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

68 FOUNDING THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS (1901-10)
the international meter and kilogram, but like Wolff and Waidner he spent
most of his time in Germany, securing new instruments and apparatus and
ordering equipment for the laboratories under construction at home. In
Washington a change of departmental administration was in the making
that was to have important consequences for the development of the Bureau.
ThE NEW BUREAU LABORATORIES
Dr. Stratton and his staff were still in downtown Washington when
the Bureau was transferred from its original home in the Treasury Depart-
ment to the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor. For more
than a hundred years the head of the Treasury had been in fact "secretary
of commerce and finance," but with increasing fiscal responsibilities and
the growth of agencies required by the commercial expansion of the Nation,
his Department had become unwieldy. In December 1901. a bill was intro-
duced in the Senate to transfer some of his functions to a separate Department
of Commerce.
The Commissioner of Labor (first appointed in 1888) was seeking
cabinet rank at the time, but loath to expand the President's Cabinet by two,
Congress compromised by merging a number of bureaus in the Departments
of the Treasury and Interior with those in the Office of the Commissioner of
Labor. On February 14, 1903, the new Department of Commerce and
Labor came into being, its Secretary, George B. Cortelyou.37
With 13 subdivisions, the new Department was at once one of the
largest and most complicated branches in the Federal Government. Curi-
ously enough, the transfer of the Bureau of Standards to Commerce and
Labor was an 11th-hour decision. Like the Coast and Geodetic Survey,
whose transfer had occasioned some discussion before it was included in
the new Department, the Bureau was apparently considered by Congress to
be a purely scientific agency, with only a remote relation to commerce.
A member of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Com-
merce, aware late in the proceedings that the Bureau was likely to be left
out, rose to urge its transfer: "The newly created National Bureau of Stand-
ards is a bureau which necessarily goes into a department primarily devoted
to manufacturing and commercial interests. This Bureau is destined to
Organization and Law of the Department of Commerce and Labor, Doc. No. 13
(Washington, D.C., 1904), pp. 7, 12, 450.
A genius of managerial efficiency, Cortelyou had been stenographer to Cleveland, assistant
secretary to McKinley, and secretary to Roosevelt before his appointment to the new
Department. Two years later he was appointed Postmaster General, and in 1907 became
Secretary of the Treasury. In 1909 he left Government service to head the Consolidated
Gas Co. in New York.