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

EDWARD UHLER CONDON 445
in larger units elsewhere." Two divisions saw little more than a name
change as weights and measures became the metrology division, and clay
and silicate products became the mineral products division.45 And as Dr.
Stratton had once headed his own optics division, so Dr. Condon for a time
doubled in brass, as chief of his new atomic physics division.
Laboratory space became critical even before the President's decision
in 1950 to construct the hydrogen bomb and the onset of the Korean war.
Under the shadow of atomic war, talk of dispersal of military installations
and defense facilities was translated into policy. The pressure for space
and Truman's refusal to permit expansion of facilities in Washington led to
the establishment of two Bureau stations far from the Nation's Capital, the
Corona Laboratories in California and the Boulder Laboratories in Colorado.
Two major Bureau projects stepped up when the Korean war began
were those in nonrotating proximity fuzes for Army Ordnance and guided
missiles for the Navy. Additional temporary structures across Van Ness
Street were sufficient to accommodate the augmented fuze group, but the
missile staff was approaching a hundred members and its development mis-
sion had been accelerated by the requirement for an expanded series of
production models for possible use in the Pacific. The project needed space
quickly and there was no time to build.46 On June 1, 1951, the project left
Washington and moved into surplus Navy hospital structures, ide since the
war, at Corona.47
Still another cooperative project, for the Atomic Energy Commission,
called for large.scale assistance from the Bureau and required facilities
for which space was lacking in Washington. The year before, in 1949,
a 220.acre tract had been donated by the citizens of Boulder, Cob., at the
foothills of the Rockies, on what was then the outskirts of the city, for new
radio facilities for the Bureau. On the slope back of the site marked out
"Underground corrosion went to metallurgy. The huge special projects section (i.e.,
guided missiles) in mechanics became part of the ordnance development division, and
a ballistics group in electricity was transferred to the new division. Transferred to
chemistry and no longer separate units were the polarimetry, radiometry, and inter-
ferometry sections of optics. Combined with the temperature measurements section of
heat and power were the division's thermometry and pyrometry sections. One section
in heat and power, aircraft engine research, was discontinued in 1948 when the work
was taken over by the NACA laboratory at Cleveland.
Weights and measures administration, for a time a section in metrology, became a
separate Office of Weights and Measures in October 1947, and was later joined by an
Office of Basic Instrumentation. All of these organization changes are shown in app. J.
"Letter, EUC to Secretary of Commerce, Dec. 13, 1949, and letter, EUC to Director,
Bureau of the Budget, Sept. 13, 1950 ("General Correspondence Files of the Director,
1945—1955," Boxes 4 and 6).
BuOrd 51—18, June 1, 1951; Hearings * * * 1952 (Apr. 10, 1951), pp. 497—502;
interview with Dr. Condon, Oct. 27, 1963.