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

EDWARD UHLER CONDON
weapon and the peacetime development of atomic energy.'7 Ranged against
continued military control were most of those who had worked on the bomb
at Los Alamos and in the universities. One of the first of the many con-
ferences that were called to discuss the future of atomic energy was that
convened by Robert M. Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago.
It met in September 1945 at the opening of the university's new Institute of
Nuclear Studies. Lending his support to the conference, Secretary of Com-
merce Wallace attended and brought with him as special advisor, Dr. Philip
M. Hauser, a sociologist on leave from the University of Chicago, then with
the Bureau of Census.
Meeting Dr. Condon, associate director of research of the Westing-
house Electric Corp., for the first time at the conference, Dr. Hauser found
him "a most amiable and knowledgeable fellow * * * [with] broad inter-
ests in the physical sciences." Aware that the Secretary was searching for
a replacement for Dr. Briggs, Hauser suggested to Wallace that "this was
a man he should meet and consider for the post of Director of the National
Bureau of Standards." As Wallace remembers it, he discussed the director-
ship with several others at the conference, but "Dr. Condon was the only one
who was available and really interested." 15
Dr. Condon's name was submitted by President Truman to the Senate
and confirmed without a dissenting vote. On November 7, 1945, he was
formally appointed Director.
As Dr. 'Condon told an Appropriations Subcommittee not long after,
he was "born * * * actually in the town where the bomb was tested, but
there [was] no connection between those two events." 19 Then in his 43d
year, he had indeed been born in Alamogordo, N. Mex., on 'March 2, 1902,
but had spent his early school years largely in California. Taking his doc-
torate in physics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1926, he went
to Germany for a year's study, where the new quantum 'physics of Heisenberg,
Born, and Dirac was being taught. He returned to lecture in
physics at Columbia University and in 1928 went to Princeton as assistant
and then associate professor.
17 One result of that concern was the publication of One World Or None (eds. Dexter
Masters and Katharine Way, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946), a report to the public
on the meaning of the atomic bomb. Contributors to the report included Einstein, Bohr,
Compton, Bethe, Langmuir, Oppenheimer, Szilard, Shapley, Seitz, Urey, Wigner, and
Condon.
Communications to the author from Henry A. Wallace, Jan. 7, 1964, and from Dr.
Hauser, Jan. 29, 1964 (NBS Historical File). See also Wallace letter in New Republic,
118, 10 (1948). For Wallace's possible prior interest in Dr. Condon, see letter, LJB to
H. A. Wallace, Aug. 2, 1945, sub: Standing of certain scientists (NBS Box 504, IG).
Hearings * * * 1947 (Jan. 29, 1946), p. 175.
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