ABSTRACT
In 1906 the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) started to issue samples of materials for standardizing analytical techniques and methods. This chapter describes the NBS's The Role of Standard Reference Materials in Measurement Systems, 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. NBS Monograph 148, The Role of Standard Reference Materials in Measurement Systems, provides SRM users with a systems approach to meaningful measurements through which SRMs can be used to produce measurement results that are precise and whose systematic errors are either eliminated or well understood. The authors of Monograph 148 recognized the need to articulate the role of SRMs in the US measurement system, to explain how SRMs are certified, and to clarify what a NIST certification means in both a legal and technical sense.
