Lloyd Albert Quarterman (1918-1982) was an American chemist.
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.