The
Founding
efore air conditioning,
airplanes, and plastics were invented, and before science was changed
forever by Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began laying the technical
foundation for the world's most prosperous nation.
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The
cornerstone was laid at the original NIST site in Washington,
D.C., in 1903. |
Chartered
by the U.S. Congress on March 3, 1901, it was the first physical
science research laboratory of the federal government, established
at about the same time as the nation's first commercial laboratory.
Teddy Roosevelt had just become President; a middle-class annual
income was no more than $5,000. It was the dawn of the age of technology.
At that time,
the United States had few, if any, authoritative national standards
for any quantities or products. What it had was a patchwork of locally
and regionally applied standards, often arbitrary, that were a source
of confusion in commerce. It was difficult for Americans to conduct
fair transactions or get parts to fit together properly. Construction
materials were of uneven quality, and household products were unreliable.
Few Americans worked as scientists, because most scientific work
was based overseas.
Yet the United
States was becoming a world power, with an industrial economy driven
by the steam engine, the railroad, and the expanding reach of electricity.
Other industrialized nations already had established standards laboratories.
The need for such an organization in the United States was discussed
for many years by scientists and engineers. One complained, for
example, that he had to contend with eight different "authoritative"
values for the U.S. gallon. The growing electrical industry needed
measuring instruments and was often involved in litigation because
of the lack of standards. American instruments had to be sent abroad
for calibration.
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NIST's
founding was described in the March 11, 1901, edition of The
Evening Star. |
The nation already
had an office of weights and measures. The first efforts to provide
accurate (albeit non-legal) standards of weights and measures were
made in the 1830s by Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, a Swiss engineer
and metrologist who immigrated to the United States and became the
first superintendent of weights and measures. But the office had
few employees, and some people disliked the idea of the federal
government imposing standards or anything else on industry.
After strong
advocacy by leading scientists and industrialists who endorsed the
concept of a national standards laboratory, principally to meet
the needs of electrical instrument makers and manufacturers, the
U.S. Congress agreed to go along with the idea. NIST originally
was part of the Treasury Department, then moved to the Department
of Commerce and Labor, later split into two units. The Institute
went with the Department of Commerce, where it remains today. Samuel
W. Stratton, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago,
became the first director, a post he held for 21 years.
The original
staff numbered 12. After several years in temporary quarters, NIST
moved to a site on Connecticut Avenue in the District of Columbia,
a few miles from the White House. The scientific and technological
programs were started from scratch. After improving the standards
of electrical measurement, NIST quickly developed better standards
of length and mass and new standards of temperature, light, and
time. The Institute also established standards of safety in commerce
and industry and of performance among public utilities, and it prepared
and maintained hundreds of standard samples of materials that helped
introduce quality control to U.S. industry. To advance fundamental
science, NIST developed increasingly precise instruments, measurement
techniques offering greater range than ever before, and wholly new
standards such as those for sound, frequency, and radiation.
The need for
standards was dramatized in 1904, when more than 1,500 buildings
burned down in Baltimore, Md., because of a lack of standard fire-hose
couplings. When firefighters from Washington and as far away as
New York arrived to help douse the fire, few of their hoses fit
the hydrants. NIST had collected more than 600 sizes and variations
in fire-hose couplings in a previous investigation and, after the
Baltimore fire, participated in the selection of a national standard.
Next Section
(The Industrial Age)
Date created:
11/2/00
Last updated: 11/17/00
Contact: inquiries@nist.gov
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