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

IN THE EVENT OF WAR 375
submarines, the supply tightened. Gasoline rationing became severe, how-
ever, not so mach to save gas as to conserve the rubber in automobile tires.
Convinced by their ration cards that the critical shortage was in
gasoline, inventive citizens besieged the Office of the Petroleum Coordinator
with gas-saving devices. Almost a hundred of their expedients came to the
Bureau for assessment, among them naphthalene fuel dopes, air bleeds or
"squirrel cages" in the intake manifold, speed governors in the fuel line,
a vacuum gage calibrated to read miles per gallon, and a variety of attach-
ments to the exhaust line—all interesting but not to the purpose.3°
Far more critical was rubber. Cut off from natural rubber resources
by the Japanese conquests in the Pacific, this country began all-out devel-
opment of synthetic rubber. With precision techniques learned in the 1920's
oii isoprene when it was a laboratory curiosity, the Bureau was to supply
endless measurements of the thermodynamic properties of artificial rubbers
and their basic materials, data vital to their manufacture.3'
As crucial in wartime as petroleum and rubber was a component of
radio whose supply was endangered because it had to be imported. That
was the wafer-thin quartz crystal, a silicon dioxide fonned in the earth
under pressure, whose piezoelectric property made it possible to hold radio
transmission and reception to a precise frequency. As the heart of all radio
apparatus, huge quantities of the crystal were to be needed in the radio com-
munication apparatus of the armed forces in everything from walkie-talkies
to radar, as well as in the warhorn realm of electronic equipment.
The best quartz crystal was mined almost exclusively in Brazil, and
when attempts to produce an artificial crystalline quartz met with only fair
success, large-scale importation and stockpiling of the crystal began.
Charged with examination and certification of the raw material, a special
unit in the optical division of the Bureau by 1942 was testing 75,000 pounds
of raw crystal per month, of which approximately a quarter proved suitable
for making radio oscillators.32
As war approached in 1941, Congress appropriated $100,000 to en-
large the optical glass plant at the Bureau and $230,000 for a permanent
radio laboratory at Beltsville, Md., to replace the wooden structure destroyed
by fire the previous November. With the acquisition of more powerful
radio equipment at the Beltsville laboratory, transmission of standard radio
and audio frequencies and other services was extended so that good recep-
tion was possible throughout the United States and fair reception over most
NBS Annual Report 1942, p. 110.
Ibid., pp. 116—117. The synthetic rubber program is described on pp. 411—412.
"NBS Annual Report 1942, p. 111. For more on the crystal program, see pp 408—410.