Sherwood Boehlert: “I wish today to support H. Con. Res. 27, a resolution honoring the National Institute of Standards and Technology and…”

“I wish today to support H. Con. Res. 27, a resolution honoring the National Institute of Standards and Technology and its valuable employees for 100 years of service to our country. A century ago, our predecessors here in Congress recognized the importance of creating an institution with a mission to work closely with private industry to help further our nation's technological progress and strengthen its economic performance. So strongly did our colleagues feel about the important role in our economy that this new entity could play, the Committee on Coinage, Weights and Measures that recommended its creation at that time wrote: No more essential aid could be given to manufacturing, commerce, the makers of scientific apparatus, the scientific work of the government, of schools, colleges, and universities than by the establishment of the institution proposed in this bill. And thus the National Bureau of Standards, which we now know as the National Institute for Standards and Technology, was created. And over the past 100 years, Mr. Speaker, NIST and its employees have not let us down. Literally, it is all but impossible to name a major innovation that has improved our quality of life with which NIST has not had some involvement.”