A physicist by training, Stratton proposed the U.S. Bureau of Standards and was appointed its first director by President Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1899 he was asked to head the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey's Office of Weights and Measures, where he developed the plan for the establishment of a bureau of standards.

He won the support for his plans from Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage and in March 1901, President William McKinley appointed him the first director of the National Bureau of Standards.

His operation was designed to recruit recent college graduates, train them, and feed them into private industry and its higher salaries.

"[3] The Bureau worked hand in glove with industry to undertake research that the private sector required but could not finance itself.

The same men, methods and equipment are involved in getting at the facts, whether they are needed in solving problems in industry or in extending our knowledge of principles.

He said that the automotive industry must find a substitute for gasoline, on which the elder Edison commented that the electric storage battery has already filled the bill.

"[3] In 1927, he served as one of three members as an Advisory Committee to Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller, along with President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard and Probate Judge Robert Grant.