late in 1918. On both occasions
Congress, ever fearful of outright Government control or ownership of any.
thing, tabled the proposals.91
Rebuffed, yet concerned for the development of its radio system, the
Navy Department urged General Electric, largest of the radio manufac.
turers, to buy out the British-backed Marconi Co. whose commercial radio
system had been taken over by the Navy in 1917 and was, with the end of
the war, to be returned. The result was the formation in October 1919 of a
General Electric subsidiary, the Radio Corporation of America, which at one
stroke became owner of virtually all the commercial high.power radio
facilities in the country.92
Secretary of Commerce Redfield and Dr. Stratton both favored Government control,
either under the Navy or, better, under Commerce. See Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12,
1918), p. 946, and correspondence in NBS Box 10, JEW 1918—20.
Rupert Maclaurin, Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry (New York:
Macmillan, 1949), p. 99.