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The
Depression
y 1932, U.S.
unemployment reached almost 25 percent of the labor force. Car sales
slumped, nightclubs closed, and hobbies boomed. NIST incurred substantial
cuts in research funding and staff. Some professional staff refused
their imposed furloughs, preferring to work without pay. Because
industry called on NIST (and national laboratories abroad) less
often than before, the Depression years were a time of international
conferences, interlaboratory comparisons, and ex-changes of data
and equipment looking to develop new or improved international standards.
For instance, NIST and an industry standards association agreed
on a new ratio between the inch and the millimeter so that precision
measurement would be on the same basis in England and the United
States, an aid to American exporters.
Despite cutbacks
in industrial research, many fundamental studies, such as the development
of photometric units (for measuring visible light according to the
sensitivity of the human eye) and research on radiation and spectroanalysis,
advanced during these years. This work was useful to both science
and industry and won wide acknowledgment. Some NIST research in
applied technology was terminated; there was a continuing debate
over how far the Institute should venture into these areas.
But it did venture
into uncharted territory nonetheless. The advances in aeronautics
and radio in the 1920s led to a period of worldwide exploration
during the 1930s, with trips to Antarctica and balloon flights into
the stratosphere sponsored by the National Geographic Society. In
1936 from the USSR, NIST made the first natural-color photographs
ever of a total solar eclipse, using a custom-made camera and lens.
Many precision measurements then were being made in terms of light
waves. With international agreement on definitions and advances
in spectroscopy enabling the search for superior types of light
for this purpose, it was hoped that many difficulties impeding the
international interchangeability of parts might be solved. NIST
developed a method for the use of cadmium and krypton wavelengths
in the measurement of precision gage blocks that permitted their
certification to an accuracy three times better than before.
NIST began a
tradition of contributing to Nobel Prize-winning research by other
scientists when its cryogenics lab was used to confirm the existence
of deuterium, or "heavy hydrogen." This isotope of hydrogen was
discovered by a guest researcher, who subsequently won the Nobel
Prize in chemistry. A NIST scientist separated the isotope. These
scientists expected that deuterium would be useful for research
or practical devices such as neon signs; they had no idea that it
would later become a vital ingredient in the making of nuclear bombs.
In work of
interest to the general public, NIST supported the consumers' movement
of the 1930s by advising consumer labs on test instruments and equipment
and devising new ones. Following magazine articles and publicity
about its work, NIST was deluged with letters from the public asking
for assistance on all types of problems, from increasing the birth
rate of pigs to obtaining devices to locate buried treasure. In
a single three-day period in 1939, almost 800 letters arrived requesting
technical information, along with a similar number of telephone
calls, 459 letters asking for publications, and 429 visitors asking
for scientific or technical information.
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Date created:
11/2/00
Last updated: 11/6/00
Contact: inquiries@nist.gov
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