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

A NATiONAL NEED . . . A NATIONAL HUMILIATION 41
Sciences; the American Philosophical Society, the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the Amer-
ican Chemical Society, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and
other scientific institutions and associations. In personal testimony, letters,
resolutions, and editorials, the leading scientists of the country, virtually
every scientific agency in the Federal Government and in the States, leading
manufacturers and commercial concerns, the railroad and iron and steel
industries, manufacturers of electrical apparatus and appliances, and all sci-
entific and technical journals and periodicals endorsed the proposed bill
without reservation.66 As James H. Southard, Representative from Ohio
and champion of the bill in the House, said: "Never has a bill come with
such a number of endorsements."
The arguments in the avalanche of endorsements were summed up in
"the conditions which necessitate the establishment of a national standard-
izing bureau," set down in Secretary Gage's letter to Congress on April 18,
1900, and here slightly abbreviated:
The-establishment of uniform standards, their maintenance, and the
solution of problems connected with them, has until recent years
been confined to standards of length, mass, capacity, and tempera.
ture; "but the increased order of accuracy demanded in scientific
and commercial measurements and the exceedingly rapid progress
of pure and applied science have increased the scope of such work
until it includes many important branches of physical and chemical
research, requiring * * * a complete laboratory, fitted for under-
taking the most refined measurements known to modern science."
An examination of the functions and sums of money devoted to the
maintenance of the German, English, Austrian, Russian, and French
institutions "is the most convincing evidence of the importance of
problems pertaining to standards and standard-measuring
apparatus."
Institutions of learning, laboratories, observatories, technical in-
stitutions, and scientific societies in this country are proliferating
and growing "at a rate never equaled in the history of any nation,"
their work "requiring accurate reliable standards, which in nearly
every case must be procured from abroad, or cannot be procured
at all."
"The extension of scientific research into the realm of the extremes
of length, mass, time, temperature, pressure, and other physical
60se endorsements will be found in the congressional documents dated Apr. 18,
May 3, and Dec. 28, 1900, cited in footnotes below.