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

218 THE WAR YEARS (1917-19)
tripled their'scièntific
''
staffs, and others that had formerly considered research
an expensive frill-now for the scientists and engineers they began
to enlist.154
For the Bureau's industrial research, Stratton asked a special con-
gressional appropriation of $363,000, half again as much as the combined
sums requested for' its' previous largest programs, structural materials testing
and the testing of' Government materials. Iii addition, he asked for more
than four the past for public utility investigations.
The war had pressure on the utilities, dramatizing, he said,
their and 'economic problems." Not 'only gas and electric
companies, but telephone and telegraph companies had been overtaxed by the
service demands of the war industries, war workers, and military camps.
Hardest hit, the telephone company in the District of Columbia had been
forced to file a petition for both traffic and financial relief.155 "The public
utilities of the country are trembling in the balance," Redfield told Congress,
and if the Bureau did not undertake the necessary research to provide
practical standards and scientific data on their behalf, then eac'h of the 48
States would have to establish separate laboratories to do this work.'56 Con.
gress agreed that it was a Bureau responsibility.
For a peacetime America, it was an immense and expensive program
the Bureau projected. With the increase in staff, statutory salaries for
Bureau test and research personnel had gone up from less than $300,000 in
1916 to nearly $500,000 for fiscal year 1920. In the same period, special
appropriations, which included salaries for 'the additional staff, rose from
$300,000 (for 9 projects) to $1,310,000 (for 25 projects). Of the projects
under special appropriations, four alone—iñdustrial research, public utilities,
structural materials, and testing o'f Government materials—accounted for well
over half the total of special appropriations and more than one-third of total
Bureau income. 'Convinced' of the peacetime worth of these investigations
begun with public or military funds during the war,' Congress made cuts in
some but voted to continue them all. Their benefit to industry was beyond
question. '
A year after Vincent and Millikan raised the question of extending
the functions of the Bureau of Standards on behalf of industry, Dr. Stratton,
in the introduction to his annual report' 'for 1'918—19, accepted the, challenge
in a significant restatement of Bureau policy. The relation of the Bureau's
work to the public, to the Government and to science remained unchanged,
154 Where in 1920 there had been' 300 research laboratories in this country,
a decade later there were 1,625, staffed by than 34,000 people. Dupree, Science in
the Federal Government, p. 337. ' '
"War Work," pp. 274—276. ' -'
"° Hearings * * * 1920 (Dec. 12, 1918), p. 941; NBS Annual Report 1918, PP. 52—53.