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

40 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Lyman I. Gage, Secretary of the
and led the campaign for a
Government.
Treasury under President McKinley, who initiated
national standardizing laboratory in the Federal
macy and wit, was to prove a wise and able mentor in the establishment of
the Bureau.
In the late summer of 1899 he asked his Assistant Secretary, Frank
A. Vanderlip, subsequently president of the National City Bank of New York,
who had come to Washington as Gage's private secretary, to suggest someone
to prepare a report proposing legislation for a national standards laboratory.
Vanderlip wrote to Samuel W. Stratton, a classmate when they were under-
graduates at the University of Illinois and at that time a 38-year-old professor
of physics at the University of Chicago.
Stratton was invited to Washington. On October 28, 1899, the in-
cumbent officer in immediate charge of weights and measures, "an expert
leveler but without a glimmer of knowledge of physical principles," 65 was
transferred and Gage appointed Stratton to the nominal position of Inspector
of Standards. Before long Stratton was at work drafting the bill to be in-
cluded in the Secretary's letter report to Congress and organizing the argu-
ments for the congressional hearings to come.
Securing endorsements for the proposed standards laboratory proved
no difficulty. It had the overwhelming support of the National Academy of
Speech, Dr. Frank A. Wolff, 25th anniversary of the NBS, Dec. 4, 1926 (NBS Blue
Folder Box 3, APW—301c).