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

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE 681
NBS HISTORICAL FILE
The assemblage of historical documents and other materials by members
of the Bureau staff beginning in 1956 and extended by the author and his
assistants during the course of research for the history forms the basis for the
NBS Historical File. It will be maintained provisionally in the NBS Library
at Gaithersburg.
Of special interest in the File are the brief manuscript memoirs by N. Ernçst
Dorsey (p. 65) and Hobart C. Dickinson (p. 240), and the manuscript mem-
oir-histories of Elmer R. Weaver (p. 114), Raleigh Gilchrist (p. 175),
J. Howard Dellinger (p. 292), William W. Coblentz (p. 338), and Galen B.
Schubauer (p. 376).
Besides two extended historical accounts of Bureau administration and
operations prepared by the individual section and division chiefs in 1949 and
again in 1961, the NBS Historical File also contains the records of more than
fifty personal interviews or conversations which I held with former and present
members of the staff. My correspondence with other than Bureau members
that is cited in the history will also be found in this File.
Letters and documents reproduced from the Stratton Papers at MIT, with
other Stratton materials collected at the Bureau, have been designated in the
NBS Historical File as the NBS Stratton Papers. Similar collections of ma-
terials not available in archival records have been tentatively set up and
designated by reason of their principal source as the Briggs Papers, Condon
Papers, Gilchrist Papers, Crittenden Papers (scarce publications and personal
correspondence he preserved), Lowell Papers (relating to NBS patent his-
tory), and Silsbee Papers (largely concerning electrical matters).