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

268 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30)
with the gums, pentoses, and lignins separated in the process, recovery totaled
more than 80 percent of the substance of some of these farm wastes.136
A group brought into the fibrous materials division upon its organiza-
tion in 1927 began a rival investigation to the levulose research going on in
the optics division. Where the levulose group concerned itself with planted
crops, Hudson, Isbell, and Acree, working with farm wastes, sought to con-
vert cottonseed hulls, corncobs, and peanut shells into useful industrial chem-
icals. Attention centered for a time on the considerable quantities of the
rare sugar xylose available in these cellulose wastes, which had important
medical uses and also might, if economically extracted, be readily converted
to organic acids useful to the tanning industry.
Within 2 years a process had been developed for the production of
100 pounds of 99.99-percent-pure xylose per day.137 But as both levulose
and xylose approached the commercial development stage, interest in them
waned. Their high cost repelled industry and Congress refused further
research support as an invasion of industry's domain. Nor were efforts
to utilize farm wastes to survive their relatively high cost of conversion
or the avalanche of chemicals from petroleum distillation in the 1940's.
In the depression years the Bureau turned from its technological develop-
ment of specific rare sugars to the chemistry of carbohydrates and later to
the study of labeled (radioactive tracer) carbohydrates, extensively used in
current biological and medical research.138
The investigation of paper made from waste materials was but one
of more than a dozen paper studies going on in the Bureau's fibrous mate-
rials division. Some were continuations of the wartime search for new
sources and substitutes, others wholly new research, looking for fundamental
data in the properties and performance of paper. Elsewhere in the Industrial
building similar lines of search went on in rubber, leather, and textiles. In
the electrical division the investigation of electroplating, which began with
studies of zinc-, lead-, and nickel-coating protection for military supplies,
broadened to include fundamental studies for the industry, particularly the
silverware and printing trades. And when chromium plating became com-
mercially feasible in the midtwenties, some of the first scientific data on this
process was produced at the Bureau.139
By 1921 pyrometric control stations in heavy industry had become
"nearly as intricate as a telephone central station," a far cry from the days
when high temperatures were estimated by visual observation. At the re-
NBS Annual Report, 1933, p. 61.
"7NBS Annual Report, 1929, p. 41; Hearings * * * 1934 (Dec. 12, 1932), p. 179;
NBS Annual Report, 1933, p. 61; interview with Dr. Gordon M. Kline, May 7, 1963.
188 Interview with Dr. Horace S. Isbell, Apr. 23, 1963.
NBS Annual Report, 1925, p. 13. See ch. III, p. 128.