September 2004 Archives

Howard F. McMurdie, a chemist and well-known member of NBS, died of pneumonia on September 26, 2004 aged 99. Dr. McMurdie was born in Detroit, MI, in 1905 and graduated with a B.S. in chemistry from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. He started work at NBS in April 1928. He became very famous as an editor of the series Phase Diagrams for Ceramists published by the American Ceramic Society. Dr. McMurdie was chief of the Crystallographic Section (formerly the Constitution and Microstructure Section) from 1944 until his official retirement at the end of 1965. Under his leadership, a project began that used X-ray diffraction on single crystals to determine their atomic structure. This led to a relationship with the International Centre for Diffraction Data (ICDD), which publishes the Powder Diffraction File, a compilation of diffraction patterns used for identification of crystalline solids. He was awarded the U.S. Department of Commerce Silver Medal in 1957 for valuable contributions to the science of crystal chemistry and very valuable leadership in the development of a comprehensive program of work in this field. In 1999, he received the highest award in the field of X-ray diffraction analysis, the Charles S. Barrett Award of the Denver X-Ray Conference. In 2003, on the occasion of his second retirement, he received a Certificate of Appreciation from the NIST Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory. He was a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society and the Mineralogical Society of America and a member of the American Crystallographic Association and the Electron Microscope Society of America.