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Show NOTES FROM WASHINGTON The bureau of Reclaimation's great experimental laboratories at Denver, Colorado have gone to war, Secretary of the Interior said this week m commenting on a report from Commissioner John C. Page. Key war agencies, hesaid. already al-ready have been helped in the solution sol-ution of cruiccal problems by the specialists who planned the construction con-struction of the world's greatest concrete dams, most powerful hydroelectric hy-droelectric plan ts, and biggest canals. He listed the War and Navy Departments, the War Production Pro-duction Board, National Research Council, Maritime Commission, Panama Canal, Public Roads Adminstration, and the Tennesses Valley Authority, as among the numerous war agencies which have asked the bureau's technicians to advise them or to solve special spec-ial problems. The famous laboratories which have solved engineering problems that were widely regarded as insoluble in-soluble (those involved in the building the Grand Coulee and the Bureau's other great dams, for example) are staffed with master scientists and technicians enlisted enlist-ed from all parts of the world, including graduates from over a hundred leading American universities univer-sities and technical colleges and from many foreign countries and institutions. Among them are specialists in all types of engineering engineer-ing civil, electrical, mechanical, hydraulic; research, equipment, materials, construction and testing engineers; architects, geologists chemists economists, mathematicians, mathematic-ians, photographers, physicists, microscopists, and hydographers. They are assisted by a large staff of specialists mechanics and laboratory lab-oratory technicians. A number of pioneer engineering engineer-ing developments were required when Congress called on Reclamation Reclam-ation engineers to build Boulder Dam. Past experience and current engineering theory and practice were inadequate. To solve one of many unprecedented problems, research engineers, mathematicians, mathematic-ians, chemists and physicists pooled pool-ed their knowledge and skill to develop a new cement and means for using it in massive blocks of concrete which were cooled by refrigeration re-frigeration pipe embeded in the dam. Without such innovations the chemically heated concrete would have required hundreds of years to cool, with gradual shrinking shrink-ing of the mass. |