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

CURTAILMENT BY LIMITATION OF FUNDS 347
Percival D. Lowell with his invention in 1922 that made it possible to use ordinary house
current instead of storage batteries to operate a home radio. For the first time, the
60-cycle alternating current that operated the lights in the house could, with Lowell's
rectifier, equally well supply power to the filament and plates of the radio.
its representation on almost a hundred sectional committees of ASA dealing
with technical subjects, and sponsor certain projects assigned to it by ASA.
When the formal transfer was made, some of the staff members separated
earlier by the Bureau were taken on by ASA, to continue their work at the Bu-
reau as ASA employees.146
To what extent Bureau research was terminated in areas susceptible
of patentable ideas that industry might otherwise discover for itself cannot
be determined. Suggestive, however, is the example in radio research, where
fundamental investigations in radio transmission phenomena were continued,
while the entire group in applied radio research at College Park, Md., involv-
ing 20 members, was dismissed in June 1934 and the station closed.147
All three committees advising the Bureau on retrenchment and re-
organization of its research expressed concern over the current patent policy
of the Bureau. Their investigations came at a time when Dr. Briggs was in
NBS Annual Report 1934, pp. 52—53; Annual Report 1937, p. 59. Upon consolidation
of Bureau funds in 1936, the standardization work remaining at the Bureau was per-
formed under the appropriation for "commercial standards."
147 Interview with W. S. Hinman, Jr., Dec. 28, 1963. Three of the group, unman,
Diamond, and Dunmore, were brought back to Washington not long after.