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

408 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45)
As a requirement of the radio wave propagation studies, a group
under Harold Lyons undertook in 1944 to establish national primary stand-
ards of microwave radio frequencies. Assisted by the military, OSRD, and
industrial laboratories, the Bureau set up frequency standards with an ac-
curacy of 1 part in 10 million covering the microwave range continuously
up to 30,000 megacycles. All frequencies in the study were derived from
a special group of quartz crystal oscillators which constituted the national
primary standard of frequency.'17
At this point some note is appropriate about the multimillion dollar
stockpile program in quartz crystals that occupied over a hundred members
of the Bureau during the war. It was known that tremendous numbers of
quartz crystal oscillator plates would be required by the armed services in
their tank, plane, and field radio equipment, in naval communication appa-
ratus, in radar and other detection equipment, and in many electronic pre-
cision instruments. In radio the plates not only serve to tune both trans-
mitters and receivers to a desired frequency and to hold the frequency of trans-
mitters within very narrow limits, but also to permit quick changes from
one frequency to another merely by changing the crystal in the circuit.
The quartz crystal from which the plates are cut is almost worldwide
in distribution but except in Brazil is of inferior quality and available only
in insignificant amounts. Just prior to the war, Great Britain, Germany, and
Japan, in a scramble to stockpile the crystals, were taking 94 percent of
Brazilian output. A mere 4 percent satisfied U.S. requirements.
When in early 1940 quartz crystal was declared critical, it was
established that the United States must stockpile at least 100,000 pounds
of usable quartz. In March the Procurement Division of the Treasury asked
the Bureau to help formulate specifications for crystals of radio grade and
to test those to be purchased for the stockpile. Through the first half of
1941 the total amount of raw crystals received came to less than 50,000
pounds.
With our entrance into the war, quartz crystal, still critical, became a
strategic material as well, that had to be denied to the enemy at any cost.'18
The Metals Reserve Company of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation,
taking over from the Procurement Division, at once contracted for the entire
CRPL report, "Radio standards," n.d., p. 8 (NBS Historical File); NBS War Re-
search, p. 39.
Other materials also subject to preemptive or preclusive buying, regardless of cost,
by the U.S. Commercial Co. set up under the RFC in March 1942, included wolfram
(the source of tungsten used to harden steel), rabbit furs, wool and blankets from Spain,
Turkish sausage casings, and all of Portugal's sardines. See Jesse H. Jones, Fifty
Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the RFC, 1932—1945 (New York: Macmillan,
1951), pp. 387 if.