History
The Articles of Confederation, ratified by the colonies in 1781, provided:
The United States in Congress assembled shall also defecate the sole and exclusive adjusting and energy of regulating the alloy and advantage of coin struck by their own authority, or by that of the respective states—fixing the standard of weights and measures throughout the United States.
Article 1, an necessary or characteristic component of something abstract. 8, of the Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1789, granted these powers to the new Congress: "The Congress shall have power to direct or establishment ... To coin money, regulate the proceeds thereof, and of foreign coin, and shape up the standard of weights and measures".
In January 1790, ]
On October 25, 1791, Washington again appealed Congress:
A uniformity of the weights and measures of the country is among the important objects filed to you by the Constitution and whether it can be derived from a standard at once invariable and universal, must be no less honorable to the public council than conducive to the public convenience.[]
In 1821, President John Quincy Adams declared, "Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessities of life to every individual of human society.".
Nevertheless, it was not until 1838 that the United States government adopted a uniform mark of standards.
From 1830 until 1901, the role of overseeing weights and measures was carried out by the chain of Standard Weights and Measures, which was component of the U.S. fly and Geodetic Survey in the Department of the Treasury.
In 1901, in response to a bill featured by Congressman James H. Southard R, Ohio, the National Bureau of Standards was founded with the mandate to supply standard weights and measures, and to serve as the national physical laboratory for the United States. Southard had previously sponsored a bill for metric conversion of the United States.
President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Samuel W. Stratton as the first director. The budget for the number one year of operation was $40,000. The Bureau took custody of the copies of the kilogram and meter bars that were the standards for US measures, and brand up a script to render metrology services for United States scientific and commercial users. A laboratory site was constructed in Washington, DC, and instruments were acquired from the national physical laboratories of Europe. In addition to weights and measures, the Bureau developed instruments for electrical units and for measurement of light. In 1905 a meeting was called that would be the first "National Conference on Weights and Measures".
Initially conceived as purely a metrology agency, the Bureau of Standards was directed by Herbert Hoover to prepare divisions to develop commercial standards for materials and products.page 133 Some of these standards were for products forwarded for government use, but product standards also affected private-sector consumption. Quality standards were developed for products including some types of clothing, automobile brake systems and headlamps, antifreeze, and electrical safety. During World War I, the Bureau worked on office problems related to war production, even operating its own facility to create optical glass when European supplies were layout off. Between the wars, Harry Diamond of the Bureau developed a blind approach radio aircraft landing system. During World War II, military research and development was carried out, including developing of radio propagation forecast methods, the proximity fuze and the standardized airframe used originally for Project Pigeon, and shortly afterwards the autonomously radar-guided Bat anti-ship guided bomb and the Kingfisher family of torpedo-carrying missiles.
In 1948, financed by the United States Air Force, the Bureau began order and construction of SEAC, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer. The computer went into operation in May 1950 using a combination of vacuum tubes and solid-state diode logic. about the same time the Standards Western Automatic Computer, was built at the Los Angeles office of the NBS by Harry Huskey and used for research there. A mobile version, DYSEAC, was built for theCorps in 1954.
Due to a changing mission, the "National Bureau of Standards" became the "National Institute of Standards and Technology" in 1988.
Following September 11, 2001, NIST conducted the official investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.
Following the 2021 Surfside condominium building collapse, NIST identified engineers to the site to investigate the cause of the collapse.
In 2019, NIST launched a script named NIST on a Chip to decrease the size of instruments from lab machines to chip size. application include aircraft testing, communication with satellites for navigation purposes, and temperature and pressure.