William Francis Giauque was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, on May 12, 1895. His mother, Isabella Jane (Duncan) Giauque, and his father, William Tecumseh Sherman Giauque, were United States citizens. When Giauque was young, his family moved back to the United States where his father took a job with the Michigan Central Railroad as a station master. When the elder Giauque died in 1908, his family returned to Canada, where William enrolled in the Niagara Falls Collegiate and Vocational School.

Giauque enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in 1916. Giauque subsequently received his bachelor of science in chemistry in 1920 and then entered graduate school at Berkeley. There he was exposed to some of the nation's greatest chemists, including Gilbert Newton Lewis, George E. Gibson (his thesis advisor), Joel Hildebrand, and G. E. K. Branch. Giauque's dissertation concerned the properties and behavior of materials at very low temperatures, a subject...