[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 105 (Wednesday, September 8, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1539-E1540]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 ON THE OCCASION OF THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF NIST'S BOULDER LABORATORIES

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. MARK UDALL

                              of colorado

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, September 7, 2004

  Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, a week from today, the Boulder 
laboratories of the National Institute of Standards and Technology will 
celebrate their 50th anniversary. I rise today to honor NIST and its 
employees on this important occasion.
  It wasn't long ago that we celebrated the centennial of NIST's 
founding, which Congress marked with the passage of a resolution that 
Representative Morella and I sponsored.
  The National Institute of Standards and Technology was chartered by 
Congress on March 3, 1901 as the federal government's first physical 
science research laboratory. Scientists, engineers, and industrialists 
first advocated the establishment of a standards laboratory, pointing 
to the new challenges facing the U.S. as a rapidly industrializing 
world power.
  Today, I'd like to draw attention to the work of NIST's laboratories 
in Boulder, Colorado, in my district.
  In 1950, to address the lack of laboratory space, NIST established a 
cryogenic engineering laboratory and radio facilities on land donated 
by citizens of Boulder. NIST's Boulder facilities were expanded in the 
mid 1960s, when NIST and the University of Colorado (CU) joined forces 
to create the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), a 
cooperative effort that has gained widespread recognition in atomic 
physics and other fields.
  The partnership between NIST and CU has led to some amazing 
discoveries. Beginning in the 1970s, the discipline of cooling and 
trapping atoms was established in part by experiments with electrically 
charged atoms by researchers at NIST's Boulder campus. This work 
inspired Dr. William Phillips and his team to demonstrate both the 
trapping and the cooling of atoms well below the temperature limits 
generally believed possible. Dr. Phillips was awarded the Nobel Prize 
in Physics in 1997 for this work.
  In 1995, using these same techniques of laser cooling and trapping of 
atoms, scientists at JILA--NIST's Eric Cornell and CU's Carl Wieman--
cooled rubidium atoms to less than 1 millionth of a degree above 
absolute zero. This was 300 times lower in temperature than ever 
achieved before and created a new state of matter predicted decades ago 
by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. The Bose-
Einstein condensate is widely hailed as one of the century's major 
achievements in physics, and has been honored with several 
internationally prestigious awards.
  All of this research has enabled the design and construction of one 
of the world's most accurate clocks, NIST F-1, which is used by NIST 
(in cooperation with the Naval Observatory) to maintain the nation's 
time standard. The NIST-F1 is so accurate that it will neither gain nor 
lose a second in 20 million years! It is approximately three times more 
accurate than NIST-7, the previous time piece for the nation. This 
precise time information is needed by such users as electric power 
companies, radio and television stations, telephone companies, air 
traffic control systems, the Global Positioning System, participants in 
space exploration, the Internet, and navigators of ships and planes--
all of whom need to compare their own timing equipment to a reliable, 
internationally recognized standard, which NIST provides.
  I'd also like to mention an interesting tale of ``technology 
transfer'' that has resulted from the time and frequency research in 
NIST's Boulder laboratories.
  In the early 1970s, NIST developed a time distribution system that 
placed a hidden time code on an unused part of the TV signal. While the 
system was not implemented, this technology provided the basis for 
closed captioning. In the following years, several networks, working 
with NIST, took up the project and developed convenient encoding 
equipment and improvements to the captioning format. Then in 1980, 
NIST, the American Broadcasting Company, and the Public Broadcasting 
System received Emmys from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences 
for this development. Today the Emmy is proudly displayed at

[[Page E1540]]

NIST's Boulder laboratories and is a wonderful example of federal 
research that led to significant commercial spin-offs.
  These are just some of the contributions NIST's Boulder laboratories 
have made to the nation in the half-century of their existence. NIST is 
poised to contribute to even greater advances in the 21st century. I 
will continue to call attention to the Boulder labs' contributions and 
the necessity of upgrading the facilities so that the Boulder 
scientists can continue to produce top-flight research.
  As the attached article from the Daily Camera notes, Washington 
scientists who were reassigned to the new Boulder labs in 1954 weren't 
happy about moving to what they thought was a ``scientific Siberia.'' 
It's remarkable what a difference fifty years can make. It turns out 
that NIST's arrival triggered a ``scientific renaissance'' that made 
Boulder the scientific hub it is today.
  I am proud to represent the scientific hub of Boulder and all the 
talented and dedicated scientists and employees who work at NIST, which 
has rightly been called a ``crown jewel of the U.S. government.'' I 
would like to express my congratulations again to NIST's Boulder labs 
for reaching this important half-century mark.

                 [From the Daily Camera, Aug. 29, 2004]

                               NIST at 50


           federal labs helped turn boulder into tech center

                             (By Todd Neff)

       Half a century ago this Sept. 14, President Dwight D. 
     Eisenhower stepped before a new $4 million structure south of 
     Boulder and dedicated the U.S. Department of Commerce's 
     Boulder Laboratories. It was a landmark day for the city, 
     then with a population of 20,000, and not just because it was 
     the first visit to Boulder by a sitting president. The 10,000 
     people who braved the beating sun that Monday could not have 
     known the Boulder labs would, over the course of the next 50 
     years, bring billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the 
     area. Nor could those present have imagined the role the labs 
     would play in turning Boulder into a technology center.
       The lab's arrival in Boulder was a combination of good 
     fortune and determined effort. Some of the good fortune was 
     President Harry Truman's 1949 secret order to stop clustering 
     major buildings in Washington, D.C., because of the threat of 
     nuclear attack. Yet the National Bureau of Standards' Central 
     Radio Propagation Laboratory needed room to grow. That 
     laboratory, like other NBS labs, had a basic mission that 
     hasn't changed: Establish the standards that form the basis 
     of technological development. Without standards, radio 
     stations would broadcast on one another's turf, manufacturers 
     would have no means of assessing the quality of materials 
     such as steel, and time synchronization critical to 
     communications, navigation and information technology 
     wouldn't be possible.
       As a Daily Camera editorial on Sept. 10, 1954, put it ``Of 
     all the agencies of the government, the NBS is perhaps the 
     greatest money-saving organization we have. Its huge cost of 
     maintenance is offset many times by what it saves the 
     government, business and the people in money, time and 
     safety.'' With the Washington, D.C., area out of the 
     question, NBS sought a small-town location with little radio 
     noise, a university and a nearby transportation hub. Boulder, 
     Charlottesville, Va., and Palo Alto, Calif., were the main 
     contenders. Some of the key effort came from the Boulder 
     Chamber of Commerce, led by Francis W. Reich. The chamber led 
     a 1950 cash drive that raised $90,000--about $700,000 in 
     today's dollars--in two weeks. They used $63,000 to buy 217 
     acres of pasture to donate to the federal government. Most of 
     the rest bought the land east of Boulder that's now home to 
     Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. The local money tipped 
     the scales. Crews broke ground at the Boulder Labs in July 
     1952, finishing work in the spring of 1954.
       It turned out to be a good investment. A 2002 University of 
     Colorado study projected that the labs would bring $2 billion 
     in economic benefit to the state between 2001 and 2005--and 
     $340 million to the city of Boulder alone. About 450 
     scientists and support staff--some from Washington, other 
     from local NBS field offices--had moved in by the time 
     Eisenhower rode up the Boulder Turnpike from his summer White 
     House at Denver's Lowry Air Force Base. Yet those scientists 
     weren't the first at the site. The Atomic Energy Commission, 
     in a rush to build hydrogen bombs after the Soviet Union's 
     successful nuclear tests, wanted a remote location to produce 
     liquid hydrogen for its Los Alamos labs. It tapped NBS's 
     Washington, D.C.-based Heat and Power Division to build a 
     plant to produce liquid hydrogen. The plant began churning 
     out the super-cold liquid in 1952 that would go into the 
     world's first hydrogen bomb. When a nuclear scientists 
     decided atomic bombs didn't need mass volumes of liquid 
     hydrogen, the operation became the NBS's Cryogenic 
     Engineering Laboratory in Boulder.
       By the Boulder NBS' 10-year anniversary in 1964, it 
     employed 1,400 people in two major laboratories. One was the 
     original Central Radio Propagation Laboratory, which tested 
     radio-wave behavior and developed standards associated with 
     all sorts of radio transmission and propagation, including 
     weather radar. The second was the Cryogenics Engineering 
     Laboratory.
       The names have all changed, often in mind-bending ways. For 
     example, NBS' Central Radio Propagation Laboratory moved to 
     the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1965, then became the 
     Environmental Science Services Administration and, in 1970, 
     the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, 
     as it's known today. The same 1965 move created the Institute 
     for Telecommunication Sciences, which did radio-spectrum 
     work. Today, the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences 
     labs make up the whole of the National Telecommunications and 
     Information Administration's presence in Boulder. The 
     Cyrogenics Engineering Laboratory and a host of additions 
     remained with the NBS until 1988, when NBS became the 
     National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST.
       Then there were the two NIST joint laboratories with the 
     University of Colorado at Boulder. The Joint Institute for 
     Laboratory Astrophysics, or JILA was created in 1962. Its 
     researchers work in everything from astrophysics to atomic 
     physics. It was two JILA scientists, Eric Cornell of NIST and 
     Carl Wieman of CU, who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics 
     for their discovery of Bose-Einstein condensate, a new form 
     of matter. The CU-NIST Cooperative Institute for Research in 
     Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, was created in 1967 and 
     focuses on atmospheric physics. NIST, NOAA and the smaller 
     NTIA make up today's Boulder labs. Combined, they employ 
     about 1,800 including full-time government researchers, 
     visiting researchers and students. About 750 are associated 
     with NIST, 1,000 with NOAA and 75 with NTIA. Research has 
     evolved even faster than names.
       Bob Kamper, 71 a physicist who started at the labs in 1963 
     and rose to serve as NIST's director in Boulder from 1982 
     until his retirement in 1994, described how work evolved in 
     the Cryogenics Division, where he started.
       First it was about liquid hydrogen for the U.S. nuclear-
     weapons program. But by the 1960s, superconductivity--in 
     which certain materials have zero electrical resistance at 
     extremely low temperatures--was a major research interest. 
     Expertise in super-cold temperatures also led to work in 
     metallurgy (metals become brittle when temperatures plummet), 
     work that eventually became part of today's NIST Materials 
     Reliability Division. Among its efforts, that division is 
     investigating the causes of the World Trade Center collapse 
     after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Efforts to 
     establish the behavior of fluids at ultra-low temperatures 
     became part of the NIST Physical and Chemical Properties 
     Division. Kamper said that division played an important role 
     in figuring out characteristics for new refrigerants in the 
     wake of chlorofluorocarbon bans, for example.
       Superconductivity-bred expertise in magnetics led to more 
     advanced superconductor work as well as broad research in 
     computer-storage devices. NIST's $93 million 2004 budget 
     includes $29 million from outside sources, such as other 
     government agencies and technology companies. ``You very much 
     worked on what people would pay for, which is why I would say 
     there is very little dead wood,'' Kamper said. He said he 
     doesn't think the research ethos has changed. ``We were 
     pretty enthusiastic way back when, and talking to the 
     youngsters now, I think they still are,'' Kamper said. 
     ``They're very much absorbed in their work.''
       John Richardson, 82, arrived in Boulder in 1952 to work in 
     microwave physics. He moved into the new labs when they 
     opened in 1954. Richardson said NBS's arrival in Boulder 
     triggered a ``scientific renaissance,'' strengthening the 
     University of Colorado, luring the National Center for 
     Atmospheric Research to the city and fueling technology 
     companies such as IBM and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
       Many Washington scientists reassigned to Boulder in the 
     early 1950s were ``very anxious about it, because they viewed 
     Boulder as a scientific Siberia,'' Richardson said. Half the 
     staff left rather than come to Boulder, said Alan Shapley, 
     85. Shapley came to Boulder on an NBS scouting mission in the 
     late 1940s and worked at what became NOAA until his 
     retirement in 1983. ``There were very few who had ever heard 
     of Boulder,'' Shapley said. But that changed quickly. 
     Richardson said he and other Boulder labs researchers taught 
     as adjunct professors at CU. The NBS presence attracted major 
     scientific conferences to Boulder, as well, he said. 
     ``Visitors came, saw the climate, saw the quality of life, 
     and I have no doubt that many were persuaded to locate here, 
     either individually or in business,'' he said. He calls NIST 
     a ``crown jewel of the U.S. government.'' ``All our 
     measurements and all our scientific progress ultimately can 
     be traced back to NIST,'' Richardson said. ``If there were no 
     NIST, it would have to be invented.''

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