Albert Crewe, First to Show a Single Atom, Is Dead at 82
Matthew Kruk
Albert Crewe, First to Show a Single Atom, Is Dead at 82
By JOHN MARKOFF
Albert V. Crewe, the University of Chicago physicist who developed the
high-resolution electron microscope that captured the first image of an
individual atom, died on Wednesday at his home in the Lake Michigan
community of Dune Acres, Ind. He was 82.
The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his daughter
Jennifer said.
Dr. Crewe's research opened a new window into the Lilliputian world of
the fundamental building blocks of nature, giving scientists and
engineers in fields as varied as computing and biology a powerful new
tool to understand the architecture of everything from living tissue to
metal alloys.
It was during the 1960s that Dr. Crewe became interested in electron
microscopy, which he wanted to apply to biology research then under way
at Argonne National Laboratory, outside Chicago, where he was the
director.
After attending a conference in England and forgetting to buy a book at
the airport for the flight home, he pulled out a pad of paper on the
plane and sketched two ways to improve existing microscopes. Back in
Chicago, he determined that one of the approaches had already been
pursued but that the other was fundamentally new.
He immersed himself in the design of advanced microscopes with the goal
of reaching resolutions as fine as a single angstrom, about a third the
diameter of a carbon atom. By 1967, his research had become so
compelling that he left Argonne and his role as a manager there to
return to the University of Chicago, where a decade earlier he had
worked on the Chicago Cyclotron, a superconducting accelerator. This
time he signed on as a full professor.
Dr. Crewe designed an enhanced electron source to bombard the object
being scanned and later improved lens and detection technologies as
well. This culminated in the first successful version of a system known
as a scanning transmission electron microscope, or STEM.
While earlier microscopes had achieved resolutions of several angstroms,
Dr. Crewe used his new electron source and newly available
ultra-high-vacuum technologies to attain a tenfold improvement in image
contrast, making it possible to see details not previously visible.
Finally, in June 1970 in the journal Science, he published a research
report titled "Visibility of Single Atoms," in which he cautiously
documented photographic evidence that showed images of uranium and
thorium atoms.
"It appears that the bright spots which we have observed are probably
due to single atoms," he wrote, noting that the geometric placement of
the bright spots corresponded to what would be expected theoretically.
"It was extremely dramatic in 1970 when he saw single atoms," said Oscar
Kapp, a University of Chicago biochemist, who worked with Dr. Crewe on
the project as a graduate student and continued to collaborate with him
throughout his career.
Five years later after that success, Dr. Crewe obtained the first motion
pictures of atoms, an achievement that offered new ways of understanding
atomic interactions. The film was even shown on a Chicago television
station by the movie critic Gene Siskel, although he noted that he would
not pay a dollar to watch it, according to one of the graduate students
who worked on the experiment.
Dr. Crewe, the university's dean of physical sciences from 1971 to 1981,
continued his research on electron microscopes through the 1980s. He
held 19 patents for his inventions in the field and eventually published
275 research papers in it. His work was essential to the development of
a generation of commercial electron microscopes, on which he consulted
with the Hitachi Corporation. Today electron microscopes are widely used
both in the semiconductor industry and in scientific laboratories around
the world.
Albert Victor Crew was born in Bradford, England, in what is now West
Yorkshire, and grew up in a working-class family. He had average grades
as a young child, but at 15 he passed a nationwide entrance exam and
became the first in his family to attend high school. He won a
scholarship to attend the University of Liverpool, where he also earned
a Ph.D. in physics.
During the summer of 1946 in Cornwall, where he and other college
students had gathered to help with a postwar wheat harvest, he met
Doreen Blunsdon. They married in 1949.
After doing pioneering work on particle accelerators in England in the
early 1950s, Dr. Crewe was invited to the University of Chicago in 1955
as a visiting research associate. A year later, having helped complete
the Chicago Cyclotron, he was hired by the university as an assistant
professor.
In 1958 Dr. Crewe joined the Argonne National Laboratory, where he led a
team of researchers developing another advanced accelerator. He rose
rapidly at Argonne, soon becoming director of the laboratory's particle
accelerator division and eventually managing 100 engineers.
He was appointed the laboratory's director in 1961, when he was only 34,
an assistant professor without tenure and not yet a United States
citizen.
In addition to his wife, Doreen, he is survived by four children,
Jennifer Crewe of New York, Sarah Crewe of Ruidoso, N.M., Elizabeth
Crewe of LaGrange, Ill., and David Crewe of Sunnyvale, Calif.; and 10
grandchildren.
In a public lecture shortly after becoming the director of Argonne, Dr.
Crewe bemoaned the growing gulf between scientists and laymen.
"There are too many people behaving like the proverbial ostrich and
hoping that science will go away if they bury their heads in the sand,"
he said, "and this in spite of the fact that the last few decades have
indicated strongly that science will not go away."
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