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

266 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30)
difficult to isolate and purify, and therefore, one of the most costly. Found
in honey and fruits, levulose was equally available in the common dahlia and
in the jerusalem artichoke, the latter a prolific weedlike plant whose bulbous
roots contained an abundance of the raw material.130
The year was 1920 and the wheat farms of the West, their wartime
markets gone, were in distress. If large-scale commercial production of
refined levulose proved economically feasible, wheatfields could be converted
to growing artichoke tubers and so ease the Nation1s surplus wheat problem.
Under that impetus the Bureau investigation lasted almost 20 years.
As an ideal solution for a major surplus crop, the program had the
full approval of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. The
Bureau set up a special laboratory. In cooperation with the Bureau of
Plant Industry of the Department of Agriculture, successively improved
types of jerusalem artichokes were grown in the West under contract and
shipped to the Bureau for processing. In 1929 a pilot plant for the pro-
duction of crystalline levulose went up in the Industrial building, and there
sirups of 99-percent purity, yielding crystallization of 75 percent of the
sugar, were finally achieved.131 A semicommercial plant for the develop.
ment of a continuous process approached completion when in 1933 the
depression brought the program to an end.
The years of reseach made the Bureau probably the greatest repository
of sugar technology in the country but they left unsolved the problem of
wheat surplus. Nor were levulose, ribose, mannose, raffinose, xylose or any
other rare sugar produced at the Bureau ever to compete economically with
dextrose, the corn derivative, which was equally satisfactory for scientific
and medical purposes.132 The wheat surplus continued.
The drive in the early twenties to utilize waste materials and products
activated other investigations in the sugar laboratories, some brief, some
lasting through the decade. One inquiry had its inception when the sugar
industry called on the Bureau for help with the impurities in cane and beet
molasses. While working on a method to minimize the deleterious effect
of the waste molasses on sugar crystallization, the Bureau became aware of
other uses for the waste besides fertilizer and cattle feed. German patents
described many valuable chemical compounds produced both from waste
"° NBS Annual Report 1920, P. 119.
S519 (Jackson, C. G. Silsbee, and Proffitt, 1925); Hearings * * * 1926 (Jan. 5,
1925), pp. 121—123; NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 25; Annual Report 1933, p. 53. As
a sugar for diabetics, chemical saccharine eventually proved better than any of the
rare sugars.
132 Continued Bureau research on ribose eventually resulted in an improved method of
manufacture that reduced its cost from $40 to $2 per gram, but was still more expensive
than dextrose. NBS Annual Report 1937, p. 66.