It's 75 for NBS

When an Act of the U.S. Congress established the National Bureau of Standards 75 years ago last month, it was answering a desperate need to bring order from chaos in U.S. industry and commerce. Measurement problems caused by a lack of national standards were proliferating throughout the country. Eight different "authoritative values" for the U.S. gallon were in existence. City surveyors in Brooklyn, N.Y., recognized as legal four different "feet." In the electrical industry, electrical developments advanced by wasteful trial-and-error methods for lack of definitions that neither scientific institutions nor industry were qualified to provide. And, in the emerging electrical instrumentation field, instruments invented and manufactured in the United States were sent routinely to Germany for calibration before they were sold in the U.S. or elsewhere. The situation was so intolerable that Carl Hering, then president of AIEE, felt compelled to send a telegram to the House of Representatives in which he not only urged passage of legislation to establish a national bureau of standards, but also described the standards-less conditions then extant as a "national humiliation."