Frank Harold Spedding played an important role in the Manhattan Project--the U.S. government's effort to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. With his colleagues, he also devised chemical techniques for isolating rare-earth elements, thus making them available for industry at affordable cost.

Spedding was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, on October 22, 1902, but his photographer father, Howard Leslie Spedding, and mother, the former Mary Ann Elizabeth Marshall, were American citizens. While at the University of Michigan, he majored in metallurgy, receiving his B.S. degree in 1925. He earned his M.S. degree in analytical chemistry there in 1926, and was awarded his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1929. While working on his doctorate at UC, Spedding studied the mathematics underlying the chemical relationships among properties of rare-earth metals, the elements consisting of scandium and yttrium, and the fifteen elements from lanthanum...