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

SAMUEL WESLEY STRATTON
FOUNDING
THE NATIONAL BUREAU
OF STANDARDS (1901-10)
For much of its first decade and a half, until shortly before America's
entry into World War I, the Bureau's energies were almost wholly engaged
in developing its staff and organization, establishing new and much needed
standards for science and industry, and proving itself as a valuable adjunct
of Government and industry. It assumed responsibilities as readily as it
accepted those thrust upon it, and found them proliferating at a rate faster
than the Bureau could grow. In 1914, making its first pause to take stock,
the Bureau discovered that it had virtually to rewrite the functions of the
organic act that had created it. This is the story told in the next two chapters.
From the day he arrived in Washington, Samuel Wesley Stratton
(1861—1931) was the driving force behind the shaping of the National
Bureau of Standards. Louis A. Fischer and Dr. Frank A. Wolff, Jr., who
had been with the Office of Weights and Measures since 1880 and 1897,
respectively, and had friends and acquaintances who knew many members of
Congress, did much of the work of bringing the proposed bill to the favorable
attention of members in both Houses. But it was Stratton, enlisting the aid
of other scientists and officials in the Government, who drafted the text of Sec.
retary Gage's letter, prepared the arguments that were to persuade Congress,
and secured the imposing and unprecedented array of endorsements for the
proposed laboratory.'
At his very first meeting on Capitol Hill, Stratton "mesmerized the
House Committee," Wolff recalled, "and splendid hearings were held which
were printed for distribution without stint." 2 He was to be the director of
the Bureau for the next 21 years.
As a youth, Stratton's interest in machines and mechanical processes
led him to major in mechanical engineering when he entered the University
of Illinois in 1880. With his bachelor of science degree and a summer of
intensive reading in Ganot's Physics—the training text of so many 19th-
century American physicists—he was appointed instructor of mathematics
and physics in the fall of 1884. In 1889 he was promoted to assistant pro.
1 Stratton's correspondence on behalf of the bill may be found in Box 1 of the Stratton
Papers in the Archives Library of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
'Speech, Dr. Frank A. Wolff, 25th anniversary of the NBS, Dec. 4, 1926.
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CHAPTER II