Keith Martin

A person performs chest compressions on a CPR practice mannequin.

Shocking History: How a NIST Engineer Helped Create Lifesaving CPR

June 4, 2025

An electrical engineer who worked at NIST helped create the technique we know today as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.

A grid of 12 obviously old photos individuals' face from their shoulder up. In each photo is a four-digit code for that person

The Pandemic Poet and Other Tales From a NIST ‘Genealogy’ Project

May 19, 2021

One of my work-from-home projects was getting to know the staff of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, then called the National Bureau of

The Curiously Colorful Wall of NIST's Radiation Physics Building

July 9, 2019

In what is currently a large construction zone in the center of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Gaithersburg, Maryland, campus, the

The Big Inch: Fueling America’s WWII War Effort

March 26, 2018

If you drive north from NIST’s Gaithersburg, Maryland, campus, you will soon reach the famed Mason-Dixon Line marking the border between the states of Maryland

Pirates of the Caribbean (Metric Edition)

September 19, 2017

To save his own life, Joseph Dombey had an idea. As two pirate ships surrounded the ship he was on in the Caribbean Sea in 1794, Dombey scrambled below deck

The Saga of the Bird-Brained Bombers

August 29, 2017

During World War II, NIST was among those working intensely to develop guided weapons to help the Allies win the war. But before the advent of satellites and

Grote Reber's Sterling, Virginia, radio telescope installation

Grote Reber, Radio Astronomer

April 18, 2017

Dulles International Airport, in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., sits on land once owned by NIST. It was on this spot that NIST brought

Hugh Dryden Had a Plan to Get a Man out of a Can

November 21, 2016

November is National Aviation History Month. So it’s fitting that it was also in November, of 1910, that a 12-year-old boy in Baltimore, Maryland, named Hugh