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

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 15
commercial life of the Nation. And under pressure to produce or to satisfy
their own demands for quantitative results, it was the scientists who sought
better standards of measurement, better tools, precision instruments, and
materials. It was they who realized that the arbitrary standards they worked
with or of necessity had to create for themselves were all bu.t meaningless
and represented a needless loss of time, effort, and money. Science, better
than industry, was aware that only Federal legislation could establish the
necessary criteria, criteria that would possess national as well as international
validity.
Other nations, more advanced in commerce and industry, had long
since recognized the need for such legislation and had established national
standards laboratories. America, growing in commerce and industry, in
national power and prestige, had nothing comparable to them. The meet-
ing of these forces at the end of the 19th century—the growing needs of /
science and technology, coinciding with a new sense of national
the impulse that created the National Bureau of Standards.
When the Bureau was founded, the first power-motored flight by
Orville Wright was just 2 years away. That first decade would see the
development of audion tubes by Fleming and DeForest, long.distance tele.
phony, the diesel engine, high-speed tool steel, the mercury vapor arc, and the
first real plastic (bakelite). In the ever-widening fields of electricity, auto-
motive engineering, aviation, plastics, textiles, and construction materials,
the Bureau was to do basic and in some cases pioneer research. And in
doing so it was to lay the groundwork for its later investigations in fields as
yet undreamed of, in the application of the new physics to metrology, in free
radical research, cryogenic engineering, atomic and radiation physics, space
physics, plasma physics, and radio propagation engineering.
Beginning with the formulation of improved standards of electrical
measurement, the Bureau was to develop better standards of length and
mass, develop new standards of temperature, light, and time. It would estab-
lish standards of safety in commerce and industry, of performance in public
utilities, and prepare and maintain hundreds of standard samples of ma-
terials for industry. The advance of science would demand increasingly
precise instrumentation, greater and greater ranges of measurement, and
wholly new standards such as those of sound, frequency, and radiation.
The Bureau would eventually become the custodian of and final arbiter over
more than 700 different standards.
Such an agency, providing vital services to the Nation outside the
province of any possible private, institutional, or industrial organization,
might have had its birth simultaneously with that of the confederation of the
colonies. Why it was over a hundred years coming into being is an
integral part of its history.