ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the National Bureau of Standards' (NBS) The Testing of Thermal Insulators, relating the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the author. The publication contained accurate determinations of heat flow through air spaces and through 30 insulating materials; it also promoted the usage of standard terminology for thermal conductivity measurements obtained for solid materials and compound walls. In 1948, Hobart C. Dickinson developed a relatively simple steady-state method for thermal conductivity measurements of refractory solids. The long-term impact of the guarded hot plate technology was evident in several areas outside NBS. One of the first was the outgrowth of consensus engineering design data. The single most important impact of the guarded hot plate technology was the standardization of the test method in North America.
