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

370 WORLD WAR I! RESEARCH (1941-45)
make mandatory the interchangeability of parts in industries retooling under
educational orders. New research had begun on fire-detection and fire.
extinguishing equipment for airplane engines, on better aircraft metals, and
on vibration problems that had arisen as airplane engine weights decreased
and speeds increased. Optical glass production had gone up sharply, in
order to provide an emergency reserve.12 And "as part of the national
defense program," an extensive survey was begun of all standardization, sim-
plification, and code activities of the Nation's technical societies and trade
associations, looking to a complete revision of the Bureau's National Di-
rectory of Commodity Specifications.
Among the progress reports on the hundreds of projects on which
the Bureau had been working during the past decade, the 1940 annual re-
port made special note of the successful preparation of an iron with less
than 0.01 percent impurities. This nearly elemental iron was expected to
permit better determination of the fundamental properties of the metal than
ever before A new investigation was begun that year for the bone
char industry in the production of bone char and vegetable carbons. Al-
though the use of bone char for clarifying and decolorizing raw sugar was
several centuries old, virtually no fundamental data existed on the func-
tioning of decolorizing media. The exploration of techniques for determin-
ing the characteristics of the raw materials, the principles of decolorization
of bone char, and bone char revivification continued through the war years
and after.14
Reported at length that year was the first tabulation of results of an
investigation begun in 1936 of truck-weighing scales. As the Bureau had
been called on to determine the inequities of commercial weights and mea-
sures in 1910, railroad car scales in 1915, and mine scales in 1918, so in
the thirties Bureau surveillance of the trucking industry was sought as the
juggernauts of the highway began to overtake the railroads in moving pro-
The Bureau was awarded a contract by the Procurement Division of the Treasury De-
partment in November 1939 for 11,400 pounds of optical glass as a national reserve, with
the request to keep confidential the fact that the glass was for Army aerial camera
lenses and Navy binoculars. Monthly Report, LJB to Secretary of Commerce, Novem-
ber 1939 (NBS Box 440, PRM); memo, R. T. Stull for E. C. Crittenden, February 21,
1940 (NBS Box 442, AG). After Pearl Harbor, all optical glass production became a
classified project.
"RP1226 (Thompson and Cleaves, 1939) and RP1472 (Cleaves and Hiegel, 1942) des-
cribed the preparation and properties of the iron. By 1949 the Bureau was preparing
5-pound ingots of the iron so pure that detection of aberrations "constituted a major
problem" (NBS Annual Report 1949, p. 47).
14 NBS Annual Report 1940, pp. 71—72; Annual Report 1948, p. 219.