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

202 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19)
investigated the protective properties of goggles and glasses for laboratory
workers and those used by oxyacetylene cutters and welders against injurious
ultraviolet and infrared radiations.'°2
It made studies in the use of radium and other self-luminous materials
for illuminating aircraft instruments, gunsights, marching compasses,
watches, and navigation instruments. In addition, almost 500 preparations
of radium, for use in surgery and dermatology, were measured and certified
in the Bureau's radium laboratory. An investigation of X-ray protection
in this laboratory for the Surgeon General's Office demonstrated that many
of even the most expensive X-ray shields then on the market were practically
worthless. And with the X-ray apparatus acquired for these studies, the
Bureau also began its preliminary study of techniques for the radiographic
detection of flaws in aluminum and steel, which were to succeed where in
many cases magnetic testing failed.'03
The Bureau developed an improved blasting machine for the Corps
of Engineers, worked on rockets and illuminating shells with the Trench
Warfare Section of Ordnance, and helped design signal lamps for daylight
transmission of messages in the trenches or between planes in flight.'04 The
colorimetrists and photometrists of the Bureau supplied scientific data for a
high-priority searchlight investigation made by the Engineers. Dr. Harvey
L. Curtis spent much of the war devising and operating his complex electrical
circuits for measuring velocity and other ballistic characteristics of proj ectiles
for the Navy.'05
Investigations of sound-ranging and sound-detecting equipment, for
locating distant or concealed enemy began soon after the French mis-
sion brought to this country some of the apparatus in use, overseas. Design-
ing and constructing improved sound-ranging apparatus, as well as geophones
and seismicrophones, to detect enemy mining operations in the trenches, and
special microphones for the detecting of underwater sounds, occupied the
Bureau's electrolysis (sic) section until, well after the armistice.'°6 The only
death of a Bureau staff member on the battlefield occurred in this group.
Dr. Ernest E. Weibel, who with Dr. Eckhardt and Burton McCollum made
important developments in a new sound-ranging device, entered the Army
as a captain in the spring of 1918 in order to take the equipment overseas
and test it in the trenches in the British sector near Ypres. In a mustard-gas
'°' "War Work," pp. 261—263, 246; NBS Annual Report 1918, p. 103.
103 "War Work," pp. 251—255, 298—299; NBS Annual 1918, p. 52; Annual Report
1919, p. 74.
104 "War Work," pp. 107—112, 124—127.
Crowell, America's Munitions, pp. 389—391; "War Work," pp. 263—265; NBS Annual
Report 1918, p. 41; Curtis, Recollections of a Scientist, pp. 39—51.
1110 Crowell, America's Munitions, pp. 384-387; "War Work," pp. 265—271; NBS Annual
Report 1918, pp. 67, 104—105.