X-Nico

unusual facts about National Bureau of Standards



Abramowitz and Stegun

Abramowitz and Stegun is the informal name of a mathematical reference work edited by Milton Abramowitz and Irene Stegun of the United States National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology).

Fire safe cigarette

In 1929, a cigarette-ignited fire in Lowell, Massachusetts, caught the attention of U.S. Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers (D-MA); she called for the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) to develop technology for "self-snubbing" cigarettes.

Gardner Inlet

It was discovered by the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition, 1947–48, under Finn Ronne, who named it for Irvine Clifton Gardner, a physicist at the National Bureau of Standards, and member of the American Antarctic Association, Inc., the organization set up to make plans and preparations for the expedition.

Grote Reber

Reber sold his telescope to the National Bureau of Standards, and it was erected on a turntable at their field station in Sterling, Virginia.

James R. Wait

After a brief stint with the Defense Research Communications establishment in Ottawa, Wait first joined the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado, and then NOAA; at each, he concentrated predominantly on theoretical aspects of radio-wave propagation.

Melvin Conway

In the 1970s and 1980s, he was involved with the MUMPS medical computer language and system language standard specification for the National Bureau of Standards.

Samuel Wesley Stratton

He won the support for his plans from Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage and in March 1901, President William McKinley appointed him the first director of the National Bureau of Standards.

Timeline of numerical analysis after 1945

Hestenes, Stiefel, and Lanczos, all from the Institute for Numerical Analysis at the National Bureau of Standards, initiate the development of Krylov subspace iteration methods.

W. H. Clatworthy

Clatworthy worked at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of North Carolina, Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh and with the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C.


see also

Bruce R. Ellingwood

In 1975, he moved to the Center for Building Technology at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), and later became the leader of the Structural Engineering Group for the Center for Building Technology.

Ferdinand Brickwedde

Ferdinand Graft Brickwedde (1903-1989), a physicist at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), in 1931 produced the first sample of hydrogen in which the spectrum of its heavy isotope, deuterium, could be observed.

Ward Plummer

Plummer accepted a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Bureau of Standards now called The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the fall of 1967 working with Russ Young, and he stayed as a staff scientist until the fall of 1973.