New Canton, Illinois was the birthplace of Walter Shewhart who was born in 1891. He would go on to earn his undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois and then later received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

Walter Shewhart would wear many professional hats. He was a physicist, engineer and a statistician. The latter being a field that he more or less added to the list of his credits by his own self-taught efforts. Still, it would be his work and dedication in that area that would earn Shewhart various honors.

Walter Shewhart was a man who believed in working through his problems using the data or stats provided. His love of mathematics and the sub-genres of the field would later enable him to become the founding member of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Additionally, in his lifetime, Shewhart worked with Bell Telephone and its engineer working in its laboratories and writing the Bell System Technical Journal which was a series of papers utilized within the corporation. His work and his theories were so strongly supported that others who followed Shewhart were able to advance and build upon them greatly.

Walter Shewhart worked diligently within statistical ideas and concepts. He believed and formed a strong opinion about tolerance intervals and his discoveries became one of the more widely accepted in his era. His scientific study later led to the development of the Shewhart Cycle.