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

306 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40)
research and testing, said Schlink and Chase, would save the public at
least a billion dollars annually if Bureau test results were made available
in a form that the consumer could use. They declared invalid in an agency
operated on taxpayers' money the Bureau argument that release of its test
results on competitive products, and identifying them by name, would "pro-
mote commercial injustice." They proposed a consumers' rebellion, and
urged the public to act through Congress to secure release of all Government
information of consumer interest, particularly that concealed in the publica-
tions and files of the Bureau of Standards and the Department of Agricul-
ture's Bureau of Chemistry.23
In a book he wrote in 1929, Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, former chief of
the Bureau of Chemistry, father of the Food and Drug Act, inveterate
polemicist, and at that time director of research on Good Housekeeping
magazine, made one of the most virulent and comprehensive of the attacks
on the character of research at the Bureau up to that time.24 Besides his
condemnation of Bureau investigations that encroached on provinces of
other research agencies in the Government, he assailed at length, as did
Schlink and other critics, the research associate plan at
the Bureau which performed research directly for the benefit of industry
at the taxpayer's expense. And he struck at "the expansive activities of thç
Bureau of Standards," citing its use of transferred funds—
to investigate oil pollution, radio direction for the Coast Guard,
helium recorders, chromium plating, corrosion, fatigue and embrittlement
of duralumin, electrically charged dust, optical glass,
substitutes for parachute silk, goldbeaters skin, storage batteries,
internal combustion engines, fuels, lubricants, photographic emul.
sions, stresses in riveted joints, machine guns, bomb ballistics, rope
and cordage, chemical and metallurgical tests, wind tunnel tests
*
of models, aircraft engines, velocity of flame in explosives
*
caroa fibers * * * and farm wastes
23 The same criticism of the Bureau appeared in Dr. Robert A. Brady's article, "How
Government standards affect the ultimate consumer," Ann. Amer. Acad. Soc. Pol. Sci.
137, 245 (1928), and in Schlink's article, "Standards and specifications from the stand-
point of the ultimate consumer," ibid. issue.
The Bureau position has been repeatedly pointed out. The creation of a Government
laboratory to test consumer goods sounds eminently reasonable. But the Bureau has
long been aware how impossibly large and controversial such a project would be. Health
hazards may justify the Food and Drug Administration, but to cover all consumer
products in order to mitigate merely economic hazards would be a herculean task.
Interview with Dr. F. B. Silsbee, Mar. 10, 1964.
The recitation of grievances appeared in a remarkable digression in his History of a
Crime against the Food Law (Privately printed, Washington, D.C., 1929), wherein a
whole chapter (pp. 281—345) was devoted to the Bureau.