Yesterday was the 180th birthday of the Naval Observatory (yay, we had cake); it was established on Dec 6th, 1830 as the Depot of Charts and Instruments. One of my colleagues sent out a copy of a 1913 House appropriations committee hearing transcript, in which the USNO superintendent was interviewed regarding his budget requests.

I found it quite compelling, but I’m biased. It’s interesting that congressional failure to grasp science and general dickishness is not something new; there are inquiries into whether the functions of the observatory could be done with a reduced staff, or eliminated completely in order to save money, possibly because it was being duplicated by one of the “great universities” (those being Harvard and Stanford). The answer then, as now, is no; there’s a distinction between basic and applied research. University astronomers of recent times don’t do the systematic position measurements that go into producing an alamanac. I think the attitude displayed by Mr. Burleson implies that he thought that everyone with a telescope must be doing the same thing. He pegs the dick-o-meter when he suggests that the work being done is” rather crude or backward as compared with the work that is being done at the naval observatories connected with the universities.” I don’t really know why one would phrase the inquiry that way.

There’s a bit of bureaucracy tedium as well, such as trying to convince the committee that when the staff is underpaid as compared to other government jobs or the private sector, people tend to move on before they might otherwise do, and retaining people, even at higher salary, is usually cheaper than continually training new employees.

All in all, not very different from what I see today.