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

SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 335
enemy of records proved to be the common air pollutant, sulphur dioxide.
The investigation, extended to newspaper records, motion picture film, rec-
ords on photographic film, microfilm, and lamination, culminated in the
Bureau's work on the preservation at the National Archives of the originals of
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.107
After the unsettling events of the early decade, the Bureau made its
adjustment to the new limitations on research and working force. Few of
the professional staff had taken their imposed furloughs, preferring to work
without pay, unhampered by administrative duties. Others, under indefi-
nite furlough, sought on their own initiative, with some success, funds from
other Federal agencies, in order to return to their laboratories. Looking
back on years, many at the Bureau were to have the impression that with
industrial research at low ebb the period was particularly fruitful in
fundamental research.
SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS
The Seventh General Conference on Weights and Measures held in
Paris in the fall of 1927, with Dr. Stratton, on leave from MIT, and Dr. Bur-
gess as the American delegates, was later pronounced the most important
since that of 1875, when the international prototype meter and kilogram were
adopted. The 31 nations attending the Conference established an interna-
tional temperature scale, accepted the principle of defining the international
meter in terms of light waves, instead of the prototype meter bar maintained
in Paris, and urged the national laboratories to reach agreement on a new
basis for the international electrical Uflits.108
Establishment of the international temperature scale was discussed
in the previous chapter. Equally gratifying to the Bureau delegates was the
adoption by the Conference of the American proposal to define the interna-
tional meter in terms of the wavelength of the red radiation from the cad-
mium lamp. Not only were many precision measurements in science and
industry then being made in tenns of light waves, but acceptance of this defi-
nition would greatly increase accuracy in the intercomparison of gage blocks
and in determining the subdivisions of the meter and yard. Moreover, it
101 NBS Annual Report 1930, p. 28; Annual Report 1931, p. 26; NBS M128 (1931) and
intermittently through M168 (1940), and NBS C505 (1951).
no danger of being supplanted, as was the international meter, this country's na-
tional prototype kilogram was taken to the International Bureau at Sèvres in 1937 and
recompared for the first time in 50 years with the international standard Its mass had
changed by only 1 part in 50 million, a reassuring high degree of constancy (NBS Annual
Report 1937, pp. 60—61).