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William Frederick Herzog Purcell (February 19, 1911 - November 24, 2002)

Born in England• Bergvliet, Cape Town, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa DEATH 24 NOV 2002 • Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, United States of America paternal grandfather Add MyTreeTags™ Father died in 1919 and he went to England for boarding school. Youngest son on William Frederick Purcell, an arachnologist and now considered of the first zoologists in South Africa, and Anna Purcell, South African suffragette and close friend of notable author and feminist Olive Schreiner.

Bill was born in South Africa (ref?), but after his father died when he was 7 years old started attending boarding school in England. He attended Cambridge and then obtained his engineering degree from University of Cape Town. He married Elizabeth Runkle, granddaughter of John Daniel Runkle and chairman of Vassar from 1953-1972...(ref?) after they met in Boston while he was attending MIT, working towards his architectural degree. Elizabeth Runkle was sisters with Barbara Runkle, married to William Hawthorne.

After obtaining his architecture degree, and with the start of the war, he moved to Washington and working for the Crown in Canada, remodeling and retrofitting factories for the war machine, for example, lipstick manufactures started producing bullet casings.

After the war. Bill emigrated from South Africa to the United States and moved to Pasadena, after being hired by Henry Dreyfuss. Working out of the Pasadena office, with a team including Robert Hose and Niels Diffrient, they designed, updated, or influenced many early and lasting products, including, , Hoover, Bell telephones, the American Airlines eagle, but they also projects like the interiors of the Lockheed Martin Constellation, an early version of Air Force One. They were the first to do anthropometric studies of the human body and documented it in the book The Measure of Man.

After Henry Dreyfuss retired, Purcell was put in charge until his retirement later in the 1970s. Purcell died in 2002 in Woodland Hills CA.