PRIORITIES AND PROPERTY 243 



the work in their own laboratories or elsewhere and definitely desired to 

 obtain most of the property. After numerous conferences among OSRD, 

 the Army and the Navy, 98 per cent of the property on hand at the Cali- 

 fornia Institute of Technology acquired for use in the rocket program under 

 Contract OEMsr-418 was transferred to the Army and the Navy; the prop- 

 erty at the Allegheny Ballistics Laboratory operated under Contract OEMsr- 

 273 by George Washington University was transferred to the Navy; that on 

 hand under Contract OEMsr-164 with the Research Construction Company 

 went to the Army Air Forces, and that at the Radio Research Laboratory 

 operated by Harvard under Contract OEMsr-411 went to the Navy. 



In the case of the Radiation Laboratory operated by the Massachusetts 

 Institute of Technology under Contract OEMsr-262, there were different 

 Service interests in the work and many conflicting requests for the property, 

 much of which was highly important to the continuation of general research 

 and development work on radar. A plan was devised under which property 

 on hand under this contract, except that to be retained by OSRD for basic 

 research work, was transferred to the Army and Navy on the basis of 

 Service requests and recommendations made to the Contracting Officer of 

 OSRD by a Joint Army and Navy Panel especially created for the purpose. 



Disposition of Property by Sale 



Receipts from the sale of property amounted to $1,374,711.65 for the 

 twenty-five months ending with December 31, 1945. Most of this amount 

 came from the sale of personal property, with about $100,000 being paid by 

 contractors for the retention of improvements made under contracts. A sub- 

 stantial portion of the total represented proceeds derived from the sale of 

 property at cost by the Radiation Laboratory under Contract OEMsr-262 as 

 a part of the normal operations of that laboratory. Speed in microwave 

 research and in the building of an industry capable of producing equipment 

 of Radiation Laboratory design required the loan of a great deal of such 

 equipment to other laboratories and to industrial concerns. When these 

 loans were liquidated, the proceeds of the sales at cost were turned in to 

 the Treasury of the United States. 



The greater portion of the receipts were from perhaps 2000 sales covering 

 thousands of individual items of property which contractors exercised their 

 right to retain under the terms of their contracts. As most OSRD contracts 

 were small, the property on hand at termination was not substantial. It 

 normally consisted of small quantities of a wide variety of used property 

 from one to five years of age, and many of the items were such as did not 

 enter largely in normal trade channels. To determine the fair value of the 

 heterogeneous lot of property taxed the wisdom and judgment of those 

 concerned. There were, however, certain guides, among them the price 



