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

THE CRUSADE FOR STANDARDIZATION 253
1940, remained available to the public until the early fifties, when a new
reprinting threatened sales of similar commercial publications in the book-
stores.91
Construction of new homes reached a peak in 1925 when 937,000
units were completed. At the start of the program it had been estimated
that a minimum of 450,000 homes a year would be necessary to overcome
the postwar shortage. New construction in the 8 years of the program,
through 1929, actually averaged 750,000 homes annually.92
The housing emergency long past, the building division at the Bureau
became an early casualty of the depression. By June 1933 the staff, which
had numbered 36, was down to 2. In 1934 its code sections and the safety
standards section in the electrical division were merged with the Bureau's
specifications division and transferred from Commerce out to the Indus.
trial building at the Bureau.93 There the regrouped division continued the
research that was to serve the New Deal low-cost housing program organized
in the late 1930's.
"THE CRUSADE FOR STANDARDIZATION"
In 1920, while President of the Federated American Engineering
Societies, Hoover initiated a survey to determine the extent of wasteful use
of materials and wasteful operations in industry. Twenty-five percent of the
costs of production could be eliminated, the report disclosed, without affect-
ing wages or labor. In six typical industries, wasteful practices accounted
for almost 50 percent of materials and labor.94
If waste was most prevalent in industry, industry had no monopoly
on it. Owing as much to long.established custom as to the wake of war,
it was to be found throughout the economy. The great reconstruction pro-
gram that Hoover proposed upon taking over the Department of Commerce
had for its objectives: (1) Elimination of waste in transportation; (2)
elimination of waste of natural resources; (3) husbandry of fuel and labor
The service trades had some justification, for upon its publication in 1931 the Bureau
distributed posters and other advertising matter for the handbook to hardware and
paint dealers and put up displays at trade conventions. See monthly reports, Div. XI,
1931 (NBS Box 334, PRM). The trades also had to contend with Doubleday, Doran's
publication for Better Homes in America of a hard cover edition of "Care and repair"
that same year, 1931. For the outcome of the handbook, see ch. VIII, pp. 481—582.
°' The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, II, 96.
"NBS Annual Report 1934, p. 73; Annual Report 1935, p. 83.
Waste in Industry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1921), briefed in H. P. Daizell, A. B.
Gait, and. R. M. Hudson's "Simplification data for survey of 'Recent economic
changes'," July 2, 1928 (NBS Box 253, PA). See also NBS Commercial Standards
(CS-0), 1930, p. 2.