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

SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 339
cerned at the time principally with the certification of radium and not with
radiation measurement, the Bureau had sent no one to the Congress.
In the spring of 1926 the president of the Radiological Society of North
America came to the Bureau and in some desperation asked it to undertake
the determination of proper X-ray and radium dosages. At the urging of
the society, Congress provided funds for the radiation research, and Lauri.
ston S. Taylor, a young physicist working in X rays and electronics on a
Heckscher Foundation grant at Cornell, was brought to the Bureau for
the work.12'
Taylor found the war surplus equipment that had been acquired by
the Bureau wholly inadequate for the research to be done and successfully
constructed from odd parts new apparatus of 200,000-volt capacity, setting
it up in East building. A year later, in 1928, Taylor attended the Second
International Congress, which proposed the "roentgen" as the unit of quantity
for expressing X-ray and gamma-ray protection. The American counter-
part of the councils working on standards in Europe was established with
the founding of the National Committee on Radiation Protection and
Measurements (NCRP) in 1928, its chairman, Dr. Taylor.122
Taylor's work on the absolute measurement of X rays, published in
1929, showed that the roentgen could be precisely measured, and resulted in
the first real quantitative data on X-ray dosage standards in this country.
Working through NCRP, his X-ray safety code in 1931 established guides
for the shielding of operating rooms and of high voltage equipment and for
protective devices for patients and operators. The first NCRP handbook on
radium protection, prepared by Taylor's colleague, Dr. Leon F. Curtiss, for
the use of industry and the medical profession, followed in 1934.123
The initial, measurements of X rays had been made with heavy and
bulky equipment. Construction in 1930 of a portable, guarded-field ioniza-
tion chamber provided means for a much needed, accurate primary standard
in convenient form. With the chamber, intercomparisons were made in
1931 with measurements obtained in the laboratories abroad. The excellence
of results led in 1934 to international agreement between the laboratories of.
England, France, Germany, and the United States on procedures in X-ray
ill Interview with Dr. Taylor, Sept. 24, 1963.
122
NBS Annual Report 1928, pp. 35—36. The work of the Second Congress was reported
in NBS C374 (1929).
Represented on the NCRP was the American Roentgen Ray Society, the Radiological
Society of North America, the American Medical Association, X-ray equipment manufacturers,
and the Bureau. See Taylor, "Brief history of the NCRP * * *," Health
Physics, 1, 3 (1958).
123 RP56 "The precise measurement of X-ray dosage" (Taylor, 1929); HiS, "X-ray protection"
(1931), superseded by H20 (1936); H18, "Radium protection" (1934), superseded
byH23 (1938).