Down to the Nth

If a business needs to know whether a butcher’s scale is accurate or what time a NASDAQ stock was traded, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and its Boulder Laboratories probably had a hand in those measurements.

Gaithersburg, Md.-based NIST, founded in 1901, standardizes all types of measurements — from length and weight to time. NIST’s Boulder facility, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, is 50 years old, and the institute also jointly runs JILA (formerly the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) with the University of Colorado Boulder. NIST employs roughly 700 people in Boulder and a total…