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

4PPENDIX M 653
dent's house and acting as a sort of personal secretary. He became, a daughter of Dr.
Peabody later recalled, a member of the family, and the training he received in the social
graces, in household management, and in meeting and entertaining visitors and guests of
the university was to prove almost the most valuable part of his college education.
It was about this time that he seems to have felt his youthful appearance belied
his new responsibilities, for in his 22d year he began to grow the short, full mustache
he wore the rest of his life.
Beginning in his second year, young Stratton took "Military," as required in
supported universities, and demonstrated marked skill as a drillmaster. Of his other
studies a contemporary was to say that his scholarship was fair but not brilliant, but
"in some matters he did excel—shop work, draughtsmanship, and work in the physics
laboratory * * * his work a model of neatness and accuracy."
Upon his graduation in 1884, Stratton received a completion certificate for his
work in mathematics, physics, and mechanical engineering, his grades, according to
the college record, consistently those expected of a "superior student"; a commission as
brevet captain in the State military; and an invitation to return to the university as a
member of the faculty. He presented his thesis, "The design of a heliostat," in 1886
and received his B.S. degree that year.
In his only extant autobiographical fragment, a four-page note on his military
and naval service, Stratton said he once asked President Peabody why he been selected
to teach at the university. The president replied that he had observed Stratton at drill
and was impressed with the fact that he seemed to know how to get along with men.
"I enjoyed the systematic way of doing things," Stratton commented, "and that experience.
especially the discipline, has been of great value to me in most of the things I have been
called upon to do later."
After a summer of engineering work in a Chicago factory, Stratton began
in mathematics and physics in the preparatory department of the university.
He continued in the rank of instructor until 1889, when he was made assistant professor
of physics. Upon his organization of a course in electrical engineering a year later, he
occupied the chair of professor of physics and electrical engineering. In 1892, through
a member of the faculty who preceded him, Stratton was called to the new University
of Chicago as assistant professor of physics.2
The Ryerson Physical Laboratory at Chicago was under construction and Prof.
Albert A. Michelson, brought from Clark University to head the new department,
spent most of that year at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures outside
Paris. There he demonstrated the practicability of a wavelength (light wave) standard,
which was destined to replace the standard meter bar as the standard of length.
Stratton, as senior in Michelson's absence, therefore had the principal task of
organizing the department and overseeing the construction and equipping of the new
physics laboratory. He was then 26.
Stratton's 7 years under Michelson served him well, for the highly irascible master
of the spectroscope and interferometer was a stickler for perfection and champion of the
sixth decimal point. Disciplined in the measurement method of science, Michelson did
not foresee its replacement by mathematical and theoretical physics, and like many of
his scientific colleagues he continued to believe that the future of physics was strictly a
matter of further precision and improved instrumentation.
2 Stratton's salary of $2,000 was $500 less than that of Amos Alonzo Stagg (1862—1965),
brought to. the university that same year as athletic director and given the rank of
associate professor. Time, Mar. 26, 1965, p. 45.