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

APPENDIX M 655
Prior to his appointment in March 1901 as the Bureau Director, Stratton lived
at a boardinghouse at the corner of 18th and I Streets. Later that year he moved
into an apartment in The Farragut, then nearing completion, a block away on 17th
Street. His famous perfect and faithful maid Cordelia who came at this time was to run
his bachelor household and delight his frequent dinner guests with her good cooking
for the next 25 years in Washington and in Cambridge.
As Director of the Bureau, Dr. Stratton had considerable entertaining to do
and learned to do it well. He streamed with charm and even his slight air of haughti-
ness was engaging. If he was somewhat formal and shy with strangers and acquaintances,
with those who became friends he was wholly at ease, merry, and playful. He enjoyed
most of all friends with large families, whose children he could spoil with presents and
confections. They were sometimes unusual presents, such as the piglet he brought
to one house, the great white goose he carried to another. As a treat for the Parris
children on P Street, one of whom, Morris, was many years later to become his personal
secretary and assistant at MIT, Stratton on one occasion secured the private car of
the president of the Washington Railway & Electric Co. and for an afternoon and
evening took them and a swarm of their friends on a picnic trip around the city and out
into the suburbs.
Without a family, he made the Bureau family his own, presiding over their
welfare, their education, and even their marriages, a number of which were held in his
home at the Farragut. As the Bureau grew and the children of the staff members
multiplied, Stratton began his custom of putting on elaborate Christmas parties and
summer games and picnics for them. At the annual summer party in June, each child
was weighed and measured and the new figures compared with those previously recorded.
For their amusement he had swings erected on the Bureau lawn, brought up an organ
grinder and monkey, a merry-go-round with a caliope, and hired a clown, and ponies to
ride. There was a toy for each child, balloons were everywhere, and all the ice cream,
lemonade, cake, and cookies the youngsters could eat. And to keep their parents happy
out on Connecticut Avenue, Stratton held frequent receptions for their entertainment and
arranged dances, lectures, and musicals, the latter often by members of the staff—
events unheard of in a Government bureau before that time.4
He tried golf briefly and occasionally played tennis during his first years at the
Bureau but never really cared for such organized exercise. The tennis ended when in
1905 Stratton and Louis A. Fischer, his chief of weights and measures, bought a 25-foot
motor launch which they kept moored at a boat club on the Potomac. They spent many
evenings and Sundays on the river, and made new friends along the waterway, among
them James C. Courts, clerk of the Appropriations Committee, who became a great
help to Stratton in getting Bureau bills through Congress. Not that he needed much
help, for Stratton had a way with Congress, of interesting and exciting its committees
in the research work of the Bureau, that was famous. As commander of the District
Naval Militia, Stratton also had access to the monitor Puritan and a steam yacht, the
to those who were to form the first Visiting Committee, including both Thomson and
Pritchett, were sent on June 18 (see ch. II, p. 61).
Mrs. Stevens, Michelson's daughter, presently engaged in writing a biography of her
father, acknowledges that the introspective physicist, with his almost complete lack
of interest in adminstration, would probably not have been happy as Director of the
Bureau. But that his standing as a scientist and metrologist made him unquestionably
the best qualified man in the Nation, and otherwise the obvious choice, for the position
is beyond question.
'G. K. Burgess, "Dr. Samuel Wesley Stratton," The Tech Engineering News (MIT),
3,146 (1922).