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

444 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51)
entific and technical information and Bureau publications4° And in a
reorganization of housekeeping elements,. budget and management, person-
nel, plant, and shops became formal divisions.
Changes in Secretary Wallace's Visiting Committee to the Bureau
included the appointment in 1945 of Harold C. Urey, research chemist at
the University of Chicago and Nobel laureate, and in 1946 of Eugene P.
Wigner, physicist at Princeton and director of research at the Oak Ridge
laboratories, who was to receive the Nobel Prize in 1963. The appointment
of two theoretical physicists resulted in a significant change in the composi-
tion of the Visiting Committee, long dominated by representatives of industry.
Urey and Wigner joined long-time members Gano Dunn of the J. G. White
Engineering Corp., Karl T. Compton, president of MIT, and William D.
Coolidge, director of research at General Electric.
In place of the informal notices and occasional memoranda on ad-
ministrative matters that previous directors had issued were the numbered
Bureau Orders, Administration Procedural Memoranda, and Bureau Memo-
randa introduced in December 1945. They were timely, for the next decade
was to see more changes in organization, policies, and staff than in all the
previous years put together. For one thing, the wartime influx of workers
that raised the staff above the 2,000 level for the first time in Bureau history
did not recede with the end of hostilities but increased steadily. Administra-
tion grew proportionately more complex.
Between serving on the McMahon committee and familiarizing him-
self with the Bureau establishment, it was May 1947, a year and a half
after assuming the directorship, before Dr. Condon completed his initial
reorganization of the Bureau structure.41 in the new order, divisions were
merged to bring related interests or functions together,42 new divisions and
new sections were created,43 and still other sections were relocated as a matter
of logic. Several sections, some of them one- or two-man units, were absorbed
A third special assistant, Nicholas E. Golovin, trained in physics but then a management
specialist from Naval Ordnance, arrived in the spring of 1949 to take over the analysis
and planning of Bureau technical programs.
Announced in NBS BuOrder 47—14, May 19, 1947.
The new electricity and optics division included three sections from optics (photom-
etry and color, optical instruments, and photographic technology) that depended upon
electrical standards. Simplified practices and trade standards were combined as the
commodity standards division.
The atomic physics division grouped all Bureau facilities and activities relating to
atomic and molecular physics and also certain phases of optics and of electronic
physics. The Central Radio Propagation Laboratory stemmed from the radio section
in electricity. Building technology division took over the fire resistance and heat transfer
secticns of heat and power, the masonry section (renamed structural engineering) from
silicate products division, and the whole of the codes and specifications division. The
applied mathematics division had its origin in the New York mathematical tables project.