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

448 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51)
Amid the general apprehension over the unsettled conditions of the
postwar world, Condon anticipated what was later to become a commonplace,
that any interruption in the flow of new knowledge, or even a slackening of
its pace, posed a potential threat to national security. The war demonstrated
the necessity of narrowing the Ieadtime between the discovery of new know!-
edge and its application, and the Federal Government had come to recognize
its responsibility for securing the basic research that made purposeful appli-
cation possible.
In a lighter moment early in the hearings in 1946, Congressman
Rabaut said to Condon: "With this atomic age on our hands we must treat
your Bureau with respect, as we do not want to get in wrong with anybody
who has anything to do with it." 56 But neither Congress nor the public
was quite ready yet to pay for the basic research of the atomic age. A year
later when Dr. Condon presented his research program in greater detail, the
mood of the subcommittee was economy.
Dr. Condon's original request to the Department of Commerce for 1948
funds totaled $25 million, almost four times the direct appropriation of the
previous. year. The new Secretary of Commerce, W. Averell Harriman,
had whittled it to $17.1, and the Bureau of the Budget had brought it down
further to $10.6 by deleting, "without prejudice," the Bureau's proposed
research in synthetic rubber, as well as research auxiliary to the atomic
energy program (the latter in the amount of $2.5 million), by reducing
initial construction funds for a new radio propagation laboratory in Wash-
ington by two.thirds ($1.9 to $0.6 million), and refusing most of the
proposed cost of rehabilitating the Bureau plant (including $1.5 million
for electrical modernization, $2 million for plumbing). Left more or less
intact were the new programs planned in building materials, hydraulics,
computers, X.ray research for medicine and industrial radiography, funda-
mentals of metallurgy, fundamental studies in the properties of chemical
compounds, electronics, high polymers, and radio propagation.57
The kind of industrial research that the Bureau had long carried on,
said Dr. Condon, was no longer necessary, except in building. With
industry booming, the civilian economy was running at the highest level
in its history, about $200 billion a year, and more than 2,400 industrial
laboratories were engaged in keeping that production going. As a conse-
quence, the laboratories were making unprecedented demands on the Bureau
Hearings, ibid.
Hearings * * 1948 (Mar. 12, 1947), pp. 287—292. Including $1.1 million for equip-
ment and facilities, the final appropriation came to $7.9 million, representing a slight
increase over the previous year.