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

SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 343
procedure devised by the Mathematical Tables Project insured nearly flawless
tables that received wide and grateful recognition. Before long universi-
ties, industry (General Electric), the Bureau itself, and other Federal agencies
(the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation, the Corps of Engineers,
the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance) began suggesting or requesting much needed
tables for their research. By 1943, 27 book-length tables had been pub-
lished in the Bureau's Mathematical Tables (MT) series, and as many
more short tables had appeared in specialized periodicals. That spring the
project staff, reduced to 60 by induction into the Armed Forces or empioy-
ment in industry, was transferred from WPA administration to that of the
Bureau, to continue its work on behalf of the National Defense Research
Committee. Four years later the project moved from New York to the
National Applied Mathematics Laboratories established at the Bureau.134
Another fundamental study begun in the thirties was concerned with
the physical constants of pure substances. The Bureau had long been aware
of the need for accurately determined constants as offering the best criteria
of the identity and purity of many industrially important organic com-
pounds. A new technique in this field had been devised abroad, that of
ebulliometry, providing a comparative method for determining the vapor
pressure, boiling point, and purity of organic substances by comparison with
water as a primary reference standard. In 1935 the Bureau invited Dr.
Mieczyslaw Wojciechowski of the Polytechnic Institute of Warsaw, the stu-
dent of Wojciech Swietoslawski, originator of the technique, to Washington.
Under his direction, Bureau chemists began preparation of a number of high
purity organic reagents and organic substances, including benzene, dioxane,
isoprene, as well as of the aliphatic. hydrocarbons and alcohols. The work
continued up to the eve of war.135
The considerable fundamental research of the depression years, useful
alike to science and industry, won wide acknowledgment. Unlike some of
the research earlier in the decade, which had found little welcome though it
was equally fundamental, none of these new lines of work impinged on or
Lowan, "The computer laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards," Scripta
Math. 15, 33 (1949); interview with Mrs. Ida Rhodes, Sept. 10, 1963. For the status of
staff and equipment just prior to the transfer of the project from WPA to NDRC auspices,
see memo, Warren Weaver, Applied Math Panel, NDRC, Nov. 13, 1942 (OSRD records,
NARG 227, file MTP General Correspondence).
131 NBS Annual Report 1936, p. 67; Annual Report 1941, p. 73; interview with Dr. E. R.
Smith, Jan. 14, 1964. Swietoslawski visited the Bureau 3 years later and with Smith
published RP1088, "Water as a reference standard for ebulliometry" (1938). See
memo, Crittenden for LJB, Aug. 15, 1940 (NBS Box 490, 1DM), for a program of
standard substances at the Bureau.