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

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Dr. Briggs himself led and directed the scientific work of "one of the most
extensive efforts ever organized" for spatial and radio research, the 76.man
team of scientists, Air Force, Army, and National Geographic members that
went to Brazil for the eclipse of 1947.169
In light of present knowledge, the First Polar Year of 1882 sought no
more than superficial clues to the makeup of the solar system and to spatial
influences on weather. The Second Polar Year and the decade of explora-
tion that followed it were not much broader in horizon or more sophisticated
in their inquiry, in spite of the progress of radio, aviation, and the new
physics. The advances in these three fields of science were not to yield their
fruit—foreshadowing command of the atom, human flight in space, and near
approach to the planets—for another half a dozen years.
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The Bureau studies of cosmic radiations, weather and radio phenomena,
of X rays, radium, and their emanations bore only distant relation
to far more sophisticated investigations going on elsewhere in the thirties in
this country and abroad into the nature of matter and its atomic structure.
Following Roentgen's discovery of X rays in 1895 and Becquerel's
demonstration of radioactivity, the new century witnessed a train of discoveries
extending illimitably the boundaries of physical knowledge: "the
quantum character of light energy (Max Planck and Albert Einstein), the
theory of relativity (Einstein), the nuclear structure of the atom (Lord
Rutherford and Niels Bohr) ; interpretation of the light-emitting properties
of matter (Prince Louis de Brogue, Erwin Schrödinger, and Max Born), of
heavy hydrogen (Harold Urey), of the neutron (Sir James Chadwick), and
of means of producing artificial transmutations of the elements (Sir John
Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, Frédéric Curie.Joliot, Enrico Fermi, and
others) " 170
The initial concern of the Bureau in the atomic adventure may be
said to stem from Becquerel's finding of radioactivity in uranium salts, and
was in the chemistry rather than the physics of the atom.
Mapping the group of radioactive elements that had been identified
since Becquerel's discovery, the English chemist Frederick Soddy in 1913
found a number of them, because they had identical chemical characteristics,
169 Gilbert Grosvenor, "Earth, sea and sky; twenty years of exploration by the National
Geographic Society," Sci. Mo. 78, 296 (1954).
E. U. Condon, "Physics," What Is Science? ed. James R. Newman (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1961), p. 110.