History

Founding director Dr. Samuel Wesley Stratton was in many ways the father of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Stratton’s impassioned arguments for the establishment of a national standards laboratory won over a reluctant Congress, which also appointed him as its first director, a position he held for 21 years. An engaged leader, Stratton’s vision has had a profound and lasting influence on NIST’s mission.

At the turn of the 20th century, uncertainty plagued U.S. markets. There were at least eight different gallons and four different feet in use, and inspectors were often poorly trained and working with outmoded equipment. NIST convened the first National Conference on Weights and Measures (NCWM) to write model laws, distribute uniform standards, and provide training for inspectors, which resulted in a more orderly and fair marketplace.

Errors in the weighing of rail freight could be costly, so NIST designed special test railcars to test large capacity scales. Whereas a tolerable error was 0.2 percent, NIST tests showed that nearly 80 percent of the rail scales were off by almost 4 percent. With help from NIST, states began to test their railroad and other large capacity scales more regularly and rigorously, and accuracy quickly improved.

Among the many innovations that NIST contributed to navigation was a radio direction finder (RDF), a special antenna that determined the direction of radio transmissions. The original RDF was made by an Italian team, but NIST researchers patented an improved design, built in 1916. It served as a prototype for the U.S. Navy and was used widely to pinpoint the positions of enemy forces during World War I.

NIST began experimental broadcasts of music and speech about six months before the first commercial station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, came on the air on Nov. 2, 1920. NIST used these broadcasts to study the technical problems that plagued early radio, and in 1923, NIST began broadcasting standard frequencies from its station WWV in Beltsville, Md., to help commercial radio stations avoid interfering with each other’s signals.

Essentially a kind of spring scale, proving rings are simple mechanical devices that can measure applied forces with a high degree of accuracy. NIST’s Serge Petrenko and Herbert Whittemore together invented the proving ring in 1926, and the devices are manufactured commercially and in wide use today.

NIST built a standard chamber that produced precise amounts of radiation so that scientists could test exposure detectors, or dosimeters, and make the first international comparisons. These comparisons harmonized international measurements of radiation and were used when drafting an X-ray safety code.

A random calibration assignment in 1913 led NIST's Wilmer Souder to become one of the nation's first federal forensic scientists. Widely regarded as an expert in a number of nascent forensic fields such as ballistics, forgery, and materials analysis, Souder provided expert testimony in a number of cases, including the Lindberg baby kidnapping, and helped establish the FBI's crime lab in 1932.

NIST and the National Geographic Society sponsored an expedition to present-day Kazakhstan to observe the June 1936 solar eclipse. Using a NIST-designed and constructed 14-foot eclipse camera and 9-inch lens, the team took the first natural color photographs of a solar eclipse.

NIST helped design and construct the Bat, the first fully automated guided missile to be used successfully in combat. NIST worked out the aerodynamic and stabilization characteristics of the 454-kilogram missile, which was guided by the radar echoes of the enemy target. In addition to its self-guidance capability, the Bat was known for its long range, high accuracy, and high payload. It saw action in the Pacific in 1945.

Harold Lyons and his colleagues at NIST built the world’s first atomic clock in 1949. Based on the frequency of the microwaves emitted by the ammonia molecule, the clock was not accurate enough to be used as a time standard, but it did prove the concept. Louis Essen at the U.K.’s National Physical Laboratory built the first atomic clock accurate enough to be a time standard in 1955.

With a speed of 1 megahertz and 6,000 bytes of storage, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) was the world’s first internally programmed digital computer and the fastest machine of its kind when it was built. During its 13-year tenure, SEAC calculated sampling plans for the Census Bureau, wave functions for helium and lithium, stresses in aircraft structures, and produced the world’s first digital image.

As part of their work studying battery life, NIST scientists found that commercial additives, including one called AD-X2, did not improve battery performance. Claiming government persecution, the manufacturer of AD-X2 instigated two high-level investigations into the NIST testing program. Through it all, NIST stood by its testing methods, which were vindicated by the National Academy of Sciences in 1953.

The need to build new radio testing and cryogenics research facilities led to the establishment of NIST laboratories in Boulder, Colo. Ground was broken on land donated by the people of Boulder in 1951, and the new lab opened for business in September 1954. President Eisenhower delivered the dedication address.

In 1956, NIST’s Boulder laboratories began broadcasting experimental low-frequency signals from its station KK2XEI. In 1963, this station was relocated to Fort Collins, Colo., renamed WWVB, and began broadcasting time and frequency signals. Today, radio-controlled clocks in most of North America use WWVB to synchronize themselves with NIST’s atomic clock in Boulder.

Capable of generating pressures millions of times those found at sea level, the diamond anvil cell, which was invented at NIST in 1958, heralded the birth of high-pressure science. NIST researchers built the first diamond anvil cell by hand using diamonds confiscated from smugglers. In fact, without a source of free diamonds, the device would have been too expensive to perfect.

After WWII, it had become clear that the original laboratories located in Washington, D.C., were completely inadequate for the increasingly sensitive experiments NIST scientists were performing. Planners selected a site in the then small, sleepy farming town of Gaithersburg, Md., and ground for the new campus in Gaithersburg was broken in 1961. Major construction was mostly completed by 1970.

More than 1,000 pages long, the NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions, colloquially known as Abramowitz and Stegun after its authors, was first published in 1964 and has been reprinted many times since. The Handbook is likely the most widely distributed and most cited NIST technical publication of all time. During the mid-1990s, the book was cited every 1.5 hours of each working day.

NIST radio station WWV, relocated from Greenbelt, Md., began official broadcasts from Fort Collins, Colo., in 1966. Immortalized in this photo, the switch was thrown to initiate transmissions at 5 p.m. Mountain time on Nov. 30, 1966. About 80 guests attended the event and afterwards NIST received more than 8,500 notices from radio amateurs noting receipt of the first-day signal.

On Dec. 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, W.Va., collapsed during rush hour traffic, killing 46 people. NIST investigators found that the collapse was caused by a microscopic pit in the surface of a single eye-bar that connected the deck to the suspension chain. Over time, the pit had grown into two small cracks about 4 mm in length, which led to the catastrophic collapse.

Statisticians roundly criticized the 1969 draft lottery as unfair, so the Selective Service System asked NIST to devise an unquestionably random method for the 1970 draft. NIST mathematician Joan Rosenblatt and colleagues developed a method to randomly choose calendars and priority permutations for the draft. The new draft method was praised as fair, and Rosenblatt won the 1971 Federal Women’s Award for her efforts on this and other projects.

Developed between 1969-1971 at NIST by Russell Young, John Ward, and Fredric Scire, the topografiner was an instrument for measuring surface microtopography and was a precursor to the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Young and his colleagues called their invention a “topografiner” because it could study the topography of a surface and resolve details as small as 30 atoms in size.

Because of the potential environmental danger of developing oil reserves on the Alaskan coast, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration asked NIST chemists to collect baseline data on the marine environment. The 700 samples of sediment, water, and marine life proved invaluable when measuring the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.

In response to the needs of the private sector, especially banking and financial services, NIST issued the first publicly available data encryption standard (DES)—a landmark event in an era when most cryptographic equipment was either proprietary or classified. While the DES algorithm was developed by IBM, NIST popularized the technology by making it a standard for federal agencies.

On July 17, 1981, two suspended walkways at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Mo., collapsed leaving 114 people dead and 186 injured. NIST’s investigation concluded that a last-minute design change by the builder to the box beam-hanger rod connections doubled the load on the 4th floor walkway, eventually causing the collapse of that walkway and the 2nd floor span below it.

Achieving a feat once thought impossible, NIST succeeded in developing the world's first practical, stable and easy to use 1-volt standard in 1985. These instruments are used by national, industrial, and military laboratories around the world to make products ranging from mobile phones to missile guidance systems.

In 1988, NIST published the model for uncertainty evaluations of near-field antenna measurements, the culmination of several decades’ work. More than 200 laboratories around the world routinely perform near-field measurements, which have saved millions of dollars in testing costs for the military and satellite manufacturers, among other users.

NIST produced the world’s first DNA profiling standard, SRM 2390, in 1992 at the request of the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. Developed over the course of two years, SRM 2390 was made to test every step of the restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis method for identifying people using DNA.

NIST's Kent Irwin invented the first practical “transition-edge” sensors, which precisely measure energy using a superconducting metal. When the metal absorbs as little as a single photon’s worth of energy, it stops being a superconductor. This high sensitivity makes them useful for advanced telescopes such as the South Pole Telescope.

NIST physicist William Phillips shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with his colleagues for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with lasers. The advance made it possible to build a new kind of atomic clock—the cesium fountain clock—that was approximately three times more accurate when first built than its predecessors.

The result of the convergence of many areas of laser physics, especially NIST Fellow John Hall’s techniques for stabilizing lasers, an optical frequency comb is a laser specially designed to produce a series of very short (a few millionths of a billionth of a second), equally spaced pulses of light. Frequency combs have dramatically simplified and improved the accuracy of frequency metrology and made it possible to build optical atomic clocks.

Eric Cornell of JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder, and his colleagues shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work to create the world's first Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC)—a new state of matter that emerges at just a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Scientists now routinely use BECs to simulate and study quantum mechanics up close and in slow motion.

NIST/JILA fellow John L. (Jan) Hall shared half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for his “contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique.” A sort of measuring stick to determine the frequency of another laser with high precision, frequency combs enable a broad array of technical capabilities from better clocks to subtle experiments on the nature of the universe.