The purpose of this paper is to show that the readings from strain gages can be used effectively to compute small transverse deflections in a rectangular plate and, further, show that the theory developed by Lamb for the rectangular-plate problem agrees with experiment. A numerical procedure is developed, based on the trapezoidal rule, which determines the transverse deflections from the readings of strain gages mounted to the top and bottom surface of a rectangular plate subjected to large longitudinal curvatures. It is shown using the strain-gage technique that experiment agrees with Lamb's theory forb 2 /Rt ratios up to 50.