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William Cronk Elmore (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. After earning a B.S. in engineering physics from Lehigh University in 1932 and a Ph.D. from Yale three years later, Elmore began his career as a physics instructor at MIT. In 1938, he joined Swarthmore’s physics faculty, retiring in 1974. He served as department chair from 1948 to 1968. Elmore authored two influential books during his life....

Early Life and Education

World War II

Elmore was recruited to work for two years on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, playing a major role in developing electronic circuits to handle the fast-pulse signals needed in the development of the atomic bomb.

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 and was a delegate to the second Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva.

Swarthmore College

Elmore is fondly remembered by his students for his integration of imaginative laboratory work with theoretical content.

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.