Quarterman was born on May 31, 1918 in Philadelphia. He graduated from St. Augustine’s College in 1943, and was quickly recruited to the Manhattan Project. Quarterman worked as a junior chemist at Columbia University, and under Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago.
At Chicago, he was part of a team that worked to separate the U-235 isotope with a distillation system that used hydrogen fluoride. As Quarterman recalled, “We split the atom in the East. We were working there on the Atomic Bomb. But the world’s first nuclear reactor, which used the atomic splitting process in a peaceful way, was set up here in Chicago. It was under an Italian scientist, Enrico Fermi… I did all my quantum mechanics under him.”
After the war, Quarterman went on to receive a Master of Science from Northwestern University in 1952. He then returned to the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his career. He continued his studies of fluoride solutions, and developed a “diamond window” through which it was possible to study its complex molecular structure. Towards the end of his life, he also began preliminary research into synthetic blood.
Quarterman died in July of 1982 in Chicago.
Editor’s Note: The Manhattan Project was a research and development program undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. African-American scientists and technicians on the Manhattan Project held a small number of positions among the several hundred scientists and technicians involved. Nonetheless, African-American men and women made important contributions to the Manhattan Project during World War II. At the time, their work was shrouded in secrecy, intentionally compartmentalized and decontextualized so that almost no one knew the purpose or intended use of what they were doing.
As government documents have been declassified and historians have examined archives and collected oral histories, the work of people including physical chemist William Jacob Knox Jr., chemist Lloyd Quarterman, physicist Carolyn Parker, physicist and mass spectrometrist Robert Johnson Omohundro, and physicist and mathematician Jesse Ernest Wilkins Jr. is being recognized. They contributed to the theoretical understanding of nuclear physics (Wilkins), the extraction and processing of the fissionable uranium isotope, Uranium-235 (Knox, Quarterman), the use of polonium as an initiator (Parker), and the development of scientific instruments to detect radioactive materials and measure radiation (Omohundro).