Bigger A. S. A.

When a U. S. woman buys silk stockings, she frequently purchases some tin along with the silk. How much tin she is buying she cannot know, for there is no standard way of testing silk. But for her protection and the protection of the manufacturer of her stockings, the American Standard Association is considering tin-silk test standardization.

Impartial and expert is the Association. Last week it completed a reorganization which shifted its control from engineering to industrial leaders. Organized as the American Standard Engineering Standards Committee in 1917 by the American Societies of Civil Engineers, of Mechanical Engineers, American Institutes of Electrical Engineers, of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers and American Society for Testing Materials, the Committee in 1919 expanded its membership to include U. S. Departments of War, Navy and Commerce. More members were added until in 1928 there were 37 member bodies. In March the American Home Economics Society was admitted to membership.

The new directorate of the Association includes such names as Quincy Bent, vice president of Bethlehem Steel, Lawrence Aloysius Downs, President of Illinois Central, and Matthew Scott Sloan, president of New York Edison. Actual standardizing activities, however, will be carried on along the original engineering lines. The Association also announced a close contact with the U. S. Bureau of Standards, one of its directors being George Kimball Burgess, the Bureau of Standards head.

Most of the Association's investigations are more technical, less popular, than the standardization tin-silk tests. The Association has, for example, established a national safety code for elevators and escalators, has developed specification and rating systems for refrigerators; a standard for drafting room practice, and a standard for uniform proportions in bolts, nuts and rivets, are more characteristic undertakings. The Association is essentially a manufacturers' rather than a consumers' body; its purpose is to define, not to uplift.