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

ACQUIRING NATIONAL STANDARDS 73
made in the Bureau workshop and furnished with chairs, dishes, and kitchen
equipment carted out from the city. Discussions about providing a more
expensive lunch for the seniors and a less expensive one for the juniors found-
ered on the single kitchen they shared, and the staff was not yet large enough
to afford a cafeteria. It became the great insoluble problem of the first
decade.45
But that problem was not in sight when, during the winter of 1903—4,
the instrument shop downtown was moved out to the North building and its
great dynamos, motor generators, refrigeration plant, storage batteries, gas-
making machine, air compressor and other apparatus were installed. In the
spring, Dr. Rosa and his group, bringing their lunches with them each day,
moved into North building as the remainder of the staff spread out in the
vacated rooms downtown.
ACQUIRING NATIONAL STANDARDS
No one knew better than Dr. Stratton that the Bureau had started
from scratch and that for a long time it would have nothing spectacular or
even noteworthy to show for its efforts. The Bureau would have to live on
borrowed time, borrowed standards, and borrowed instruments while it
acquired the materials and methodology for research. Members of the
Bureau visiting abroad had found the standards laboratories of France,
Germany, and England openhanded, the instrument.makers of those coun-
tries helpful in the extreme, and they came home laden with the best equip-
ment and knowledge of standards then available.
At the end of its third year the Bureau had achieved a sense of unity
and purpose, and sufficient personnel to do something more than make com-
parison of a limited number of standards. It was ready, as Rosa said, to
"do in its field what the Coast Survey and the Geological Survey and the
Department of Agriculture are doing in theirs." It had acquired almost
$225,000 worth of apparatus and equipment, much of it abroad, some bought
from instrument-makers and manufacturers in this country, and not a little
constructed in its own shops. Two of the three divisions were well advanced
in their organization (see below), although with the limited staff Dr. Stratton
not only directed the Bureau but was in personal charge of a division and
of one of its sections, while Dr. Rosa in his division also supervised two of
its sections. For the first time it was possible to see just what had been ac-
MS, Dorsey, "Some memories of the early days."
Rosa, "The organization and work of the Bureau of Standards," Science, 19, 937
(1904). Much of the material of this chapter is based on this article.