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

52 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10)
Commissioned in the Illinois naval militia unit that Michelson or-
ganized in 1895, Stratton first left the University of Chicago in the spring of
1898 to serve as a Navy lieutenant in the Spanish-American War. He re-
turned to the University that fall. Soon after, Arthur E. Kennelly, the
Harvard dean of electrical engineering, said in his memoir of Stratton, he
was asked to go to Washington to invite Admiral Dewey and Secretary Gage
of the Treasury to give addresses at Chicago, and on that occasion fell into
a discussion with Gage about weights and measures and the scientific work
being done on them in the national laboratories abroad.7 Lyman Gage
therefore knew Stratton when the Assistant Secretary, Frank Vanderlip, in the
summer of 1899 brought up his name as the man to take charge of the falter-
ing Office of Weights and Measures, and invited him to Washington. As
Stratton recalled it:
While on a visit to Washington in 1899, the Secretary of the
Treasury asked me to accept a position as head of the Office of
Weights and Measures in the Coast and Geodetic Survey, which
was declined. However, I pointed out to the Secretary, the As-
sistant Secretary, and the Superintendent of the Coast Survey the
necessity for a government bureau having to do with standards and
methods of measurement in the broad sense, and at the request of
the Secretary of the Treasury drew up a plan for the establishment
of such an institution. I agreed to devote a year's vacation
[sabbatical], upon which I was just entering, to the preliminary
steps for the establishment of the institution, the first of which was
the securing of the necessary legislation.8
In later years •both Dr. Henry S. Pritchett, superintendent of the
Coast Survey, and Frank A. Vanderlip, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury,
claimed credit for bringing Stratton to Washington. Pritchett said that
shortly after coming to the Coast Survey in 1897 he had—
asked Congress to appropriate a salary sufficiently large to induce a
physicist of high standing to take charge of the office, under direc-
tion of the superintendent. An appropriation of $3,000 was made.
With this sum some difficulty was found in inducing any physicist
of standing and reputation to accept the place, and only after many
interviews and considerable correspondence I succeeded in persuad.
'Nat!. Acad. Sci., Biographical Memoirs, XVII, 254 (1935). See also personal letter, L. J.
Briggs to Prof. E. Merritt, Cornell University, Oct. 31, 1933 (NBS Box 359, 1G.).
8 Letter, S. W. Stratton (hereafter SWS) to R. S. Woodward, president, NAS, Feb. 10,
1914 (Stratton Papers at MIT, Box 12; copy in NBS Historical File).