Horace Richard Crane was an American physicist, the inventor of the Race Track Synchrotron, a recipient of President Ronald Reagan's National Medal of Science "for the first measurement of the magnetic moment and spin of free electrons and positrons". He was born on November 4, 1907, Turlock, California, United States. In 1935 Harrison Randall at the University of Michigan found the money to hire this bright Californian at the rank of instructor. Upon arriving in Ann Arbor, he began building a 1 MeV accelerator and also undertook experiments with radioactive sources. Over the years 1936-1940, he continued the study of nuclear disintegration, gamma and beta spectra, beta spectra, and mechanisms of electron energy loss.

He also continued to search for evidence of the neutrino. In 1938 he and Jules Halpern published the first convincing, quantitative measurements of neutrino momentum. And, in 1939 Crane searched for neutrino absorption by burying a mesothorium source in a bag of salt and looking for sulfur produced by the inverse beta decay of chlorine; he was able to set an upper limit for the cross section of this process and he also discussed the astrophysical implications of his result. Crane’s last publication on neutrinos, in the 1948 Reviews of Modern Physics, was given lavish credit by Ray Davis in his 2002 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He died on April 19, 2007, Chelsea, Michigan, United States.