This is a 1915 traction dynamometer mounted on a wagon, used to measure the force required to pull the vehicle over the road against the friction of the wheels in contact with the road.
The Federal-Aid Highway Amendments Act of 1963 expanded the law to include development under the research and planning section. The Act specified that the 1½ percent funds would be available, among other purposes, “. . . for research and development, necessary in connection with the planning, design, construction, and maintenance of highways and highway systems. . . .” The intent of Congress was that development would be an integral part of the overall research and development program and that this provision would stimulate the States to play a more active role in the development phase.[1]
Public Roads Magazine
The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 authorized a 5-year road program which had barely begun when the United States entered the European war. Looking forward to the resumption of the road program after the war, Director Logan W. Page of the Office of Public Roads and Rural Engineering (OPRRE) foresaw the need for a journal devoted to the publication “. . . of the results of researches, experiments and studies of those connected with this Office, and of highway officials of the various States . . .”; and also “. . . for the dissemination of such information as the officials of the various States may desire to spread for the benefit of their contemporaries.”[2]
The first issue of the new publication, named Public Roads, appeared May 1918. It provided the State highway officials with a welcome forum for the discussion of current problems. The first issue brought the industry up-to-date by summarizing motor vehicle licensing laws and fees for registration and operators’ licenses. This wartime issue also urged highway builders to conserve scarce fuel by proper attention to the firing of boilers and the careful use of steam in road machines and in quarrying. An entire issue (June 1918) was devoted to the catastrophic road breakups caused by heavy trucking during the 1918 spring thaw. The May 1919 issue dealt with the social and economic benefits of using convict labor on the public roads. When the Government distributed the huge surpluses of military equipment to the States, Public Roads ran articles on how to take care of the equipment and convert it to civilian highway use.
Public Roads published the resolutions adopted by the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) at its annual meetings of December 1918, 1919, and 1920, and also the papers read at those conventions. In effect, it was the official journal of AASHO until that organization launched its own publication, American Highways, in 1922.
Within a year of its first issue, Public Roads was an important voice of the young highway industry, with a long waiting list of would-be subscribers. In fiscal year 1920, the authorized monthly circulation was raised to 4,500 copies, but hundreds of requests for the magazine had to be refused. Budgetary cuts reduced the circulation to 4,000 copies per month for fiscal year 1921, and, without explanation, publication was suspended altogether after the December 1921 issue. The suspension drew an immediate protest from the American Road Builders’ Association, AASHO, and other organizations interested in roads and also “. . . many expressions of regret not only from its engineer subscribers, but also from the nontechnical administrative heads of county highway activities to whom it had been helpful. Not the least gratifying of such expressions were those which came entirely without solicitation from the editors of other technical engineering journals.”[3]
Public Roads resumed publication in March 1924, with the return of better times. However, the magazine was no longer a forum for the administrative and technical problems of the States, this function having been assumed by American Highways after Public Roads ceased publication. Instead, the new Public Roads was exclusively a house research journal, and all of its contributors were engineers, scientists, and economists of the Bureau of Public Roads. As the Bureau’s research activities expanded, Public Roads published papers dealing with every aspect of highway research—finance and taxation, the economics of transport systems, the properties of soil and road materials, the management of construction operations by contractors, the characteristics of highway traffic, the strength of road slabs, and many others.
Public Roads was the original publisher of many landmark papers in highway research. Most notable of these was “Highway Capacity: Practical Applications of Research” by O. K. Normann and W. P. Walker (Public Roads, October, December 1949). Another paper, “Interrelationship of Load, Road and Subgrade” by C. Hogentogler and C. Terzaghi (Public Roads, May 1929) laid the foundations of subgrade soil classification and marked a turning point in studies of subgrade soils.
The highway researchers of the twenties, thirties, and forties were breaking new ground. Often progress in a particular field of research depended on the invention of new instruments to measure what had never been measured before. A continuous stream of such instruments issued from the Bureau of Public Roads’ instrument laboratory for nearly 40 years—the Goldbeck Pressure Cell for measuring pressures under pavements; the electric-eye and road-tube traffic counters; the Benkelman Beam for measuring minute deflections in pavements under load; and many others. Information about most of these devices first reached the scientific world through the pages of Public Roads.
