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

276 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30)
ness of surfaces, the straightness of edges, and the limiting surfaces of end
gages, the Bureau's standard plane was to serve as a basis for producing
standard angles and for calibrating instruments that measured curvature.163
All the major industries reached new peaks of development and pro-
duction in the twenties, and in the glass industry few so spectacularly as the
manufacturers of automobile windows and windshields. But the three giants,
and the symbols of the age, were the automobile, aviation, and radio industries.
AUTOMOBILES AND AIRCRAFT
Between 1920 and 1930 the number of cars registered in the United
States leaped from 9 to 26.5 million, well over half of them Henry Ford's
Model T. With them came the first officially numbered highway, the first
automatic traffic light, the first concrete road with banked curves, the six-
lane highway, one.way street, parking problem, tourist home, and tourist
cabin.164 Enclosing the tonneau in glass and canvas or in steel and installing
more efficient and more powerful engines converted the car from a family
horseless carriage to a family locomotive. With moderate prices and in-
stallment payments, the acquisition of an automobile moved rapidly from
luxury to convenience to necessity. But it might not have happened if the
geologists had been right.
Bureau research on the automobile and airplane, in adjoining lab-
oratories in West building and in the dynamometer chambers, began on a
pessimistic note: the Nation's supply of gasoline and oil must be conserved.
Depletion of this country's known petroleum resources was said to be as
little as 10 years away. The need for conservation was unquestioned.165 A
secondary problem, partly resulting from the producers' efforts to conserve
the supply, was the poor quality of much of the gasoline on the market. If,
by improvement of combustion through better knowledge of fuels, ignition,
lubrication, and carburation, the Bureau reported, it could assist "in lower-
ing the gasoline consumption of automobiles only 10 percent for a given
mileage, it [would] represent a saving to the country of something like
C. A. Skinner, "Making a standard of planeness," Gen. Elec. Rev. p. 528 (1926);
"John Clacey—Optician," Pop. Astron. 38, 1 (1930); NBS Annual Report 1937, p. 65.
Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change, p. 110.
Hicks, The Republican Ascendancy, pp. 27—28. As late as 1926, "the dwindling
supply of crude oil" still marked the "urgent necessity for rigid economy in the use of
fuel." Hearings * * * 1927 (Jan. 25, 1926), p. 107. The Bureau was to lose 8 or 10
of its best young physicists to industry in the search for oil in the 1920's, including
Karcher in 1923, McCollum and Eckhardt in 1926, and Foote in 1927 (interview with
Dr. Paul D. Foote, July 23, 1963).