The Academy's Early Work for the Government

Shortly after the 22 April 1863 meeting at which the National Academy of Sciences was organized, the institution received its first request for advice. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, requested a study on the "uniformity of weights, measures, and coins, considered in relation to domestic and international commerce." Accordingly, the NAS set up a Committee on Weights, Measures, and Coinage to undertake the study. After holding several meetings of its members in Philadelphia, Cambridge, and Washington, the committee submitted its report to Secretary Chase on 7 January 1864. It recommended a thorough survey of other countries' systems of money and measures, and requested that its work be extended to encompass such a survey. Interestingly, the committee over the course of its discussions came to feel that the United States should adopt the metric system of weights and measures.

The Committee on Weights, Measures, and Coinage was exemplary of subsequent NAS activities on a number of counts. First, in undertaking to carry out a survey of a current problem, it established a working method that would provide a model for most of the institution's study bodies. Secondly, it offered its conclusions and recommendations in the form of a report transmitted to the requesting agency. And lastly, its having taken the form of a topic-specific committee not only conformed to a recommendation made by NAS President Bache in the institution's first Annual Report to the United States Congress, but set an organizational precedent that would be followed by the majority of study units of the NAS as well as its subsequently founded operational arm, the NRC.

Although the Academy was founded in time of civil war, its first study was not related to the war effort. But requests for advice on matters related to the war were soon to come. Very shortly after the Committee on Weights, Measures, and Coinage was brought into being, the Navy Department requested no less than three studies, two of which were addressed to subjects directly related to the capabilities of the Union fleet, and one of which concerned wind and current charts used for commercial navigation. On May 8, Admiral Charles H. Davis, a Navy officer and charter member of the Academy, called upon the Academy to consider ways for the Navy to protect the bottoms of its new iron-hulled ships from corrosion and other damage induced by salt water. A Committee on Protecting the Bottoms of Iron Vessels was duly appointed and given the task of advising a Navy commission, in existence since March 1863, on possible solutions to the problem. In January of the following year the committee issued a brief report in which it could recommend no decisive solution, but called instead for further investigation pending Congressional appropriations. These latter were not forthcoming, and the committee's work ended inconclusively.

The committee ultimately failed to devise an effective means for protecting the bottoms of iron ships, but the fault appears to have rested not with the committee itself, but instead with the limitations of the technologies available at the time. As late as fifty years after the committee's work came to an end, the Navy Department was still investigating various types of ship's paints in order to come up with the most protective composition.

On the same date that he requested the Academy to undertake its investigation into the protection of the bottoms of Union ironclads, Admiral Davis requested that the Academy "investigate and report on the subject of magnetic deviation in iron ships." In response, the Academy's Committee on Magnetic Deviation in Iron Ships, commonly known as the "Compass Committee," was formed. At the time of Admiral Davis's request, the Union Navy was rapidly adding iron-built ships to its inventory. Most of these were iron-clads -- wooden-hulled ships plated with iron above the waterline -- but some had hulls of iron construction or decks protected with iron plates. The large amounts of iron in these ships caused onboard compasses to deviate, thus making navigation an inexact and potentially dangerous affair. The Compass Committee was thus charged with recommending ways to correct this deviation. In January 1864 the committee issued a substantial, 73-page report in which it recommended the use of appropriately placed bar magnets to counteract local attractions acting on ship compasses. Following on its recommendations, the committee itself from March through September 1864 oversaw the correction of compasses on twenty-seven Union ships.

The Compass Committee was notable not only for having brought its study to a successful conclusion, but for having set the precedent of issuing a substantial printed report. This is a precedent to which the majority of the institution's study groups continue to conform.

The Federal government, through Congress and various agencies and departments, continued to request Academy studies on a number of subjects through the end of the Civil War and afterward.

In 1867, the Academy was asked by the War Department to advise on the longevity of the metal headstones proposed for use on soldiers' graves. The Academy, which to a large extent had been the creation of the Civil War, now was concerned with preserving monuments to the enormous human cost of a war it had helped to win.

NAS Committees Advisory to the Government, 1863-1913

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