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

310 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40)
celerate "with returning prosperity." Actually, from the viewpoint of
appropriations, as Dr. Burgess wrote with great satisfaction to Gano Dunn
of the Visiting Committee, 1931 had been "the banner year for the Bureau."
Transferred funds and direct appropriations totaled'more than $4 million,
the largest sum in its history, exceeding even the appropriations of the war
years. Besides increases in salaries, special appropriations, and transferred
funds, almost a million dollars had been allocated for a new hydraulic lab-
oratory, two radio stations, and some 15 acres of additional land to the
north and west of the Bureau quadrangle.35
NBS Annual Report 1931, PP. 1, 46. This report is the only one ever to state the
number of projects carried on under each Bureau appropriation.
No special alarm, either, seems to have been felt at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichs-
anstalt (PTR), the Bureau's counterpart in Berlin. More interestingly, that year
produced the only comparison between the Bureau and the PTR that has been found.
Five years earlier, in 1926, Paul D. Foote while in Europe had written Dr. that
from his observations the Bureau, with better equipment, now excelled the PTR in
practically every line of work (letters in NBS Box 157, ID and IDP). A German
article on the state of the PTR in 1931 confirmed Foote's reports.
By comparison with the NBS and Britain's National Physical Laboratory, the writer
said, the PTR "in these past years, has considerably receded into the background." It
had become preoccupied with testing to the exclusion of basic physical-technical re-
search, it suffered from lack of team work, and the technically important work it should
be d&ng for industry was instead being done by industry itself.
Where the NBS budget for 1929 amounted roughly to $2.75 million or 11.5 million RM,
with a "material" (nonsalary) budget of 8.8 million RM, the PTR budget for 1931 of
1.5 million RM allowed but 400,000 RM for all material expenditures, of which only
170,000 RM were earmarked for research. As for productivity, "The staff of the Reichs-
anstalt would really have to consist of half-gods * * * to achieve the same results as
the Bureau of Standards." J. Zenneck, "Werner von Siemens und die grundung der
Physikalisch Technische Reichsanstalt," Munich Deutsches Museum Abh. u. Ber. 3,
13 (1931) L/C: AM1O1.M974.3.
Letter, Mar. 4, 1931 (NBS Box 330, ID). The National Hydraulic Laboratory estab-
lished at the Bureau was described in Science, 72, 7 (1930), and Civil Eng., 1,
911 (1931).
Surveying the 9 major and 12 minor buildings spread over the Bureau heights, Burgess
beheld "a varitable city of science." Outside Washington, the new radio research sta-
tion on 17 acres at Beltsville, Md., was to be used to send continuous standard fre-
quency signals to broadcasting stations, the station on 200 acres at Meadows, Md., to
study upper atmosphere radio phenomena. Aviation eigine testing, too rackety for
the householders dGwn on Connecticut Avenue, had been moved to a new station at
Arlington, Va. Other field stations included that for radio aids to aviation at College,
Park, Md., electric lamp inspection laboratories in the New York and Boston districts;
farm waste stations at Ames, Iowa, and at Auburn and Tuscaloosa, Ala.; cement and
concrete test stations at Northampton, Pa., and Denver, Cob.; cement, concrete, and
miscellaneous materials test units at San Francisco, and ceramics research at Columbus,
Ohio. Burgess, "The National Bureau of Standards," posthumously published in Sci. Mo.
36, 201 (1933). For an earlier report by Burgess on the Bureau plant, see Hear-
ings * * * 1928 (Dec. 5, 1927), p. 43.