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

A NATIONAL NEED .. . A NATIONAL HUMILIATION 43
tions for Government purchases, which were to occupy so much of the time
of the Bureau in its early years. Nor did the conditions include better
standards for the general public, whose every purchase and transaction is
based on standards. Yet from the beginning the Bureau was to become
involved in Government specifications, crusade for the consumer, and act
to put better weights and measures in the hands of State and municipal
authorities.
The proposed bill contained in Gage's letter of April 18 recommended
that the Office of Standard Weights and Measures be reorganized as a sepa-
rate agency to be designated the National Standardizing Bureau, and that
it remain under the Secretary of the Treasury. As stated in the letter,
The functions of the bureau shall consist in the custody of the
standards;
the comparison of the standards used in scientific investigations,
engineering, manufacturing, commerce, and educational iustitu-
tions with the standards adopted or recognized by the Govern-
ment;
the construction when necessary of standards, their multiples and
subdivisions;
the testing and calibration of standard-measuring apparatus;
the solution of problems which arise in connection with standards;
the determining of physical constants, and the properties of mate-
rials when such data are of great importance to scientific or manu-
facturing interests and are not to be obtained of sufficient accuracy
elsewhere.
These six functions, subsequently enacted into law without change,
made the Bureau the source of national standards and their custodian. The
Bureau was to have no regulating or policing powers; enforcement of
standards was left to the discretion of the States. On the other hand, the
responsibility of the Bureau for the establishment of standards, standard
instruments, tests, and analytic procedures, and for the determination of
physical constants and the properties of materials, made its scope of research
in the physical sciences virtually unlimited. And the delegation of respon-
sibility to it for the investigation of any problem in• connection with
standards was to, enable the Bureau to span the gap between standards
of measurement and standards of performance in the coming age of mass
production, and to leap thence to the age of atomic research and space
physics.
"Letter, Apr. 18, 1900, p. 1. The bill as enacted into law appears in app. C.