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

480 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51)
sulating properties and high resistance to heat readily suggested that glass
paper might have extensive use in electronic and other electrical equipment.'43
An area of research that had become scattered over many divisions
at the Bureau was reorganized in 1947 to form a new division, that of build-
ing technology. For the first time a unified approach was made to the
problems of the construction industry as the Bureau coordhiated its investiga-
tions of properties of building materials, studies in structural strength, fire
resistance, acoustics and sound insulation, heating, ventilation, air condition-
ing, and building and electrical equipment.'44
As after every war, the construction industry turned its attention first
to conventional housing, of which there was an estimated shortage of 5 mu-
lion units.145 The Bureau made home construction its immediate target.
With building materials approaching the cost of labor, the Bureau aimed at
new structural designs based on engineering principles tested in the war-
time construction of ships and planes—something of an innovation itself—
and on maximum use of nonconventional building materials that provided
structural strength with the minimum of materials and labor. Bureau re-
ports went out to the industry on the properties of materials unknown a
decade before, such as some of the new plastics, laminated woods, lightweight
concretes, and slag aggregates. New and better masonry paints and asphalts
were also reported.'46
In order to formulate standards of heating, the Bureau built a test
bungalow 25 feet square with an 8-foot ceiling. One after another, com-
mercial heating devices including stoves, furnaces, and panel heating were
installed and the detailed data gathered on temperature gradients attained
inside were correlated with outside temperatures.'4' A long series of fire
tests of building structures and materials were carried out in search of better
means of reducing the direct annual ioss from fire, currently estimated at
8,000 lives and $700 million in property damage'45
The next decade witnessed a steady rise in private and public housing,
in construction of office buildings and Federal buildings. Aided by the new
Swedish-invented hydraulic self-lifting Linden crane, high-rise apartment
houses went up as fast, and in some cities, faster than homes. Bureau re-
search figured to some extent in much of the high-rise construction, but could
NBS Annual Report 1951, p. 48; M. J. O'Leary, B. W. Scribner, et al., "Manufacture
of paper from glass fibers," Tappi, 35, 289 (1952).
NBS Annual Report 1947, pp. xiii—xiv.
Hearings * * * 1947 (Jan. 29, 1946), p. 203.
"° BMS1O7, "Building code requirements for new dwelling construction * * 'i" (Thomp.
son, 1947) ; BMS1O9, "Strength of houses: application of engineering principles to
structural design" (Whittemore et aL, 1948).
NBS Annual Report 1947, pp. 202—203, 208; Hearings " * * 1950, p. 492.
NBS Annual Report 1948, pp. 234—235.