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

LYMAN JAMES BRIGGS 313
Receiving the recommendation from interim Secretary of Commerce
Roy D. Chapin, Hoover offered Dr. Briggs's name to the Senate. In view
of the imminent change of administrations, the Senate did not act on the
appointment. In the patronage scramble of 1933, Roosevelt was pressed to
name "a good Democrat" to the office. He is said to have replied: "I haven't
the slightest idea whether Dr. Briggs is a Republican or a 'Democrat; all
I know is that he is the best qualified man for the job." On March 27, 1933,
Roosevelt renominated Dr. Briggs and on June 13 the Senate confirmed the
appointment.42
Dr. Lyman J. Briggs (1874—1963), born the' same year as Dr. Bur.
gess, grew up on a farm north of Battle Creek, Mich. He acquired his copy
of Ganot's Physics at 18, in his third year at Michigan State College.
Transferring to the University of Michigan for graduate work, Briggs studied
under Dr. Karl E. Guthe, who was to be chief of an electrical section at the
Bureau of Standards in its early years. in 1895 Briggs graduated with a
master of science in physics.43 That same fall he entered the Johns Hopkins
University, where he worked under Prof. Henry A. Rowland, investigating
with him the recently discovered Roentgen rays.44 But his principal inter-
est 'had been fixed earlier at Michigan State, in what was then a new science
called "soil physics." To learn more of the subject, and to support his ap-
proaching marriage, Briggs in June 1896 obtained a position .as physicist in
the Bureau of Soils of the Department of Agriculture.45 His Hopkins thesis,
42
Wallace R. Brode, "Lyman J. Briggs s," Sci. Mo. 78, 269 (1954).
The delay in acting on the nomination of Dr. Briggs was occasioned by efforts of certain
members of the Senate to name a director of their own choice. Their candidate was
Winder Elwell Goldsborough of Maryland, electrical engineer, teacher, inventor, business.
man, and from 1923 to 1932 director of the Henry L. Doherty Research Laboratories.
The impasse that ensued was apparently broken when Secretary Roper informed Golds.
borough's sponsors that contrary to their belief "that he is a Democrat and entitled,
because of this as well as because of his qualifications, to this position," he was in fact
"a consistent Republican" (letter, Secretary Roper to Senators Harrison, Lonergan, and
Sheppard, June 10, 1933 [NARG 40, Correspondence of Secretary of Commerce Roper,
Box 24.—SI). Additional correspondence on Goldsborough's candidacy, dating from
September 1932, appears in NARG 40, file 93067).
His thesis was published as Guthe and Briggs, "On the electrolytic conductivity of
concentrated sulfuric acid," Phys. Rev. 3, np (1895).
Rowland, Carmichael, and Briggs, "Notes of observations on the roentgen rays,"
Am. J. Sci. 1, 247 (1896); Rowland, Carmichael, and Briggs, "Notes on roentgen rays,"
Elec. World, 27, 452 (1896).
At that time, according to Dr. Briggs, there were only three soil physicists in this country,
Eugene W. Hilgard at California, Franklin H. King at Wisconsin, and Milton Whitney
in the Department of Agriculture. Interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1962.