Walter McCrone - Biography

Biography

McCrone was born in Wilmington, Delaware. At Cornell University he received a bachelor's degree in chemistry (1938) and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry (1942), after which he completed two years of post-doctoral work there. From 1944 to 1956 he was a microscopist and materials scientist at what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Becoming an independent consultant in 1956, he founded McCrone Associates, an analytical consulting firm now located in Westmont, Illinois. In 1960, he founded the McCrone Research Institute, a nonprofit organization for teaching and research in microscopy and crystallography.

For more than thirty years he edited and published The Microscope, an international quarterly journal of microscopy. He also wrote more than 600 technical articles along with sixteen books or chapters. He is credited with expanding the usefulness of the microscope to chemists, who had previously considered it to be primarily a tool for the biologist. In 2000, the American Chemical Society presented him with its National Award in Analytical Chemistry.

McCrone served on the board of directors and as president of the Ada S. McKinley Community Services, Inc., a nonprofit social services agency in Chicago.

McCrone died of congestive heart failure at his home in Chicago. He was survived by his wife, the former Lucy Beman; two sisters, Mary Lou Catts of Chattanooga, Tennessee and Phyllis Painter of Cherokee Village, Arkansas; and many nephews and nieces.