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

216 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19)
necessary measurements but a source of the scientific principles upon which
its operations must depend.147
The Bureau itself realized for the first time what could be done when
its 2- and 3-man sections became 50-man sections and were supported with
adequate funds and equipment. It was no more than a glimpse, for Bureau
accomplishments, by comparison with the tasks laid before it, seemed few.
There had hardly been time to state the problem, acquire the equipment,
or find the staff before the armistice came. But it was a turning point in
the outlook of the Bureau. If it could not be the hoped for center for pure
research, the Bureau would undertake the applied research for industry
that industry could not do for itself.
As Stratton and Secretary Redfield told the House subcommittee late
in 1918, "Practically all of the military work [conducted by the Bureau]
has an industrial value," and that research must be continued and expanded
on behalf of industry.148 Other nations realized the extraordinary role science
in industry had played in the conflict, and as a result Canada, Japan, and
Australia were already planning national laboratories to look after their
industrial development. In beating swords into plowshares, Stratton told
Congress, the Bureau must continue its research on airplane engines and
instruments and take up much needed studies of automotive engines as well.
The study of problems raised by the war in optics and optical instruments,
in radio, and in acoustics had only begun.149
Much of the proposed peacetime research that Stratton and Redfield
outlined to Congress was to be carried on, the latter said, in "the legacy
left to us," the Bureau's great Industrial 'building, clearly destined to become
"the center and home of the scientific studies of' the Government for the
A historian-scientist in the glass industry was to say twice within 20 pages of that
period: "Much of [the subsequent] increase in knowledge was the direct product of the
[There wasi * * * an
enforced extension of the optical glass industry during the war. '
awakened realization by the glass industry * * * that the soundest foundation for a
strong industry is the understanding of its fundamental scientific principles." George W.
Morey, The Properties of Glass, pp. 5, 26.
Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), p. 958. A year later Stratton noted that the
Bureau "has gotten practically 100 percent salvage value out of all of its scientific
research for the War Department." Hearings * * * 1921 (Jan. 2, 1920), p. 1531.
The new emphasis on research for industry and standardization in industrial production,
manufacturing, and distribution were subjects of many articles shortly after the war,
among them G. K. Burgess, "Science and the after-war period," Sci. Mo. 8, 97 (1919)
E. B. Rosa, "The Bureau of Standards and industrial standardization," Am. Federa-
tionist, 25, 1029 (1919); "Work of the Bureau of Standards during 1918," Science,
49, 39 (1919)); P. G. Agnew, "The work of the Bureau of Standards," Ann. Am. Acad.
Pout. Sci. 82, 278 (1919) ; "The Bureau of Standards and the war," Nature, 103,
197 (1919); C. H. Claudy, "Science in the war," Sci. Am. 120, 653 (1919).
Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), p. 957.