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

TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 331
interest and use in the purchase of hundreds of products from automobiles
to window glass.95
The failure of national consumer interests to mobilize Government
action on their behalf recoiled on the Bureau. Its products testing and its
continued association in the specifications, simplified practices, and com-
modity standards work even after that work was transferred to ASA in 1933
sustained the hopes of consumer.groups and kept the Bureau in something of
a bind for the next two decades. As late as 1952 the Bureau still found it
necessary to maintain a form letter explaining the limitations inherent in its
testing of products for Government and industry and why it could not issue
comparative ratings of brand-name commodities.
Despite the alarms, apprehensions, and hardships of the period, many
of the seniors at the Bureau later remembered the time of the depression as
not unrelievedly bleak. The respite in committee assignments, curtailment
of travel, and decline in supervisory duties left welcome time for research.
The paper load was further lightened as testing, which had long accounted for
almost half of all annual funds and occupied more than half the time of the
staff, fell off.
It was a time of moratoriums and petty economies. The annual con-
ference on weights and measures, first postponed in 1932, was not resumed
until 3 years later. The Director's annual report was reduced by half and
printed with that of the Secretary of Commerce. The master scale depot at
Chicago, the farm-waste laboratory at Tuscaloosa, Ala., and the ceramic
station at Columbus, Ohio, were closed, and the Bureau's cotton mill in the
Industrial building was shut down.. Reduction of the building and housing
division from 36 to 2 members and the automotive research section from
40 to 13 members had counterparts in almost every building at the Bureau.96
Although hiring of technicians and scientists, no matter how available
or desirable, was out of the question, large numbers of "clerks," "draftsmen,"
and "technicians" were offered the Bureau through the Federal Emergency
Relief Administration (FERA) A Works Projects Administration
The material of the brochure first appeared as an article by Dr. Briggs in Ann. Am.
Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 173, 153 (1934). In the same brochure series were "Services of the
National Bureau of Standards to the home building industry and to the household"
(1936) and "Services * * to governmental purchasing agencies" (1937).
°°
NBS Annual Report 1932, p. 2; Annual Report 1934, p. 73; correspondence in NBS
Box 356, AB and AG, and Box 399, 1ST.
Early in 1935 the President allotted $75,000 of FERA funds to the Bureau, "to assist
educational, professional, and clerical persons in a study of materials for low-cost housing."
Few of the 189 persons assigned to the Bureau possessed the specified training
and were given cleaning and repairing chores. By autumn only half were still at the
Bureau, on a part-time basis. The other half had been transferred to other Federal
agencies. Report, A. S. McAllister, Oct. 4, 1935 (NBS Box 388, PRM).