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

302 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40)
burns when applied externally, but that skin lesions had insidious effects
was not so well known. Despite this, and the total ignorance of the effects
of radium when taken internally, the American Medical Association did not
remove radium for internal administration from its list of recognized
remedies until 1932.
The standardization crusade that did so much to fix the public
image of the Bureau as a "great scientific business [operated ii for the
common benefit of all the people" acted in yet another way. Consumers
and those interested in consumer welfare began asking what precise benefits
the public derived from standardization. Critics of the Bureau appeared
who saw only too well how its efforts at standardization and simplification
saved money for industry but little evidence that those savings were passed
on to the householder.
The Bureau was at some fault itself. It extolled its consumer research
without making clear the distinction between the "organized consumer,"
meaning Federal, State, and city agencies and hospital, hotel and
similar trade associations which were direct beneficiaries of its research,
and the "over-the-counter consumer" or man in the street. Yet the Bureau
was sincerely concerned for the individual consumer and assured him in
correspondence and publications that he was the' ultimate beneficiary of all
its research, in better products and better quality.11 Even more direct aid
was available to the consumer through Bureau publications on incandescent
An indirect consumer service of the Bureau was its unpublicized investigations for
the Federal Trade Commission, Postal Service, Justice Department, and Treasury De-
partment, particularly in the scientific detection of misrepresentation, fraud, and high
crime. Misleading advertising and misrepresentation of products became subjects of
Bureau investigation almost from its inception, but interest in crime did not begin
until 1913 when Albert S. Osborn, -author of Questioned Documents, sent some
micrometers to the Bureau for calibration. By chance, the instruments were tested
by Dr. Wilmer Souder of the weights and measures division, who became interested in
the scientific detection of crime. His laboratory, with Dr. Stratton's encouragement,
was for almost two decades the principal crime research center in the Federal Govern-
ment, long antedating the organization of a crime laboratory in the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. The FBI Laboratory acquired its first scientist in 1932.
Assistance from all the Bureau laboratories was available to Dr. Souder, especially the
photographic technology laboratory, where Raymond Davis developed a method for
photographing and deciphering almost completely charred records when the ordinary
camera, the microscope, and chemical reagents failed (S454, 1922). Specializing in the
identification of questoned documents, of typewriting, handwriting, bullets, cartridge
cases, and firearms, Dr. Souder by the early 1930's was participating in some 50 to 75
Federal investigations a year involving extortion, kidnapping, theft of money orders,
raised checks, forgeries, stolen securities, and threatening letters. Bureau testimony in
a contract case in 1935 was reported to have saved the Government almost $300,000,
and in another instance settled the payment of income taxes on $1 million (NBS
Annual Report 1935, p. 66; correspondence in NBS Box 386, IWI).