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

LAISSEZ-FAIRE STANDARDS 37
Some of the consequences were revealed in an article in Scientific
American in 1896 describing the increasing unreliability of household -
products, industrial goods, and construction materials. In the construc-
tion of buildings, between 15 and 20 percent more material than needed had
to be ordered to allow for the uneven quality found in every lot. The tensile
strength of cement varied with the shipment, a certain quantity of steel tub-
ing and forgings could be counted on to prove defective, and in one recent
test sampling only two of six makes of white lead submitted deserved the
name. Among household items, a conspicuous example of outright fraud
was lard oil containing a high percentage of paraffin oil.
A number of independent testing agencies had sprung up to assist
industry, the article continued, but their subjective standards were in no
way comparable to those established in the bureaus under gcwernrnent super-
vision in Europe. As a result, "at present it is very difficult to get a paint
which is worth anything, or a good lubricating oil at a reasonable price,
and many of the soaps sold throughout the country are so injurious to clothes
as to be worse than useless. Is this not, after all, a matter for governmental
control?" 56
Henry Ives Cobb, designer of the Chicago Opera House and New-
berry Library and consulting architect to the Federal Government, con-
curred on the state of construction materials, and in testimony before a
congressional committee some 4 years later, he and other highly qualified
witnesses left no doubt of the consequences in this country of laissez-faire
standards. Although the Office of Weights and Measures had adopted the
English standard of light, said Carl Hering, president of the American In-
stitute of Electrical Engineers, it was so indefinite and inadequate that
scientific laboratories referred instead to the German standard as more
precise and reproducible. The electric light industry, finding neither the
British nor German standards useful, had adopted standards of its own in
the manufacture and sale of lighting equipment. By agreement among the
electric light companies, Prof. Henry A. Rowland of the Johns Hopkins
University testified, a lamp requiring 10 amperes of current at a pressure
of 45 volts was called 2,000 candlepower, when in reality—that is, by British
or German standards—it amounted only to 400 to 500 candlepower.57
Dr. Henry S. Pritchett, then superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic
Survey, acknowledged that the Nation was with'out a definite, accurate
standard or even the means to arrive at one. But then neither
we accurate means to test thermometers, barometers, pressure gages,
'electrical standards and measuring apparatus, polariscopes, instruments of
L. S. Randolph, "Systematic inspection of material," Sci. Am. 75, 347 (1896).
51 Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, Dec. 28, 1900
(56th Cong., 2d sess., S. Doc. 70, serial 4033), pp. 12, 15.