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

356 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40)
Dr. Gardner's specially designed camera for photographing the solar corona. It was
used at Ak Bulak in Asiatic Russia in 1936 and at Canton Island in the South Pacific
in 1937. The lens was made at NBS from optical glass poured in the Bureau glass plant.
made comparisons of photographic and instrument measurements at high
altitudes.'65
The next year, in 1936, the National Geographic and the Bureau
jointly sponsored an expedition to the Kazak region of Asiatic U.S.S.R.,
to observe the June solar eclipse. New data on the suns corona, its prom-
inences, and solar spectra were recorded by the Soviet and Harvard Uni.
versitv groups with the expedition. Dr. Irvine C. Gardner of the Bureau
brought back the first natural-color photographs ever made of a total eclipse,
with a 14-foot eclipse camera and 9-inch astrographic lens wholly designed
and constructed at the Bureau.166 The giant camera went again on the
National Geographic-U.S. Navy Eclipse Expedition to Canton Island in the
South Pacific the following year.167
Another joint National Geographic.Bureau eclipse expedition was
made to South America in 1940, and a year later the Bureau itself sponsored
the Louise A. Boyd Arctic Expedition, to make new radio, geomagnetic, and
auroral measurements for a special study of ionospheric characteristics.168
Briggs, "Laboratories in the stratosphere," Sci. Mo. 40, 295 (1935), et seq.; Capt.
A. W. Stevens, "Man's farthest aloft," Nat. Geo. 69,59 (1936).
166
Gardner, "Observing an eclipse in Asiatic Russia," Nat. Geo. 71, 179 (1937).
167
NBS Annual Report 1937, p. 65.
'66Sci. Mo., 51, 305 (1940); Science, 93, 420 (1941); Science, 94, 324 (1941).