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

APPENDIX M 661
materials gathered over the next 3 years were to form the shelf of Stratton papers
located in the Archives Library at MIT.
Several outlines of the proposed work and preliminary drafts of three chapters,
through Stratton's early teaching career at Urbana, were completed when certain
difficulties arose. Sufficient details and documents of Stratton's forebears could not
be found and the early pages were thin. The complete absence of self-interest, and
hence self-revelation, in Stratton's life and career gradually became evident. Then
Parris left the Institute and Prescott assumed the additional duties of Dean of Science.
But almost certainly the crowning difficulty, stifling further work on the biography,
was the prospect of attempting to record the history of Stratton's directorship of the
Bureau.°
Professor Prescott undoubtedly relinquished his project under the pressure of his
administrative and teaching duties, but it is more than likely that he also came to
realize that the heart of any possible biography of Dr. Stratton could not be a record
of his life so much as a history, the history of his greatest single accomplishment,
the National Bureau of Standards.
° The final correspondence in Prescott's search for biographical materials is that with
Dr. Briggs of the Bureau in December 1934, which resulted in Prescott receiving nine
items. These included copies of extracts from the report of the Electrical Conference
of 1884, a chart of the funds and staff of the Bureau since its founding, the Rureau's
brief biographical sketch of Dr. Stratton, and the program of the Bureau's farewell
reception for him.