Frederick John Bates
Born in Marysville, Kansas, January 2, 1877. Mr. Bates received a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Kansas in 1900 and a Masters Degree in Optics from the University of Nebraska in 1902. In 1903, Mr. Bates joined the National Bureau of Standards (NBS, now called the National Institute of Standards and Technology). Mr. Bates retired in 1947 after 43 years of active work. He died in 1958, in Washington, DC. Additional information on Frederick Bates is available in the subsequent article.
Mr. Bates started work at NBS as a laboratory assistant in the Light and Optical Instruments Section. Two years later, as chief of the newly created Polarimetry Section of the NBS Optics Division, he was seeking a solution to a long-standing problem at the Customs Service of the Treasury Department: the discrepant results its laboratories had been obtaining by saccharimetry, the method they used to determine the sucrose content of imported sugar--at any stage of refinement--for assessing duties on it. Saccharimetry quantifies sucrose from the degree to which test samples, measured under standardized conditions, cause plane polarized light to rotate. Bates' solution to the problem was his design for a perfected saccharimeter; a saccharimeter is a specialized type of polarimeter. NBS had the saccharimeter built by the firm of J & J Fric in Prague, Czechoslovakia. When the new saccharimeter was found capable of routinely providing far more precise measurements than previously obtainable, the Customs Service used Bates saccharimeters exclusively for assessing duty on imported sugar. The instrument on display in the museum is one of three Bates saccharimeters at NIST.
Updated: 09/19/08