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

EDWARD B. ROSA 63
Dr. Edward B. Rosa,
who set the pace for
the high level of re-
search at the Bureau
in its first two dec.
ades. Rosa probably
sat for this portrait
about 1915, but ac-
cording to Dr. Sils.
bee, who knew him,
it could have been
made at almost any
time, for Dr. Rosa
did not change muck
in all his years at the
Bureau.
name was Rosa (pronounced Ro-zay), and meeting him, Stratton knew he
was the man he sought.
Edward Bennett Rosa (1861—1921), of Dutch ancestry, had taught
physics and chemistry after getting his B.S. degree at Wesleyan University in
Connecticut and then entered the Johns Hopkins University as a graduate
student in physics under Henry A. Rowland. Receiving his doctorate in
1891, he returned to Wesleyan as associate professor of physics, becoming
full professor the next year. He came to the Bureau as a physicist at $3,500
and a decade later, his electrical group firmly established as the premier
division of the Bureau, he was made chief physicist.
Like Stratton, Rosa was of distinguished appearance. He was not
as outgoing in temperament as the Director, yet he made a strong impression
on scientific and administrative visitors to the Bureau and before long became
its stellar ambassador at home and abroad. If Stratton was the autocratic
paterfamilias of the Bureau, interested in every laboratory and its occupants
and the source of intense staff loyalties, it was Rosa, the autocrat of research,
who set the pace for the high level of achievement in the early years of the
Bureau. The names of Stratton and Rosa are inseparable in any considera-
tion of the period.
It is a tribute to Rosa's character, as those with long memories recall,
that his own forceful personality rarely clashed with that of Stratton. The
Director fully agreed with Rosa's concept of the importance of the electrical