The Bureau of Standards tested everything (Patreon)

If you've ever done any research into the National Institute of Standards and Technology, you'll know that it's a bit of a playground for setting crucial but often overlooked standards for...well...almost everything. They're pretty famous for being the place that tells you how much the things you weigh with weigh.

The duties of places like NIST are shared with a range of public and private labs that test unusual things (I'm particularly enamored with the large shake tables that help scientists test stability by shaking things really hard).

But in my research for this upcoming video on why batteries are letters, I've taken a deep detour into NIST's predecessor, the Bureau of Standards, which seemed to combine all those functions in one rich and deeply quirky bureaucracy. Started in the 1900s, it endured for quite a while before transforming into NIST (with a somewhat diminished mission).

Setting standards like NIST, but exerting more power to regulate how products actually worked, the Bureau of Standards was like a Willy Wonka factory if Willy Wonka turned away from sugar and became obsessed with testing carpet tread (that's actually the machine pictured above. No word on if Augustus Gloop survived it.). The Bureau was responsible for standardizing a lot of the chaos of a newly corporatized mass-market America in ways that, to my modern eye, seem surprisingly aggressive. One anecdotal example I found said that BS helped reduce the number of milk bottle designs to improve efficiency. Great! But today that would almost certainly be negotiated by distributors, grocers, and other interested parties, not a government agency.

Putting aside the politics of it all, wherever you might sit, there's something delightfully quirky about a building dedicated to testing things. The cliche of saying it's like "a Wes Anderson movie" is totally fitting here. It's an attempt to bring organization to the chaos of a country in boom times, and that's pretty on brand for some nice symmetrical shots and a few quirky characters.