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

488 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE (1946-51)
The outline for the first project, the "NBS Handbook of Physical
Measurements," as it was originally entitled, appeared in a 117-page mimeo-
graphed study in December 1946. It called for eight volumes, on metrology,
mechanics, heat, electricity, optics, atomic and chemical physics, and physical
chemistry, each volume and its chapters and sections assigned to Bureau
authorities in the field. In March 1947, Dr. Condon asked the House Ap-
propriations Subcommittee for $30,000 to initiate the project.165 No demur
was made and the work was launched.
Progress on the handbook was slow. Besides their reorganization
and some shifting around of laboratories, the divisions were clearing up
backlogs of paper work, completing reports on wartime research, and plan.
fling new programs of research. Since the handbook was to be a formal
Bureau publication, Dr. Condon directed that it might be done on Bureau
time. The working day simply wasn't long enough, and the only writing
accomplished was that done on nights and weekends, on individual initiative.
Four years later, when Dr. Condon left the Bureau, some 10 or 12
chapters out of the 57 projected had been completed. No longer to be a
Bureau enterprise, the handbook was modified in scope and the aid of authori-
ties in industry and the universities was enlisted. A progress report and new
outline late in 1952 described a more extensive work. It was to comprise 88
chapters, of which 40 were completed or in the first draft form. The
published book, Condon and Odishaw's Handbook of Physics, appeared in
1958. Of the contributors to "what every physicist should know," as the
editor described the volume, 13 were members of the Bureau staff.166 Dr.
Condon himself wrote 17 of the final 90 chapters in the 1,459-page hand-
book •157
An accomplishment of importance to the Bureau that Dr. Condon
saw achieved in somewhat less time than the handbook was amendment of
the Bureau's organic act of 1901. Even before Congressman Stefan raised
the question in 1947 of the Bureau's spending millions of dollars "on the
basis of a two.page law," Dr. Condon had already initiated final preparation
of the draft legislation for submission to Congress in order, as he said, to
"remove some of Ithe] ambiguities and try to state more explicitly and in
* ' ° 1948 (Mar. 12, 1947), p. 367.
160 In addition to their articles and books published under Government imprint, members
of the Bureau staff have produced almost a hundred books and textbooks, including two
autobiographies. See app. N.
" New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. The progress report of 1952, with instructions for
authors and a sample section, is in NBS Historical File.
Some of the material prepared by Bureau members for the handbook subsequently ap-
peared as NBS publications: C476, "Measurements of radioactivity" (Curtiss, 1949)
C478, "Colorimetry" (Judd, 1950); C484, "Spectrophotometry" (Gibson, 1949); C544,
'Formulas for computing capacitance and inductance" (Snow, 1954).