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

442 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51)
funds, to expand the regular series of Bureau reports.and prepare and publish
multivolume tables of atomic energy levels, tables of the thermodynamic
properties of chemical compounds, and a new and comprehensive handbook
of physics. The Bureau had lately become the central agency in the Federal
establishment for radio propagation research and service. Dr. Condon
proposed that it also assume direction of all Federal research in synthetic
rubber and in mathematical analysis and machine computers.
Was all this, the committee asked, contemplated in the act that created
the Bureau? What about the present program? "Are all of your tremen-
dous, gigantic activities out there carried on under a two-page law?" Con-
gressman Stefan asked. Did the Bureau actually intend to "spend about
nine or ten million dollars during the next fiscal year on the basis of a two-
page law?" 32 The committee began vigorously debating with Dr. Condon
on what he thought the phrase "bureau of standards" meant and what such
a bureau was really supposed to do. He explained point by point how the
new science, enormously stimulated by the war, had changed the Bureau
and the Nation.
In many ways Dr. Condon was the very man for the Bureau in the
years after the war, sparking new ideas and impulses among his associates
and energetically recruiting a new scientific staff.33 He acknowledged that
recent technological developments demanded continuance of the Bureau work
on rubber, plastics, textiles, liquid fuels and lubricants, on structural mate-
rials, ceramic and electroplated coatings, metallic alloys, electronic devices,
and new ranges of radio wave frequencies. But "it would be a serious
mistake * * * to let these projects in the fields of applied science interfere
with the Bureau's work on fundamental problems of physics and chemistry
and on methods of measurement and the standards and instruments which
provide the basis for measurements of every kind," as primary responsibilities
of the Bureau.34
New industries and wholly new technologies were to make unprece-
dented demands upon the laboratories. Perhaps no one at the Bureau corn-
Hearings * * * 1949 (Jan. 20, 1948), p. 526.
As he told the committee, in addition to the prewar cuts in staff, budget, and services,
during the war much of the Bureau's basic research had been reduced and its best
men put into war work, from which they had not yet been released. The Bureau was
therefore very shorthanded in the field of fundamental research, and it was that area he
sought to rebuild and expand. He hoped "to be allowed to do for peacetime fundamental
research [in the Bureau] something of the sort that [had] recently been announced
as part of the Navy's research plans, involving a high degree of collaboration, and
intimate cooperation at the working scientists' level with universities throughout the
country" (Hearings * * * 1947, pp. 178—179). Dr. Condon referred to the Office of
Naval Research, organized later that year.
Hearings * 4 * 1947, p. 176.