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

TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 333
The first approval of new construction since the turn of the decade
occurred in 1938 when Congress agreed to the erection of a high voltage
laboratory to replace the obsolete structure built alongside East building
in 1913.102 Up to that time the electrical industry had been content with
laboratory measurements in line-to-line voltages in the range of 100,000 volts.
By the late thirties the industry, transmitting power at 285,000 volts, was
in need of new measurements. At a cost of $315,000, the new laboratory,
with a 2 million-volt generator for high voltage work and a 1,400,000-volt
generator for X-ray studies, was completed late in 1940.103
Reflecting less the upturn than the relentless outpouring of Federal
funds into construction projects was the expansion of Bureau branch labo-
ratories in the latter half of the decade. A new laboratory was established
in Seattle to test cement for the Grand Coulee Dam. The staff at Denver was
augmented for the building of the Austin and Hamilton Dams in Texas and
the Conchas Dam in New Mexico, as were the test groups at Riverside, Calif.,
and Allentown, Pa., for local construction projects.'°4
Despite the relief programs and the massive construction projects,
the Nation still failed to recover its normal momentum, a fact the President
bitterly attributed to the deliberate machinations of the economic royalists
in industry.105 The answer was more pump-priming, and the administration
turned to new efforts on behalf of housing, the railroads, and utilities.
The better homes movement of the 1920's became the low-cost housing
program of the 1930's, administered on a series of fronts by the housing
division of the Public Works Administration, the Federal Emergency Relief
Administration, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, and the Tennessee
Valley Authority. For some time a consultant to these agencies on building
materials, the Bureau was now brought directly into the program and pro-
vided with special funds for research in low-cost housing. Its studies in the
structural and fire-resistant properties of materials for these houses were
102 The original laboratory was not planned but acquired as an alternative to invoking
a penalty clause in the construction contract for East building. The structure, Building
No. 26, was later converted into a telephone exchange for the Bureau. Interview with
Dr. Silsbee, May 21, 1962.
102NBS Annual Report 1937, p. 59; Hearings * * * 1939 (Jan. 31, 1938), pp. 146—152;
Annual Report 1940, pp. 63—64, 70.
204 NBS Annual Report 1936, pp. 75—76.
105 James A. Farley, Jim Farley's Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948), pp. 101, 104.
For Morgenthau's diary entry on the "conspiracy" of business, see The Memoirs of
Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929—1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1952),
p. 482.