William Cronk Elmore

William Cronk Elmore
William (Bill) Cronk Elmore in 1995
Born	(1909-09-16)September 16, 1909 Montour Falls, New York
Died	January 21, 2003(2003-01-21) (aged 93) Newtown Square, PA
Resting place	Montour Falls, New York
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Lehigh University Yale University
Known for	Elmore delay
Scientific career
Fields	physics
Institutions	Los Alamos National Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology Swarthmore College
Thesis	Surface Magnetization of Ferromagnetic Crystals  (1935)

William Cronk Elmore (September 16 1909 - January 23 2003) was an American physicist, educator, and author who is best known for his work on and related to the Manhattan project during World War II and as a professor of Physics at Swarthmore College, PA from 1938 to 1974. Bill Elmore authored two influential books during his life, the Physics of Waves with Mark Heald and Electronics-Experimental Techniques with Matthew Sands. He is also known for deriving a simple approximation for the delay through an RC network, known as the Elmore delay.

Early Life and Education

William Cronk Elmore was born in Montour Falls, New York to Thaddeus Percevil Elmore and Grace Cronk Elmore. Elmore had two sisters, Mary Elmore (b. 1902, d. 1907) and Eleanor Elmore (b. 1912, d. 2010). As a young man, Bill spent many of his days outside with his boy scout troop, experimenting with electronics and other technology, and building crystal radios. He attended Cook Academy in Montour Falls, New York and was the valedictorian upon his graduation in 1928. After earning a B.Sc. in Engineering Physics from Lehigh University (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1932 and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1935. Elmore began his career as a physics instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1935 to 1938. In 1936, Elmore married Barbara Page, the daughter of Leigh Page, who was one of his professors and mentors at Yale University. Bill and Barbara were married for the next 66 years. They had 4 children, Mary-Leigh (b. 1939), David (b. 1945), Elizabeth (b. 1947, d. 2015), and Page (b. 1959).

World War II

Elmore was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1943. He played a major role in developing electronic circuits to handle the fast-pulse signals needed in the development of the atomic bomb. He also developed the electronics used to measure the strength of the first atomic test at Trinity test in New Mexico. At Trinity on July 16, 1945, Elmore observed the blast from the closest position of any observer, laying on a rubber mat next to J. Robert Oppenheimer behind a temporary wall of led bricks and holding a piece of welding glass in front of his eyes. War era letters Barbara Page wrote to her mother and other family members detail the daily life of Elmore and his family while living in Los Alamos with the other Manhattan Project scientists, such as Enrico Fermi.

In 1946, Elmore and Matthew Sands wrote Electronics: Experimental Techniques, which was published in 1949 by McGraw-Hill as part of the National Nuclear Energy Series. This book presented many ideas and circuits developed at Los Alamos, and became a standard reference for post-war nuclear instrumentation and influenced a generation of physics graduate students in the 1950s.

In 1957, Elmore returned to Los Alamos to work with the controlled fusion group. He was a delegate to the second Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva.

Swarthmore College

In 1938, he joined Swarthmore’s physics faculty, retiring in 1974. He served as department chair from 1948 to 1968. Despite his clear potential for advancing theoretical and experimental physics, at Swarthmore Elmore was known for developing (and publishing) laboratory experiments that effectively taught students the fundamentals of physics.

Elmore and Heald co-wrote the 1969 textbook Physics of Waves, which is still in print.

In 1965, Elmore received a Distinguished Service Citation from the American Association of Physics Teachers and was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Later life

Also an accomplished musician, Elmore played accordion at square dances in Los Alamos and was the founding pianist of the Swarthmore faculty dance band The Moonshiners. Elmore's granddaughter, Amanda Elmore, is on the US National Rowing Team and won a gold metal at the 2016 Summer Olympics in the Woman's eight.