In Precision's Palace

Washington last week caught up with Leyden, Berlin and Toronto in the matter of liquefying helium (after hydrogen most volatile of gases) and keeping it liquid--a scientific feat first accomplished 23 years ago. The jubilant men who did it were staff members of the U. S. Bureau of Standards--Drs. George Kimball Burgess (director), Hobert Cutler Dickinson and Ferdinand Graft Brickwedde and two aides. In cylinders stout enough to withstand the tremendous expansion of gases they compressed air to liquid ( -- 310-o F.). Liquid air helped liquefy hydrogen ( -- 432.4-o F.); liquid hydrogen helped freeze helium to a colorless liquid at --456-o F. That temperature is less than 4-o F. above Absolute Zero, unrealizable goal of cryogenists. At such low temperatures molecules almost stand still, display fantastic electromagnetic properties.

The Bureau of Standards wanted to liquefy helium to refine the accuracy of (among other measuring apparatus) kitchen thermometers.

Director Burgess' current interest in extreme cold is the antithesis of his preoccupation with extreme heat at the beginning of his scientific career. That was while he was studying with Henry Louis Le Chatelier in Paris. In 1901 he accomplished four things: Earned his Sc. D.; translated Le Chatelier's High Temperature Measurements with additions; published Recherches sur la constants de Gravitation; and took Suzanne Babut across the Atlantic to his home at Newton. Mass, for a New England marriage.

Concurrently a fifth thing soon important to him was happening. Congress had created a Bureau. of Standards in Washington. President McKinley in 1901 took Professor Samuel Wesley Stratton from the University of Chicago to be the bureau's first director. A couple of years later he had Dr. Burgess with him. When Professor Stratton became president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1923), Dr. Burgess became Bureau Chief. Just a month ago President Stratton, for a year now Tech's board chairman, was back in Washington, guest of his onetime subordinate at the bureau's 30th anniversary celebration and the unveiling of a Stratton portrait in the old institution.

When they and the bureau were young, they had scarcely a score of men on the staff. Their research home was a temporary shelter. Now the bureau occupies more than 20 buildings in a wooded, 43-acre Washington suburbs park. Scientists and assistants number more than 1,100.

The first laboratory was so rickety that passing wagons made the measuring instruments rattle. Now Dr. Burgess has structures so solidly poised that an earth quake could not joggle a butterfly on a pendulum. He also has instruments sensitive enough to detect the streetcleaners' brushing a block away.

Precision is the bureau's prime purpose. Deep within an unshakable vault, where temperature and air pressure is constant, lies the master measuring stick of the U. S., a platinum bar one metre long. Bureau men know that it is one metre long because they measured with an eternal, invariable standard, the red light waves of cadmium.

Then there are standard quarts and bushels, standard tin cans and hotel dishes, machines which weigh an electron, others which weigh bridges. They bend steel girders at the bureau and blow up steel tanks. One device, an interferometer, indicates how far a 40-in. brick wall is deflected by the pressure of one hand. They have an ultramicrometer which measures a movement of one-millionth part of an inch. But it is "too sensitive for any known use."

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