Lloyd Albert Quarterman was one of only a handful of African Americans to work on the "Manhattan Project ," the team that developed the first atom bomb in the 1940s. He was also noted as a research chemist who specialized in fluoride chemistry, producing some of the first compounds using inert gases and developing the "diamond window" for the study of compounds using corrosive hydrogen fluoride gas. In addition, later in his career, Quarterman initiated work on synthetic blood.
Quarterman was born May 31, 1918, in Philadelphia. He attended St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he continued the interest in chemistry he had demonstrated from an early age. Just after he completed his bachelor's degree in 1943 he was hired by the U.S. War Department to work on the production of the atomic bomb , an assignment code-named the Manhattan Project. Originally hired as a junior chemist, he worked at both the secret underground facility at the University of Chicago and at the Columbia University laboratory in New York City; the project was spread across the country in various locations. It was the team of scientists at Columbia which first split the atom. To do this, scientists participated in trying to isolate an isotope of uranium necessary for nuclear fission; this was Quarterman's main task during his time in New York.
Quarterman was one of only six African American scientists who worked on the development of atomic bomb. At the secret Chicago facility, where the unused football stadium had been converted into an enormous, hidden laboratory for the "plutonium program," Quarterman studied quantum mechanics under renowned Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. When the Manhattan Project ended in 1946, the Chicago facilities were converted to become Argonne National Laboratories, and Quarterman was one of the scientists who stayed on. Although his contributions included work on the first nuclear power plant, he was predominantly a fluoride and nuclear chemist, creating new chemical compounds and new molecules from fluoride solutions. Dr. Larry Stein, who worked at Argonne at the same time as Quarterman, told interviewer Marianne Fedunkiw that Quarterman was very good at purifying hydrogen fluoride. "He helped build a still to purify it, which he ran." This was part of the research which led to the production of the compound xenon tetrafluoride at Argonne. Xenon is one of the "inert" gases and was thought to be unable to react with other molecules, so Quarterman's work in producing a xenon compound was a pioneering effort.
After a number of years at Argonne National Laboratories, Quarterman returned to school and received his master's of science from Northwestern University in 1952. In addition to his fluoride chemistry work, Quarterman was a spectroscopist researching interactions between radiation and matter. He developed a corrosion resistant "window" of diamonds with which to view hydrogen fluoride . He described this to Ivan Van Sertima, who interviewed him in 1979: "It was a very small window--one-eighth of an inch. The reason why they were one-eighth of an inch was because I couldn't get the money to buy bigger windows. These small diamonds cost one thousand dollars apiece and I needed two for a window." Diamonds were necessary because hydrogen fluoride was so corrosive it would eat up glass or any other known container material. Quarterman was able to study the X-ray, ultraviolet, and Raman spectra of a given compound by dissolving it in hydrogen fluoride, making a cell, and shining an electromagnetic beam through the solution to see the vibrations of the molecules. His first successful trial was run in 1967.
Quarterman also began research into "synthetic blood " late in his career but he was thwarted by what he described as "socio-political problems" and later fell ill and died before he could complete it. Besides holding memberships in the American Chemical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Scientific Research Society of America, Quarterman was an officer of the Society of Applied Spectroscopy. He also encouraged African American students interested in science by visiting public schools in Chicago, and was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In recognition for his contributions to science, Quarterman's alma mater, St. Augustine's College, departed from 102 years of tradition to award him an honorary Ph.D. in chemistry in 1971 for a lifetime of achievement. He was also cited for his research on the Manhattan project in a certificate, dated August 6, 1945, by the Secretary of War for "work essential to the production of the Atomic Bomb thereby contributing to the successful conclusion of World War II."
Quarterman was also a renowned athlete. During his university days at St. Augustine's College he was an avid football player. Van Sertima, who interviewed Quarterman three years before his death, later wrote, "As he spoke, the shock of his voice and his occasional laughter seemed to contradict his illness and I began to see before me, not an aging scientist, but the champion footballer." Quarterman died at the Billings Hospital in Chicago in the late summer of 1982. He donated his body to science.
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