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

GOVERNMENT, SCIENCE, AND THE GENERAL WELFARE 19
measures office in the Coast Survey and extend the present investigations of
that office to include electrical standards. It would also undertake "to
observe the laws of solar and terrestrial radiation and their application to
meteorology, with such other investigations in exact science as the Govern-
ment might assign to it." 20
The proponents of the new department agreed that it should under-
take no work that "can be equally well done by the enterprise of individual
investigators"; that its bureaus would cooperate, not compete, with uni-
versity research laboratories; that they would investigate only in those fields,
still unoccupied, "where private enterprise cannot work"; and confine them-
selves "to the increase and systematization of knowledge tending 'to promote
the general welfare' "—in particular, to research vitally affecting the estab-
lishment or expansion of new industry in the Nation.
The committee pointed to photography, which since the daguerreo-
type in 1839 had grown into a $30 million a year industry, and to the new,
promising electric telegraph, telephone, light, and electric railway industries,
as proof that "the pursuit of science is now directly connected with the pro-
motion of the general welfare" and therefore a Federal responsibility.
But the old arguments prevailed. The Government could not fail
to compete with the university laboratories or the enterprise of individual
scientists. With its "capacity * * * for indefinite expansion," a Federal
agency of science would encroach more and more upon individual effort
and on industry, and by proliferation and publication soon come to create,
control, and diffuse the scientific knowledge of the Nation.21 The Allison
Commission shelved the proposal for a department of science. The prospect
of anything like a centralized research agency in the Government was bad
enough, but that it might ultimately lead to some kind of intervention in
industry or regulation of business was too much for the times.
In those last decades of the century, as Frederick Lewis Allen has
said, "business was supposed to be no affair of the government's." The farm
States in 1887 had forced creation of an Interstate Commerce Commission to
regulate the railroads, but its powers were small, uncertain, and unexercised.
There was no Department of Commerce, no Department of Labor, no Federal
Trade Commission, no Federal Reserve System, and when in need of credit,
Washington without the aid of John Pierpont Morgan was helpless.22 The
Federal Government was without the power or inclination either to inter-
Report of M. C. Meigs, Chairman of NAS Committee, to 0. C. Marsh, President, NAS,
Sept. 21, 1884 (Allison Commission, Testimony, Mar. 16, 1886, 49th Cong., 1st sess.,
S. Misc. Doe. 82, serial 2345), p. 8.* Hereafter cited as Allison Commission, Testimony.
21 Ibid., pp. 7*_8*, 66—69, 177—179, 999—1001; Dupree, Science in the Federal Govern-
ment, pp. 215—226, 231.
Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900—1950 (New
York: Harper, 1952; Bantam Books, 1961), p. 72.