William H. Beamer was born on July 5, 1918 in Apollo, Pennsylvania. He graduated from South High in Youngstown, Ohio in 1935, and then attended the College of Wooster. He earned his MA from the University of Maryland in 1941, and his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Ohio State University in 1944.
At Los Alamos, he worked as an associate chemist, studying polonium.
After the war, he went on to work in the embryonic spectroscopy lab at Dow Chemical Company. He also served as the director for the radiochemistry lab. In 1949, he published The Physical Properties of Polonium.
On October 23, 2000, Beamer passed away in a small plane crash, at the age of 82.