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

APPENDIX M
SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON
Founder and First Director of the
National Bureau of Standards 1
It is no exaggeration to say that Dr. Stratton's whole life was the National Bureau of
Standards and that every formative influence in his early years was a preparation for his
founding and direction of the Bureau. The Bureau is his monument, and the ideals of
service that Stratton built into the edifice he raised in the age of commerce and industry
survive intact into the present space age.
The name "Stratton" goes back to l2th.century Scotland, the surname of families
who dwelt in a walled village by a paved road. The first Stratton on record in this
country came from England in 1628. Dr. Stratton himself is believed to have descended
from a Thomas Stratton who received a patent of land in Pittsylvania County, Va., in
1764. Thomas's great grandson Robertson Stratton moved from Virginia to Kentucky,
where his fifth child, the father of Samuel Wesley Stratton, was born in 1832.
Upon the death of Robertson in 1832, his widow and children moved to Illinois.
Dr. Stratton's father, Samuel, grew up in Litchfield, Ill., went into stock farming and
later lumbering, and married a widow, Mrs. Mary Webster Philips. It was on the farm
just outside Litchfield that Samuel Wesley was born on July 18, 1861.
Young Samuel Wesley grew up with little taste for farm life or for the stocks
of Jersey cattle, Shetland ponies, Brahma chickens, and other new breeds of farm
animals introduced into the State by his father as a result of periodic trips East and one
voyage he made for new stock to England and the Channel Islands. Instead, he took an
early interest in tinkering with the farm machinery, clocks, and other devices in the
house, and in devising mechanical ways of taking the drudgery out of soapmaking,
making apple butter, and similar farm chores. An annual treat was the stock show in
St. Louis, 50 miles away, where his father exhibited his livestock and where young Samuel
explored the exhibits of farm machinery, tools, and new mechanical inventions on display.
Determined on more education than provided by the district school and the high
school in Litchfield, 2 miles away, Stratton sold a colt he had raised and announced his
intention of going for a year to the Illinois Industrial University at Urbana, the future
University of Illinois. In 1880 land.grant Illinois Industrial was almost 12 years old,
a citadel of learning offering courses in "such branches of learning as are related to
agriculture and the mechanic arts, and military studies, without excluding other
scientific and practical studies."
The course Samuel Wesley set his heart on was that in "Machine shop practice,"
and he persuaded the registrar to let him take it in his freshman year. He was then 19,
Except as otherwise noted, the present sketch is based on the manuscript fragment of
a biography of Stratton written by Dr. Samuel C. Prescott of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in 1933—34 and on the materials collected for that biography that now
comprise the Stratton Papers in the Archives Library at M.I.T. The biographical frag.
ment and other documents in that collection used in this sketch have been reproduced
for the NBS Historical File.
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