He was the third director of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) during the Great Depression and chairman of the Uranium Committee[1] before America entered the Second World War.

He was the eldest of two brothers in a family that descended from Clement Briggs, who arrived in America in 1621 on the Fortune, the first ship to follow the Mayflower.

Albert died in infancy, and Isabel would eventually marry Clarence Myers and go on to generate the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother.

Although he spent time working with the newly discovered Roentgen Rays, he ultimately graduated in 1903 with a Ph.D. in agriculture with a dissertation On the absorption of water vapor and of certain salts in aqueous solution by quartz.

In Briggs' first professional position he was put in charge of the Physics Laboratory (later the Bureau of Soils) of the US Department of Agriculture.

In 1906 he devised a soil classification technique called the moisture equivalent based on centrifuging, which is now thought of as the first Pedotransfer function.

Briggs worked with Homer Leroy Shantz on the effect of environment on the water uptake by plants, and was an early contributor to ecology.

Briggs was detailed by an Executive Order to the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Standards in 1917 due to mobilization pressures of World War I.

After Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as president in 1933 he was pressed to name "a good Democrat" as director of the National Bureau of Standards.

Roosevelt, not wishing to make a patronage appointment, replied, "I haven't the slightest idea whether Briggs is a Republican or a Democrat; all I know is that he is the best qualified man for the job."

He managed to save the jobs of about 2/3 of the career employees by putting many on part-time employment and transferring others to the American Standards Association while they continued their work at the bureau.

Due to Briggs outstanding persuasive powers, he managed to get Congress to increase its appropriation for the Bureau in 1935, and many of the employees that were let go were re-hired.

[5] Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom German refugees Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls under professor Marcus Oliphant made a breakthrough, indicating that it would be possible to make an atomic bomb from a relatively small mass of concentrated U-235.

A copy of the MAUD Committee's interim report was sent to the Briggs in the USA because Britain lacked the resources to undertake such a large and urgent program on its own.

Oliphant said: "The minutes and reports had been sent to Lyman Briggs, who was the Director of the Uranium Committee, and we were puzzled to receive virtually no comment.

I called on Briggs in Washington, only to find out that this inarticulate and unimpressive man had put the reports in his safe and had not shown them to members of his committee.

In 1939 he sent Secretary of Commerce Daniel C. Roper a list of services the Bureau could provide in the event of armed conflict in Europe.

Some of the Bureau's activities were the non-rotating proximity fuze, guided missile developments,[6] establishment of a Radio Propagation Laboratory, critical materials research on optical glass which Germany had previously supplied, on quartz and synthetic rubber and measurement and calibration services.

At his request the names of the first three directors of Bureau are cast onto the rim of the instrument: Samuel Wesley Stratton, George Kimball Burgess, and Lyman James Briggs.

In 1948 Briggs received the Medal of Merit from US President Harry Truman for his distinguished work in connection with World War II.

In his retirement, Briggs returned to research, establishing a laboratory for studying fluids under negative pressure at the National Bureau of Standards.