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

GOVERNMENT, SCIENCE, AND THE GENERAL WELFARE 17
chart the coasts for American shipping, provided the only scientific men-
suration supported by Federal funds until the miniscule Office of Weights
and Measures was set up within the Survey itself in 1836. That same year
the Patent Office was established in the State Department, over strong op-
position from many in Congress who declared its inclusion in an executive
branch an unconstitutional usurpation of authority.
Government concern with medicine and public health was left to
the Army Medical Department (1818), and except in the short-lived Na-
tional Board of Health (1879—83), medical research remained a function
of the Army until the establishment in 1902 of the Public Health Service.
In the Navy Department was the National Observatory and its Hydrographic
Office, organized in 1842, which, with the telegraph facilities operated by
the Army Signal Service, provided meteorological and weather services to the
Nation until 1890 when these functions were transferred to the Department
of Agriculture. That Department itself was not established until 1862, under
wartime pressure for greater food production.
In a nation predominantly agricultural until the last decade of the
19th century, these Government services seemed sufficient.'7 Such research
as they conducted was restricted by law and lack of funds to that immediately
necessary to carry out their functions. Yet inevitably these agencies ac-
quired specialized personnel for their problems, were aided and encouraged
by the independent scientific organizations of the Nation, and in some in-
stances achieved on meager appropriations remarkable results. The work
of the Naval Observatory in astronomy and of the Army Medical Corps in
bacteriology produced contributions to fundamental science well beyond
the pragmatic strictures of Congress.'8
Federal reluctance to enter scientific fields and congressional agree-
ment to keep in bounds those it perforce established grew out of the nature
of the Constitution, which reserved to the individual and to the States the
greatest possible freedom and the maximum opportunity for private enter-
prise consistent with the public good. The industrialization of America
in the late 19th century coincided with a kind of glorification of this political
theory of laissez-faire and its concomitant gospel of work and wealth. It was
little wonder that a proposal made in 1884 for the establishment of a Depart.
ment of Science in the Federal Government foundered even as it was
launched.
In 1890 agricultural, mining, forest, and fishery products accounted for 82 percent
of our exports; domestic manufactures 18 percent. By 1900 agricultural products were
68 percent of exports and manufactures had risen to 32 percent. Statistical Abstracts of
the United States, 1900 (Bureau of Statistics, Treasury Department, Washington, D.C.,
1901), p. 187.
"A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government (Harvard University Press,
1957), pp. 184—186, 263 if.