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

374 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45)
accomplishing, the Bureau noted wryly, long overdue "legitimate economies."
New knowledge of construction, for example, had made obsolete the use of
2 x 6 beams in roof rafters, where 2 x 4's were more than adequate, and
multiplied by tens of thousands of buildings saved forests of precious wood.26
Time, labor, and material-saving studies available in the Bureau's
building and housing studies had long urged the use of precast concrete
flooring, of prefabricated wood and sheet-steel frames, walls, floors, and
roofs, of metallic roofing materials, and of fiber and plywood paneling as
insulation materials. These as well as the elimination of nonessentials and
substitution of less scarce or noncritical materials were to find their way
into defense housing projects through new building code requirements.27
The greatest inertia in the building world, adding disproportionately
to construction costs and most prodigal of labor and materials, was in
plumbing. Bureau research since the 1920's on plumbing practices and
plumbing hardware had little impact until the war, when a new manual,
designed to save "thousands of tons of critical metals," became the basis for
emergency plumbing standards made mandatory in all Federal construction.28
The shift from educational orders to all-out war production almost
immediately quadrupled Bureau testing and certification of measuring instru-
ments and apparatus, particularly of the precision gage blocks that served
as master standards in the production and inspection of war materials.
Within 6 months Army Ordnance set up 13 district gage laboratories across
the country to serve gage manufacturers, and established gage test facilities
at all its arsenals turning out guns and shells. The need for quan-
tities of the blocks led to their hasty manufacture by inexperienced firms,
forcing the Bureau to reject large numbers of seriously inaccurate or defec-
tive sets before its standards were met.2°
Early wartime tasks witfrhigh priority assigned to the Bureau included
investigations in the conservation of petroleum, in the production of synthetic
rubber, and the testing and stockpiling of quartz crystals. The concern in
the twenties over America's dwindling petroleum resources waned with the
discovery of new fields in the Americas and the importation of oil from the
Caucasus and the Middle East. The flood of oil created a vast new industry
and by 1940 propelled more than 32 million automobiles, buses, and trucks
over the roads. But as oil tankers became prime targets of enemy
Hearings * * * 1941 (Dec. 9, 1939), pp. 122, 124.
21 NBS Annual Report 1941, p. 85; Annual Report 1942, pp. 125—127; BMS88, "Recom-
mended building code requirements for * * * war housing" (1942).
Ibid, and BMS66, "Plumbing manual" (1940).
NBS Annual Report 1942, p. 107.