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

224 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30)
came by streetcar. Some of the prices for new automobiles that year read
like Bureau salaries. While the Ford runabout was only $395, the sedan
cost $795. The Dort "fourseason" sedan was $1,870, the Auburn sedan
$2,775. Nor could used cars have been very popular when a 1919 Chevrolet
cost $550 and an Overland $1,000. For the sporty youth on his own,
however, there was that Stutz 6-cylinder roadster, vintage not given, going
for Few below the scientific grades in the laboratories could afford
any of them, just as few could afford to stay at the Bureau.
A loyal nucleus that included most of the key members of the staff
remained, even though mapy of those in the lower grades who elected to
stay were, Dr. Stratton said, being paid "less than a living wage." In its
search for replacements, all that the Bureau had to offer was "a reasonably
good entrance salary to young men just out of college." 10 With industry
bidding for them, too, even recent graduates could not be found in any
numbers and the Bureau staff fell from 1,150 members in July 1919 to 981
a year later, and 850 by 1921. Few eligibles appeared on the civil service
registers and answers to advertising appeals grew meager. The Bureau
turned to industry itself in an effort to restaff its laboratories.
Dr. Stratton some years earlier had warned that the schools were not
turning out even a tenth of the scientific and technical men needed in in.
dustry, and as a consequence industry raided the Bureau in its search for
trained men. In 1916, as industry expanded to feed the war machines in
Europe and Bureau losses of skilled workmen went up, Stratton proposed to
Congress that in order to relieve the pressure on his staff the Bureau make
its facilities available to industrial specialists, technical experts, and re-
searchers, and by setting them to work on problems in which both they and
the Bureau were interested, "train them up for the industries." He cited as
example a linoleum company which had recently asked to send a chemist to
the Bureau who after 6 months' training would return and set up a laboratory
in the plant where he worked. Without authorization or funds for this
type of employment, the Bureau had to deny the request.11
Although he brought up the matter at hearings each year thereafter,
Congress said no. By the summer of 1919 what Stratton had previously
called "more or less a notion of mine" had become stark necessity, and he
turned to the trade associations served by the Bureau, proposing that where
they needed specific researches on important problems affecting their in-
dustry, they send qualified men to the Bureau to do this research. It was
0 Advertisements in the "Washington Evening Star," April and October 1920.
10 NBS Annual Report 1920, p. 279; Annual Report 1921, p. 272.
Hearings * * * 1918 (Dec. 1, 1916), p. 4.83.