STRATTON, SAMUEL WESLEY

(b. Litchfield. Illinois, 18 July 1861; d. Boston, Massachusetts, 18 October 1931)

physics, metrology, science and engineering education.

As founding director of the National Bureau of Standards and later as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stratton significantly shaped the study and teaching of the physical sciences and engineering in America. He grew up on the farm of his parents, Samuel and Mary Webster Stratton, and worked his way through Illinois Industrial University (now the University of Illinois), earning a certificate in mechanical engineering in 1884 and a B.S. in 1886. His academic performance was so outstanding that the university offered him a faculty appointment in mathematics and physics, and also gave him responsibility for organizing its first course in electrical engineering.

In 1892 Stratton joined the physics department of the newly opened University of Chicago. With department chairman Albert Michelson on leave at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, Stratton was asked to organize the physics curriculum, plan and equip the Ryerson Physical Laboratory, and offer graduate and undergraduate classes during his first year. Upon Michelson’s return in 1893, they entered into a scientifically rewarding, though personally frustrating, partnership. Certainly Michelson’s obsession with precision and measurement left its mark upon Stratton’s subsequent career. Stratton soon discovered, however, as had other young physicists (including Robert Millikan, who joined the department in 1896), that Michelson was easier to work for than with. Stratton and Michelson collaborated on several important experiments and developed a new kind of harmonic analyzer for Michelson’s spectrographic studies, but Stratton later told close friends that he never felt Michelson had given him proper credit for his contributions. Turning his attention from research to teaching, Stratton joined Millikan in reorganizing the undergraduate curriculum and coauthoring A College Course of Laboratory Experiments in General Physics (1898).

Stratton’s career took an unexpected turn in 1899 when he was invited by the office of the secretary of the treasury to spend a sabbatical year in Washington, D.C., evaluating the federal office of Weights and Measures. Germany had established the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in 1887, and Great Britain the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in 1899. Many American political and business leaders feared that unless the United States followed suit, it would fall behind its commercial rivals, especially in the high-technology electrical and chemical industries, in which Germany was then leading the world.

After careful study Stratton drafted a proposal for a national standards laboratory modeled on the PTR; solicited endorsements for it from prominent scientific, technical, and business organizations; and lobbied key congressmen on its behalf. Thanks in large measure to Stratton’s efforts, on 3 March 1901 Congress passed a bill establishing the National Bureau of Standards. A week later President McKinley appointed Stratton its first director.

Over the next two decades Stratton built the bureau into one of the world’s premier laboratories in the physical sciences. Starting with a staff of fourteen and an annual budget of only $32,140 (when the PTR, by contrast, had an annual appropriation of $80,000 and the NPL $62,100), Stratton had by 1921 increased his staff to 850 and his budget to $2,209,089 while maintaining a consistently high level of scientific research on subjects ranging from basic metrology to electricity, radio, optics, and materials. He recruited top graduates from leading universities and helped some complete their doctorates under a unique cooperative education plan. Just a decade after the bureau’s founding, Joseph S. Ames, head of the physics department at the Johns Hopkins University, wrote: “There is not a college or university in the United States that can give a student as much apparatus for experimental work and as much help in the theoretical field of the physical sciences as he can obtain at the Bureau of Standards.” By the time Stratton left the bureau in 1923, it was perhaps the strongest department of physics in the country, boasting twenty-three physicists who had earned stars of distinction in American Men of Science.

Stratton always envisioned a greater role for the bureau than basic metrology. Exploiting the open-endedness of his legislative charter—“the solution of problems which arise in connection with standards”—he extended the bureau’s mission well beyond the boundaries of physical constants and scientific measurement. In keeping with the commercial spirit of the bureau’s founding, Stratton forged important new links between federal science and private industry. He made industrial research a significant portion of the bureau’s work; formed a “research associates” program that brought corporate researchers into bureau laboratories, at company expense, to learn state-of-the-art science and engineering; and generally put science to work for industry much as the Department of Agriculture had put it to work for farming. Recognizing as well the bureau’s obligations to the public interest, Stratton launched a “consumers’ crusade” for fair and accurate weights and measures in the marketplace, published consumer product testing bulletins, and to make sure that the government got what it was paying for initiated a large-scale testing program covering everything from scientific instruments and light bulbs to concrete and the cable for the elevator in the Washington Monument.

Despite a somewhat aloof and formal manner, Stratton was long remembered by his staff for his close personal attention. Perhaps because he never married, he treated his “boys,” as he called them, like family. He kept in touch with their research by means of daily walks through the laboratories and threw elaborate holiday parties. While he proved better at selling bureau programs to Congress than he had ever been at doing research himself, Stratton never gave up laboratory work entirely and always kept a small shop adjoining his office just for tinkering.

In 1923, at the age of sixty-one, Stratton left the bureau for the presidency of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spent much of his seven-year tenure there refashioning MIT on the model of the National Bureau of Standards. With new programs in aeronautical and automotive engineering, building construction, and fuel studies, Stratton reemphasized MIT’s commitment to cooperative research with industry. At the same time he recognized, perhaps more clearly than his predecessors, the dangers of too much reliance on applied research and corporate patronage. He tightened up MIT’s freewheeling policies on sponsored research, strengthened its basic science departments, and looked to private foundations to supplement industrial funding. Although Stratton was more successful in augmenting MIT’s traditional strengths in engineering than in creating new ones in the sciences, his programs did set the stage for its dramatic transformation in the 1930’s under his successor, Karl Compton, from a respected technical school into a national center for science and engineering research and education. Stratton stepped down from the presidency in July 1930 to become the first chairman of the MIT Corporation.

Stratton remained active until his death, traveling, lecturing, and serving on government commissions, including the Sacco and Vanzetti trial review board. He received half a dozen honorary degrees and many awards, including a commendation from the National Academy of Sciences for eminence in application of science to the public welfare.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Stratton wrote very little. A complete list of his dozen or so publications, including transcripts of several speeches, is in A. E. Kennelly, “Samuel Wesley Stratton,” in Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences, 17 (1937), 253–260. In addition he wrote A College Course of Laboratory Experiments in General Physics (Chicago, 1898) with Robert A. Millikan. Stratton’s papers from his days as director of the National Bureau of Standards are held by the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The Institute Archives and Special Collections at MIT also has substantial Stratton holdings, including material gathered by one of Stratton’s close friends for a biography that was never completed.

II. Secondary Literature. Rexmond C. Cochrane, Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards (Washington, D.C., 1966; repr. New York, 1976), gives a detailed account of Stratton’s career with the bureau and includes a short biography in an appendix. Samuel C. Prescott, an associate of Stratton’s at MIT, published a brief appreciation in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 69 (February 1935), 544–547. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), places Stratton’s bureau career in context; and John Servos, “The Industrial Relations of Science: Chemical Engineering at MIT, 1900–1939,” in Isis, 71 (1980), 531–549, does the same for Stratton’s MIT years.

Stuart W. Leslie