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Management Resources

News and Updates

Displaying 1 - 25 of 38
fraudulent five-gallon measure

Deception, Trickery, and Metrology

While exploring a box of early 20th century index cards in the NIST archives, I stumbled upon two that starkly illustrated one of NIST's missions – legal...
McKee-Beshers

Field of Dreams

A field off River Road, about 10 miles from NIST Gaithersburg campus, once held the world’s largest radio telescope and was the site of the discovery of...
The images in the Camera for Photographing Eclipse Photographic Collection are in the public domain and are not subject to copyright in the United States. However, please pay special attention to the individual works to make sure there are no copyright re

Solar Eclipse 1936

NIST physicist Irvine C. Gardner designed a 4-meter long eclipse camera with a 23-centimeter astrographic lens to study a total solar eclipse in 1936. The data...
Black and white photo of NIST’s first librarian, Dr. Aristide Fanti

QA to QC Thanks to Dr. Fanti

If you have ever discovered a useful library book in the QA to QC shelf number range (Mathematics, Astronomy, and Physics), you have NIST’s Aristide Fanti to...
Merritt Birky in white shirt and tie leaning over and measuring laser rod distortion

Cool It, Hot Rod: Improving Early Lasers

In the first decade after the invention of the laser one challenge to improving laser quality was the distortion of a laser’s rod due to absorption of heat...
Ralph Orwick bending over a tungsten electrode welder

Welding for Ultrahigh Vacuum

April is National Welding Month, a time dedicated to highlighting accomplishments in this important field. At NIST in the 1960s, Ralph Orwick of the NIST...
NIST physicists Irwin Priest and Chauncey Peters, 1918

NIST Neutral as Butter War Spreads

In 1917, NIST physicists Irwin Priest and Chauncey Peters were drawn into the so-called Butter War, an early 20 th century commercial and political spat between...
An image of Ernest Kent from NIST’s Industrial Systems Division is analyzed by the Pipelined Image Processing Engine (PIPE) in 1986.

Computer Vision 1986

An image of Ernest Kent from NIST’s Industrial Systems Division is analyzed by the Pipelined Image Processing Engine (PIPE) in 1986. PIPE was an image...
Harry Keegan seated at mechanical calculator CIE color coordinates of standard sources, 1958

Calculating Color

Harry Keegan of NIST’s Photometry & Colorimetry Division using a mechanical calculator in 1958 to compute color coordinates for standard sources.
A 300,000-volt simulated lightning bolt produced in NIST’s high-voltage measurement laboratory in 1984.

Lightning in the Lab

A 300,000-volt simulated lightning bolt produced in NIST’s high-voltage measurement laboratory in 1984. NIST helped utilities and manufacturers determine what...
Testing Stucco Panels at NIST

NIST Tests Home Construction

A giant Rubik’s Cube? An early modernist-style building? We weren’t sure what to make of this photo taken on the NIST campus in 1911. Turns out it was a two...
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