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

BUILDING AND HOUSING 251
The spring of 1922 witnessed the first surge in home construction,
and the Bureau issued its first publication in the campaign, on "Recom-
mended minimum requirements for small dwelling construction." Plumb-
ing, zoning, building code, and city planning primers followed. A Bureau
investigation of the seasonal irregularities in building activity, which kept
building trades workers unemployed for 3 or 4 months out of each year,
disclosed that most of the lagging resulted more from custom than climate, as
generally believed. Slowly the custom began to yield to the campaign of
publicity and persuasion launched against it.88 The number of new homes
built that year, more than 700,000, was almost double that of the previous
year.
"How to own your home," a Bureau handbook for prospective
home buyers, appeared in the fall of 1923 and sold 100,000 copies the first
week and more than three times that number by the end of its first year.
It was reprinted in magazines and serialized in newspapers across the
country.89 Eight years later its inevitable companion piece, "Care and
repair of the house," came out and was similarly serialized.90 In the fore-
:°' Building and Housing publication No. 1(BH1, 1922).
9°NBS Annual Report 1924, p. 26. A survey of the Bureau's building and housing
activities appears in the series of articles by Delos H. Smith, "Our national building
standards," House Beautiful, 1926—27.
89 BH4, superseded by BH17 (1931). The "New York Sun" serialization, for example,
spanned January and February of 1932. A supplement to BH4 appeared as BH12,
"Present home financing methods" (1928).
9° BH15 (1931). LC366, LC381, and LC383, all in 1933, covered "Bringing your home
up to date."
N0TE.—Letter circulars, numbered from LC1 (1921) to LC1O4O (1961), have been
reproduced at the Bureau to make information available to the public prior to formal
publication, to supplement information in formal reports prior to their revision, to
supply information too brief for publication, or to excerpt material from Bureau publica-
tions for which there was a continuing or voluminous demand. In some instances LC's
also reproduced information from reports of the American Society for Testing Materials
and the American Standards Association.
Until recently when mimeographed lists of publications (LP) began to appear, perhaps
the largest single category of LC's were bibliographies of the published work of Bureau
sections (e.g., LC5, "List of communications of the gage section") or of special areas
of research, whether done at the Bureau or elsewhere (e.g., LC35, "Publications per-
taining to petroleum products").
Some of the subjects that have eluded formal publication include "Good gasoline,"
"Cellophane," "Color harmony," "Neon signs," "Motorists' manual of weights and
measures," "Dry ice," "Metric and English distance equivalents for athletic events,"
"Matches," "Horology," "Porcelain and pottery," "Abrasives," and "The legibility of
ledgers." Others are cited elsewhere in the present history.
The only known complete set of these ephemeral letter circulars, as well as LP's, is
presently located in the Office of Technical Information and Publications at the Bureau.