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

GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY 487
on storage batteries "excellent * * * without reservations," and supported
"the position of the Bureau of Standards that the material is without
merit." 162
GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY
Dr. Condon could have had no inkling of the tempest to be visited upon
the Bureau when he approved the letter circular and formal circular on
AD—X2. They were routine test reports, as had been that on "Aquella" and
hundreds of other commercial products since the founding of the Bureau. Of
greater concern to him were the new lines of research he had set going, the
reorganization of the Bureau laboratories, the establishment of new facilities
at Corona and Boulder, and, not least, the preparation of a new and compre-
hensive handbook on physics, to be written by the Bureau staff. The hand.
book, with worldwide distribution, would not only be scientifically im-
portant and prestigious but would set a capstone on 50 years of modern
physics.
Precedent for the encyclopedic work planned by Dr. Condon was the
Dictionary of Applied Physics, the five-volume work edited by Sir Richard
T. Glazebrook, first director of the National Physical Laboratory in England
and published in 1922_23.163 The idea of the handbook was preceded in
March 1946 by plans for another comprehensive work, a Bureau proposal to
the Commerce Science Committee to prepare 50 or more publications designed
especially to aid small business. Bureau circulars, letter circulars, and other
publications in print were to be revised and new ones prepared by recognized
authorities at the Bureau, describing products, methods of manufacture, and
processes developed in this country and abroad during the war that might
serve as a basis of new enterprises. At the time, the estimated cost of the
project, $250,000, was considered by Congress to outweigh the merits of the
enterprise.'64
Report of the Committee on Battery Additives of the National Academy of Sciences,
Oct. 30, 1953, pp. 1, 31, 33—34 (NBS Historical File); "Washington Post," Nov. 14, 1953,
p. 1; Hearings * * * 1955 (Jan. 11, 1954), pp. 105—107.
The AD—X2 affair is presented as a case history in public administration and policy
formation, for teaching purposes, in Samuel A. Lawrence's The Battery Additive Con.
troversy, Study No. 68 (University of Alabama Press, 1962).
NBS contributors to the Glazebrook dictionary included Silsbee on superconductivity,
McCollum on electrolysis, Coblentz on radiation and radiometry, Gibson on spectro-
photometry, and Meggers on the measurement of wavelengths.
'i" The 13-page outline, "Proposed technological services to business, industry, and the
public, in collaboration with the Office of Declassification and Technical Services,"
Mar. 1, 1946, is in NBS Historical File.