Mr. Umstead’s full report appeared in 1903, in the third volume of bulletins published by the American Society for Testing Materials. This Society, whose secretary is Professor Edgar Marburg of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, is affiliated with the International Association for Testing Materials, one of the most important agencies in existence for providing the engineer with trustworthy data.
Industrial Uses of Measurement.
Measurement industrially is taking on a new and rapidly extending scope. It is of great moment that a railroad or a steamship, a factory or a mill, should be built of the best materials in the most economical way, that it should be equipped with the most efficient boilers, engines, machines, and lamps: in effect, that every dollar be expended for the utmost possible value.
At Altoona the Pennsylvania Railroad Company has a laboratory for testing the materials which go into its roadbed, bridges, tracks, rolling stock, buildings, telegraph, and signal systems. Every gallon of oil, each incandescent lamp, car axle, or boiler plate accepted by the Company must pass a due test in a continuous series of competitive examinations. The huge scale of such a Company’s purchases, the strains placed upon its equipment by a service growing in extent and in speed, make this course indispensable. Take another case, this time in New York, at the power-house of the Interborough Company in West 59th Street. There every day a fair sample of the coal brought to the dock is burned, and its heat-units ascertained as a basis for payment. With a consumption which may rise to 1500 tons a day this precaution is obligatory.[30]
[30] The United States Geological Survey, Washington, D. C., in 1906 published a report on the coal testing plant at the Exposition, St. Louis, Mo., 1904. Part I, Field work, classification of coals, chemical work. Part II, Boiler tests. Part III, Producer-gas, coking, briquetting, and washing tests. This report, with elaborate tables and many illustrations, is of great value.
The Pennsylvania R. R. Co., Philadelphia, in 1905 published a large and handsomely illustrated volume, “Locomotive tests and exhibits, St. Louis, 1904.” $5.00. The locomotives represented the best American practice of 1904. Every detail of construction and operation is given in the most instructive manner.
The Company is continuing these tests of locomotives at Altoona, Pa.
On quite other lines, equally important, the ascertainment of values proceeds at laboratories thoroughly organized for the purpose by staffs at the service of the public. In the United States the first in rank of such laboratories are grouped at the Bureau of Standards in Washington. At leading universities and technological institutes throughout the Union are other laboratories well equipped for chemical, physical, and engineering tests. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, for example, is an Emery testing apparatus for making compression tests of specimens up to eighteen feet in length, for tension specimens up to thirteen feet. In Europe analogous institutions are supplemented by the Board of Trade Laboratories in London, the Laboratoire Central in Paris, the Reichsanstalt in Berlin. The Electrical Testing Laboratories, a joint-stock concern, has been established in New York, at Eightieth Street and East End Avenue, for similar tasks in so far as they come within the electrical field. Its direction in ability and character is authoritative. Here is some of the best apparatus in the world for tests of the permeability of magnet iron, of the light from incandescent, arc, or other electric lamps, of gas-burners and mantles, of the extent to which reflectors and globes fulfil their purpose, and so on.