In addition to the Division of Simplified Practice and the independent Bureau of Efficiency, there was organized within the Department of Commerce, under the guidance of Commerce Secretary Hoover, a Bureau of Standards. Originally created to test materials used by the government, the Bureau of Standards was assigned to help business solve its most difficult scientific problems with regard to standardizing the quality (and other characteristics) of products marketed to the consumer. The Bureau promoted standardization of parts and practices within specific industries, with the goal of eliminating waste in time, labor, material, and money. (INTRO NOTE Herbert Hoover) At the end of the decade, the Bureau housed the largest research laboratory in the world.
The Consumer Movement: Lectures by Colston E. Warne (1993) posits that the government push throughout the 1920s toward standardization of equipment and processes in industry, offices, and homes actually helped foster the rise of the watchdog-consumer-testing movement. In the Anna Kelton Wiley Papers file
This standardization of the nation's commercial life -- which was central to the ability of industry to keep pace with the ever-increasing demand for products to satisfy the consumer economy -- had its mirror image in a standardization and proliferation of government forms and procedures, illustrated, probably with unintentional humor, in some of the items in the Coolidge Papers case file