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

62 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10)
Little is known of the Visiting Committee's assistance to Dr. Stratton
in the early months of the Bureau except that it met for the first time in the
summer of 1901 "to pass on proposed sites for the laboratory." 27 Stratton
had already toured the Washington area looking at possible sites and had
tentatively settled on a location out on Connecticut Avenue, almost 3½ miles
from the White House and within 2 miles of Chevy Chase, Md. Just inside
the site of the line of forts built to the North to protect the city during the Civil
War, the heavily wooded height comprising nearly 8 acres rose more than
75 feet, the highest ground in the vicinity, overlooking Connecticut Avenue.
A laboratory up there would be well away from the street noise and inter-
ference from the electric cars running out Connecticut Avenue to Chevy Chase.
The site, "one of the most beautiful in the District of Columbia,"
Stratton thought, was for sale, and its owner, the Chevy Chase Land Co.,
was persuaded to let it go for $25,000, the sum available.28
By July 1, 1901, when with minor ceremonies the old Office of Stand.
ard Weights and Measures became the new National Bureau of Standards,
two contracts had been let. One was for a mechanical laboratory, to house
the power and service plant and shops of the main laboratory, scheduled to
be completed by July 1902. The second, for the physical laboratory itself,
was to be completed by January 1903. That same day, July 1st, Dr.
Edward B. Rosa arrived at the Bureau.
EDWARD B. ROSA
Dr. Stratton's most pressing need upon his appointment as Director of
the Bureau was to find an outstanding man to plan and direct the electrical
research that had dominated the arguments for the creation of the Bureau.
Demands for routine electrical testing now took all of Dr. Wolff's time, and
original research or even planning such research was out of the question.
Stratton's attention was drawn to a. professor of physics at Wesleyan
University who in the past decade had published a dozen papers on electricity.
With Prof. Wilbur 0. Atwater, he had recently devised an ingenious respira-
tion calorimeter that was to prove highly useful in subsequent pioneer in-
vestigations of food values and problems of nutrition in this country.29 His
2TNotice in Science, 14, 340 (1901) ;.Visiting Committee correspondence, 1902, in
"General Correspondence Files of the Director, 1945—55," Box 6 (in process in NBS
Records Management Office for NARG 167) (see Bibliographic Note).
28 NBS Annual Report 1905, p. 4; Remarks of SWS at the laying of the cornerstone of
the Chemical Laboratory, March 23, 1916 (NBS Historical File); Remarks of SWS
on the 30th Anniversary of the NBS, March 7, 1931 (Stratton Papers, Box 12).
29 See Atwater and Rosa, "A new respirator calorimeter * * s," Phys. Rev. 9, 129,
214 (1899), and the special notice of it in William North Rice's article, "Scientific
thought in the nineteenth century," Annual Report, Smithsonian Institution, 1899, p. 399.