Gesell’s ambitious goal was to establish universal developmental norms beginning at birth. The idea that development follows regular patterns over time is commonplace today, but it was then a novel way of thinking about growth. It also had significant practical consequences. The applied technology that Gesell’s research produced was a scale–a test–that promised to measure whether children were developing normally or deviating from expected patterns of mental, motor, linguistic, and social growth. By measuring more than intelligence, or I.Q. (“intelligence quotient”), the Gesell scales moved beyond the first generation of mental tests. They were widely utilized by clinicians working in medical and educational fields. In adoption, they were used to determine if children were qualified for adoption in the first place. At a time when social workers worried about under- and over-placement (errors that gave bright children to dull parents and dull children to bright parents), the Gesell scale also guided which children were placed with which parents.