Don't know whether this article had showed up on the list... Nat ------------------ Copyright 2001 The Washington Post The Washington Post April 01, 2001, Sunday, Final Edition SECTION: STYLE; Pg. F01 LENGTH: 3957 words HEADLINE: Uncle Sam's Funhouse; � Want to ignite a love seat, blow out an ear drum, blow up a car, slam load-bearing walls into putty? The National Institute of Standards and Technology is the place for you. BYLINE: Michael E. Ruane, Washington Post Staff Writer BODY: THE DOOR TO ROOM A-60 IS LOCKED, until the face of Group Leader Zeina J. Jabbour appears in the window to check us out. We are late, but expected, and are quickly admitted to the quiet gray sanctum that is the portal to the hallowed object. Beyond here we may not go. The alarm to the inner chamber is "armed," and Jabbour is one of only a few permitted to enter and take up the sacred tongs. Human hands may not touch the object, lest it become altered in the slightest nano-way, and the air inside is filtered of all but dust particles a half-micron in diameter, or less. Jabbour, its "keeper," already has entered, wearing a special blue "clean suit." She has opened the safe, and carried the object on its black tray under its glass dome to the viewing window. "That thing?" we ask, peering in at a plain but gleaming silver-colored cylinder about the size of a squat pill bottle. "That," she says: the thick slice of platinum-iridium alloy, crafted by French instrument makers about 1889, the only solid object in the country still used to define a measure. It's the National Kilogram. Primal, untainted by dirt, lint, the weight of a fingerprint, the calamity of a smudge. The immaculate kilo. The ultimate standard against which lesser kilos across the land may be compared. The official foundation, born of the French Revolution, on which the peculiar American system of ounces, pounds and tons is built. The cosmic sire of every bathroom scale in the country. The big K is also the perfect, unbeating heart of the U.S. government's National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, where it so importantly resides. It is the core of what, at its birth a century ago, was called the National Bureau of Standards, and what, 100 years later, has grown into one of the world's premier scientific research centers. Born of fundamental questions like what is a gallon, or bushel, or foot? -- for there once were several of each -- the institute came to be asked about standards for locomotive wheels, shoe leathers, refrigerator doors, fire sirens, bridge girders, car batteries, flak vests, milk bottles, traffic lights and many other things. It went on to evolve dramatically, shaped by war, economics and technological upheaval, through three name changes, three locations and all of the century's scientific epochs. It grew from an Edwardian bureau of calibrators into an early consumer advocacy group, then a wartime research agency, then a cutting-edge high-tech science institute, and lately a more active partner in the nation's commercial enterprise. Along the way it has kept many, but not all, of the trappings of previous incarnations. While its mission has always been to assist American industry through standards and measurements, its often eclectic journey has also had its researchers bending, breaking, burning, weighing, calibrating, timing and recording through pure scientific investigation. "They're given that kind of license," a NIST spokesman says. For the last few weeks, NIST has been celebrating its centennial -- it was chartered by Congress on March 3, 1901 -- with reunions, symposia and gala celebrations. Officially, it's been a century of serious stuff. Institute scientist William D. Phillips won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 for learning to herd atoms with laser beams. And promoting the national industry, while noble for an agency that is part of the Commerce Department, can be rather dry. But over the years, at what was once called Uncle Sam's House of Wonders, they've also had some fun. NIST researchers have fiddled with flexometers, spectrometers, and hydrometers; a betatron, a dynamitron, and an omegatron; as well as something called a Knoop indenter. At one point they had a madcap machine that lifted and dropped suitcases over and over, to see how good a handle should be. Good enough for 25,000 pickups, it found! Another contraption, a spinning wheel with shoes attached, measured how fast soles wore out. Another exposed dishes to five years of washing in 48 hours. And another exposed sneakers to lawn mower blades. In the 1950s, NIST's late and legendary director and baseball fan, Lyman J. Briggs -- in pursuit of pure science -- used a wind tunnel and the staff of the Washington Senators to study the behavior of the curveball. He found that the maximum break, from mound to plate, was 17.5 inches. Best velocity was a pokey 68 mph. (Come to think of it, maybe that explains the Senators better than it explains curveballs.) The institute's fire research lab still regularly ignites, and then videotapes, beds, mattresses, desks, dressers, sofas, love seats and cars to see how much heat and smoke are generated. The fire guys love to show the tapes, which are scary, and will gladly show you the nuked cars out back. The more serious types in the ballistics lab, set up in an underground former missile site, have a high-tech stabbing machine that looks like a pile driver, and a weird one-size-fits-all "gun," with interchangeable barrels, for testing flak vest standards. In the sound building, researchers -- aiming to protect eardrums around the world from too-loud fire sirens -- set them off again and again inside a cushioned chamber with walls made of fiberglass wedges, and doors like a safe's. An aging, monster universal testing machine can still put 12 million pounds of pressure on structures 40 feet high to assess the strength of large-scale construction. In a metals lab, scientists have sliced open rivets from the Titanic -- wondering if purer iron might have saved the ship from filling with water after slamming into an iceberg. But NIST isn't merely cool machines. It also keeps on file hundreds of what are called Standard Reference Materials. Should you discover, say, what appears to be some nickel oxide 3 in a bottom drawer, you can buy from NIST 25 grams of the real thing for comparison. Cost: $ 104. Same goes for Jamaican bauxite, metallo-organic strontium, chlorinated biphenyls -- a set of five for $ 286 -- urban dust, apple leaves, bullet lead, and whale blubber. Then there are NIST's employees -- some of whom are legends. Like Roy G. Saltman. In 1988, Saltman, now 68, and retired from NIST after 27 years as a computer scientist, wrote a detailed report on the use of pre-scored election punch card ballots. The ones that developed "hanging chads." The cards didn't work well, Saltman warned. They'd already messed up several local elections, and were nothing but trouble. He recommended: "The use of pre-scored punch card ballots should be ended." Roy was in Thailand on vacation last November when the reporters began to call. "It was unreal," he chuckled recently. "I felt like I had been the prophet crying in the wilderness, and suddenly the dire happening that I had predicted sort of came to pass." Sort of? In 1902, in Brooklyn alone, there were four different legal definitions of what constituted the length of a foot: the United States foot, the Bushwick foot, the Williamsburg foot and the 26th Ward foot. Nationally, there were eight definitions of the gallon. And a few years earlier a prominent scientist had informed Congress that the true weight of the American pound was unknown. The scramble for uniform standards of measurement had bedeviled the United States since before its birth. The Articles of Confederation, and later the U.S. Constitution, gave Congress the duty of "fixing" the nation's standards for weights and measures. This was a vital job, whose importance might be described in a word: taxes. The government, which then relied more heavily on duties and excises, couldn't accurately tax goods it couldn't uniformly measure. But setting government standards meant establishing regulations. As a result, nothing was done. In 1827, Albert Gallatin, then the U.S. minister to Britain, shipped over a brass copy of the old British troy pound, according to a 1966 history of NIST by Rexmond C. Cochrane. But after the British pound was damaged in the Parliament fire of 1836, there was no way to authenticate Gallatin's. In the early 1830s Congress asked Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, a Swiss engineer who had been the first superintendent of the Treasury Department's Coastal Survey, to study the various standards in use and try to come up with a system. Hassler suggested that the U.S. gallon be based on the English wine gallon of 1703. The bushel should be the Henry VII Winchester bushel. The yard would be based on the 1758 brass bar made by the famous English instrument maker Edward Troughton. Though Congress could not bring itself to make Hassler's measures legal, it gave them moral support via joint resolution in 1836 and ordered copies distributed to the states, thereby establishing the country's first, unofficial, system of standards. It took twenty years -- until just before the Civil War -- for the last of the copies to be delivered. Soon they would be irrelevant: In 1866 Congress declared the metric system to be the basis of measurement in the United States. You read that right. Even though most Americans still aren't entirely clear how long a centimeter is, for more than a century the metric system has been the foundation on which American measures were defined. In 1893 the U.S. pound was officially described as 0.4535924277 kilogram, and the yard, 3600/3937 meter. Three years earlier, the National Kilo had arrived from France, where the International Kilo -- the world standard -- still resides. Now, the United States just needed a good place to put it. On Sunday morning, Feb. 7, 1904, a fire broke out in the John E. Hurst wholesale dry goods house in the heart of Baltimore's business district. It moved rapidly through the building, and quickly spread to another, and another. Fed by the wind, and a warren of wooden structures, it raced out of control. Within an hour, George W. Horton, chief engineer of the city's beleaguered fire department, had sent a frantic telegram to Washington: "Desperate fire here. Must have help at once." Washington firefighters piled aboard a special train with their equipment and were rushed to Baltimore less than two hours later. Crowds cheered their arrival. But when the District firemen tried to attach their hoses to Baltimore's hydrants, they found that couplings didn't match. More firemen soon arrived from Philadelphia, New York, Wilmington and Annapolis. None of their couplings matched Baltimore's hydrants. Thirty hours later, after 1,500 buildings over 70 blocks -- including much of the old city -- had burned down, the fire was out. A few weeks later, Samuel Wesley Stratton, the first director of the fledgling Bureau of Standards, then spreading among its new buildings along Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington, ordered a bureau engineer from MIT, Albert S. Merrill, to investigate. Merrill began a survey, collecting samples of municipal hose couplings from across the country. By the time he finished a year later, he had 600. Every one, so the story goes, was different. NIST people tell the Baltimore fire story over and over, to illustrate how critical standards can be, and then they take you to visit the grand exemplar of sameness, the standard of standards: King Kilo. Actually, in the "hierarchy" of NIST's kilograms, the exalted one is only taken out of its case about twice a year. This is done to calibrate a lower tier of kilos made of stainless steel called the "secondary standard." Those in turn are used to calibrate a third tier of stainless steel kilos, called the "working standard," which are used to serve NIST's customers. Jabbour, NIST's kilo keeper, says customers include people in the aerospace, biotech and semiconductor industries, along with state departments of weights and measures, all of whom bring in their weights for calibration. Which ensures that your airliner isn't too heavy to get off the ground, and that when you order a pound of Swiss at the deli, you get an honest-to-gosh pound. But over the years this university of uniformity has not been immune to change. The year of the Baltimore fire, the institute was just beginning the evolution that would mark it for the next century. The year before, its name had changed to the Bureau of Standards -- with the word national inexplicably dropped. National would go back into the name in 1934, and would stay there until 1988. That year Congress passed a law to further boost American industry, giving the bureau its new name -- with the potent words institute and technology -- and a broader scientific mandate. Money began to flow, too. NIST's congressional appropriation leapt from $ 144.7 million in 1988 to $ 700 million in 1995. There were new research programs partnering with industry, and new construction plans, and things were looking great. And then came the Republican revolution in Congress. The same year that saw the fat appropriation later saw cost-cutting proposals so severe they called for the dismantling of the Commerce Department and the disbanding of NIST. The next year the institute's appropriation was slashed by $ 155 million, but it had survived the storm. Funding has steadied now. A new $ 75 million advanced chemical sciences lab opened in 1999, and last December work began on a $ 245 million advanced measurements laboratory. That should be really something. Within the lab, even the variability caused by the vibrations of foot steps will be eliminated. Measurements will be made in increments of atoms. Joannie W. Chen's people in the photodegradation lab are pumped. Their fat aluminum baby -- the black ball in the next room that looks like a UFO and is leaking weird blue light -- is up and cooking at last. It's been years in the making, and it is one of a kind. They've tested it, and tweaked it. But on this late winter day they've actually opened some of the 32 ports -- which protrude from the ball in barrel-like appendages about six inches in diameter -- and slid in experiments. Six microwave plasma lamps at the top of the six-foot sphere are blazing away, filling it with ultraviolet light. The lamps are 6,000 watts each, says project chemist Chris White, which is "a bunch of juice." To stay cool, they suck up 3,500 cubic feet of air a minute through fat ventilation ducts. "The first time we hit the lights," White says, "it was huge." The device is basically an ultraviolet light furnace designed to expose polymer, or plastic, coatings and structures to accelerated doses of damaging UV light. In other words, the stuff in sunlight. "Our gig is polymers," the 36-year-old Chen says. It's stuff you might find in a hardware store -- paint, coating, outdoor furniture, caulking. In the past such testing was done by leaving things out in the sun for years, or by using less reliable, old-fashioned light boxes. The sphere, through any one of its ports, can blast a specimen with the equivalent of 65 days worth of ravaging UV light in one day, to see how it fares. In photodegradation circles, that is pretty awesome. Chen's people are the latest breed of NISToid. Mostly under 40. Scarcely a necktie in sight. Jeans and sneakers have supplanted pocket protectors and white short-sleeve dress shirts. They have emerged from tiny offices scattered among the miles of NIST corridors that are dotted with emergency showers and warnings like: "Danger Hydrofluoric Acid." They are brilliant, often articulate, sometimes incomprehensible, and somewhat pleased with their strange, capital of calibration. "There's a tremendous amount of pride in knowing that the fundamental standards of commerce are here," says White. A physician's son, White, also 36, has been at NIST three years. "Part of it is just really exciting," he says, "and part of it is just terrifying. Think of going to work every day and being confronted by problems that have no solutions. Our life is essentially dealing with things we don't understand. That's really exciting. "It's just such wonderful, magic, super stuff to do." Vince Stanford whistles softly to get his computer's attention. >From atop an array of 59 tiny microphones assembled inside an oblong box made of balsa wood and acoustic ceiling tiles, a small camera swivels toward the sound, projecting Stanford on a computer monitor. "Basically what this thing is doing is scanning the room with a fan of (audio) beams," Stanford, 50, says, moving across the room, and whistling again. "Hey, camera! That's better." As other people in the room speak, the camera swivels eerily to look at them. "It'll follow anyone's voice," Stanford says, as the camera turns back to him. "Hello," he says to it. "There you go." "It's using the phase information off this array to tell where the voice is coming from," Stanford whispers, as if observing a reptile in the jungle. "It can look at you and it can also focus a beam on you and get a good rendition of your speech." If two people speak at the same time, though, the camera's not sure where to look. "It can be confused," he says. "It likes whistles better because they're high frequency." Stanford, a specialist in NIST's Smart Space Laboratory, is wearing black jeans and a herringbone sport coat. His field is what's sometimes called pervasive computing, in which computers become broadly integrated in the tasks of everyday life, much like the conversational uber-computer, HAL, in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." Things haven't gotten that far yet, but computers rule at NIST. There are an estimated 6,000 desktops, as well as something ominously called the Central Computing Facility, which contains roomsful of cyber power. Which is the difference from the old days, when a single clunky computer was the size of a room. In the old days, "You could have lunch in your modem," Stanford says. Computing has now gotten so potent that many tests can be inexpensively simulated, or mathematically modeled on the computer screen. Even virtual fire can be generated and thoroughly studied in the safety of cyberspace. This, among other things, has been bad news for some of NIST's legendary testing behemoths. The mammoth, vice-like universal testing machine, which had its own building constructed around it when the institute moved from Washington to its Gaithersburg campus in the 1960s, is now only used about 10 times a year. Indeed, NIST has a museum of mysterious antique testing and calibrating devices, many unidentified, that have been outstripped by technology. For the moment, Stanford's lab seems safe from the museum, and right now he is trying to see how well his seeing/listening computer might follow and distinguish voices, say at a business meeting. "You can see," he says slowly, whistling again and walking away, "that . . . it's . . . capable . . . of . . . following . . . the speaker . . . around the room." He then prompts the computer to distinguish between two speakers. It automatically puts an electronic target box around the image of whichever person is talking at a given moment. It's like being acquired by a munition. Stanford chuckles. It's not scary, he insists. "It's inevitable." Sure. Just like in the space movie, where the astronaut tells the computer: Open the pod door, HAL. Not missing a beat, Stanford replies weirdly, as the by-then homicidal HAL did in the film: "I can't do that, Dave." In Room 156 of the Fabrication Technology Division, Building 304, dwells the un-NIST man. A goat-farmer on weekends, he labors alone, soothed by CDs of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Van Morrison and Rod Stewart. The music helps him "ground" himself. "If I'm upset, I can't work," he says. There's a refrigerator, a microwave, a metal locker and a beat-up chemistry book. Room 156 is as much studio as lab. It is a world of fire, crystalline beauty and blinding, molten quartz. It is a place of art as well as science, sensibility as well as calibration. It's the realm of Jeff Anderson, 45, fine-instrument maker and NIST's chief glass blower. Anderson is a lanky 6-foot-5. He wears only cotton clothing -- because burning polyester cloth can be nasty -- and has a pair of glasses with flip-down shades, like an outfielder, on a cord around his neck. He also wears sun block, and at times a reflective mask, like a welder's. He works at a wooden bench that is scarred black from burns and is cluttered with strange graphite implements he has made himself. His chief tools, though, are burners that can produce a foot-long flame with a point like a spear, and that he tunes like a wind instrument. It is to Anderson, the quintessential free spirit, that NIST's egghead researchers come when they need a complex glass apparatus that can be had nowhere else. It might be a complicated helium gas cell, which resembles a flattened flask, for the neutron reactor; a delicate piece the size of a cigarette; or a fat tube that looks like plumbing. Sometimes the scientists will drop off a detailed diagram of what they need. Other times it will be scrawled on scrap paper. It doesn't really matter to Anderson. It may be state-of-the-art research outside Room 156, Anderson says, but inside "it all comes back to the thousand-year-old art of just being able to manipulate molten glass." It is a task that's done by eye, and feel, though you can only touch molten glass with graphite. "It has to be what flows, what's coming off the tips of my fingers," he says. "If it doesn't feel like art I'm not doing my job." It isn't always beautiful. "I've learned over the years that some of the ugliest things I've ever made have worked the best," he says. But often it is. If only he still had the flash tube he made a few years back for the chemical kinetics group. It was a quadruple-jacketed cell with tungsten electrodes. God, it was gorgeous. His job can be hazardous. Molten glass and flames seem to be everywhere. Anderson ritually lights the big pilot on the main burner when he arrives in the morning and leaves it licking out of its nozzle all day. "I do it to annoy management," he jokes. His burners run off natural gas, oxygen, maybe a little propane if he needs to "kick" the heat up a little. His hands dance around the pointed flames like a conductor's. The real danger, though, is not the flame, but the molten glass. It can be as hot as 1,500 degrees Celsius. "It vaporizes your skin," he says. "Your skin just goes up in a puff of smoke. It's a funny kind of burn, believe me. And I'm not meaning funny, ha-ha." Quartz can burn so bright that it'll light up the room. Plus, it's very hard visually to tell hot glass from cool. Sometimes, it will feel slippery if you try to pick it up. By then it's too late. Anderson isn't really a NIST-type guy. "I'm kind of the illegitimate child around here," he says. "I don't fit in, don't fit the frame." He's a maverick. If he feels out of sync, ungrounded, he'll just go home. But that's rare. As long as that yellow pilot light is lit, he's the king of Room 156, the wizard of glass. "When I quit having fun, I'm leaving," he says. "I also say if I ever had to get a real job I wouldn't know what to do. I'm lucky that work is here for someone like me." He could be stuck in some drab university shop. Students, bureaucrats. Yuck. "You just repair condensers all day and go crazy." That would never happen here. Not in Uncle Sam's science wonderland.
