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

350 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40)
frankly to Dr. Briggs that he believed the enforced curtailment of Bureau
activities a good thing:
* * * In the course of time there are likely to creep into a long
term program, and to stay there because there is always one more
thing to try, projects that are not of very great import, or in which
the economic condition has passed that once made them important.
* * * In the long run the necessity for * * * a clean-cut decision
as to the relative importance of the work in hand * * * will
improve the patient.
Dr. Briggs, who saw science the handmaid to new industries, with reserva-
tions reluctantly agreed.'5°
One area of investigation which felt the knife of economy directed
wholly at its applied research was radio. By 1935 staff and funds for radio
research were approximately half what they had been in 1932. As a conse-
quence, research was narrowed to the most pressing concerns: The improve.
ment of primary and secondary frequency standards and of Bureau broad-
casting of standard radio and audio frequencies for the control of station
transmitters; research in the character and cause of variations in radio wave
intensity and direction (i.e., radio wave propagation phenomena); and ac-
curate determination of the height and characteristics of the ionosphere
layers, the primary factor in long-distance radio transmission.
Outgrowing its radio laboratory and its reliance on commercial and
Government broadcasting stations for additional operating facilities, the
Bureau in 1932 received funds to establish two experimental stations just
outside Washington. One was a transmitting station, in several frame build-
ings erected on the site of the Department of Agriculture experimental farm
near Beltsville, Md.; the other a receiving station for radio wave research, in
similar structures on 200 acres purchased near Meadows, Md.151
With new and improved equipment at Beltsville, the Bureau continued
its transmission of standard radio frequencies to permit stations to calibrate
standard oscillators and check their broadcast frequencies, and in 1935 began
transmitting standard time intervals in the form of spaced pulses, as well as a
standard musical pitch.152
Long-distance radio transmission continued to present the greatest
difficulties, owing to the character of the ionosphere layers, some 60 miles
up. In cooperation with standards laboratories and radio agencies abroad,
the Bureau set up automatic equipment at Meadows and began making con-
Letter, H. W. Gillett, July 13, 1933, and attached correspondence (NBS Box 356, AG).
NBS Annual Report 1932, pp. 16—1'Z.
The services were described in LC453, "Standard frequencies and other services
* * (1935), superseded by LC498 (1937), LC565, (1939), and LC591 (1940).