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...