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

248 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30)
of studies in Europe. It was well known that each chemical element or com-
bination of elements has distinctive spectra, either by emission or absorption,
that are as characteristic of the element as the fingerprints of humans. Yet
in that time practically none of the spectra of the elements had been comrn
pletely described, although their importance, both theoretical and practical,
was increasing more rapidly than the knowledge of them advanced. Except
in astrophysics, there had been little application of spectroscopy, and in
analysis the "wet" chemists continued to reign supreme.
Upon his arrival at the Bureau as a young laboratory assistant in 1914,
Dr. William F. Meggers began the measurement of wavelengths of light and
their application to an understanding of the spectra of chemical elements.
By the sheer weight of accumulated evidence he was to establish standards of
spectrographic measurement that were to gain worldwide acceptance. Some
of the masses of spectrographic data that he and his assistants compiled over
the next three decades for the analysis of chemical elements and compounds,
noble gases, common and rare metals and their alloys, had to await the
development of electronic computers for their resolution and final form.
Out of the routine analyses made in the Bureau's spectroscopic laboratory of
the thousands of samples of materials submitted for testing came new methods
of quantitative analysis, some of them sensitive to amounts of impurities so
small that they completely escaped detection by chemical methods.
The publication in 1922 of Dr. Meggers' paper with Kiess and Stimson
on "Practical spectrographic analyses" drew attention to the simplicity and
practicality of making chemical identifications and quantitative determina-
tions by spectroscopic means. That paper, Dr. Meggers was to say, "finally
put applied spectroscopy on its feet." 82 The tool of science became a tool
of industry, owing much to Dr. Meggers' continuing research in improved
methods of spectrochemical analysis. At the same time, he was to contribute
materially to atomic physics studies going on at the Bureau through his
search for better description of atomic and ionic spectra.
A chance assignment first launched the Bureau into areas of atomic
physics well beyond its early investigations of radium and radioactivity when
Professor John Tate, physicist at the University of Minnesota, came as a
guest worker in the heat division during the war. Professor Tate had recently
returned from Europe where he learned about the exciting work being done
at Göttingen in the spectral analysis of mercury and other metal vapor atoms.
At the Bureau he aroused the interest of Dr. Paul D. Foote and Dr. Fred L.
Mohier, two youngsters in the heat division, in this work that appeared to
support Bohr's theory of atomic processes.
82 S444 (1922) and interview with Dr. Meggers, Mar. 13, 1962. Today there are
more than 3,000 spectrometrical laboratories in the United States alone.