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

EDWARD B. ROSA 67
Dr. Charles W. Waidner,
a decade after he came
to the Bureau, who
with Dr. Burgess in the
heat and thermometry
division attempted to
construct an absolute
standard of light, not
to be experimentally
realized until 1931, 20
years later.
measurements, testing of ordinary commercial thermometers, polariscopic
apparatus, hydrometers, resistance instruments, standards of electromotive
force, and direct current apparatus.35
By July 1902 the original staff of 12 had increased to 22, and the 15
offices and laboratories of the Bureau were crammed with crated and un-
crated apparatus and machinery. To get elbow room, Stratton rented a
four-story house at 235 New Jersey Avenue, not far from the Coast Survey
building, converting its space into an instrument shop, dynamo, and storage
battery rooms, and additional laboratories. Approximately equivalent only
in their antiquity, the high, narrow residence at 235 was promptly christened
"Bushey House," after the stately mansion in England that had recently
become the home of the National Physical Laboratory. Much of the new
apparatus was moved there to be set up and tested, while on the upper floors
preliminary studies began in alternating current measurement and in
pyrometry.36
During the summer of 1902 Wolff and Waidner went abroad to visit
the principal government laboratories and instrument makers in Europe,
taking with them a number of electrical and pyrometric standards to verify
while in Berlin. The next summer Fischer visited Paris with his copies of
"Circular of information on the NBS, No. 1," Science, 14, 1019 (1901).
MS, Dorsey, "Some memories of the early days"; NBS Annual Report 1902, pp. 4-5.