Biographical Memoirs Volume 80 (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Frank Harold Spedding
Frank Harold Spedding
Pages 300-327
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From page 301... ...
. Frank Harold Spedding was born on October 22, 1902, in Hamilton, Ontario, to Howard Leslie Specicling en cl Mary Ann Elizabeth (Marshall)
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From page 302... ...
Lewis became his major professor, en cl Specicling felt he had arrived in a young chemist's heaven. Specicling's research cluring graduate school years was spent learning about electronic spectroscopy, especially absorption spectra.
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From page 303... ...
For the years 1930-32 Spedding was awarded a National Research Fellowship, which enabled him to stay on at Berkeley doing full-time research. After that, Lewis hired him as a temporary chemistry instructor for 1932-34 with his main duties being continued research on the absorption spectra of solids.
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She was teaching at Victoria High School, Victoria, British Columbia, when she and Frank Spedding met while hiking in northern California. They took up housekeeping cluring his tenure of the National Research Fellowship en cl uncler rather Spartan conditions.
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in separating some of the rare earths by fractional crystallization, as hacl Hopkins. When he further Earned that Lindsey Light en cl Chemical Company hac!
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LennarcIJones in quantum mechanics, meet Max Born who had also left Germany, and attend Born's seminars. Travel expenses were to be paid by the Guggenheim Foundation, but the first quarterly payment wouIcl have hacl Frank en c!
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fruitless, but the George Fisher Baker assistant professor position at Cornell University was open, so Specicling took yet another temporary position, this time from 1935-37. Spectroscopic studies of other crystalline compounds of
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(Buck) Coover at Iowa State College hacl lost much of his physical chemistry staff from resignations stimulatecl by greener pastures en cl was looking for a replacement.
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come through. So in the fall of 1937, the Speciclings checkocl into Ames, Iowa, where he became the heacl of the physical chemistry section of the Chemistry Department at Iowa State College.
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he asker! his chemist friends to suggest outstanding inorganic chemists in the country who also knew something about the rarer elements, particularly uranium en c!
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impurities were known to absorb neutrons. Therefore, one of the great neecis of the program was to final a process that couIcl produce ultra pure uranium metal in large quantity.
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at Il32°C. One immediate neecl was a source of a pure uranium compound as input to any process of metal production.
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Although graphite was known to react with uranium metal, the Ames team soon founcl that most of the carbide formecl remained at the interface between the metal en c! the graphite if the graphite container was kept at a temperature slightly lower than the molten uranium en cl not for too long.
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From page 314... ...
In the meantime, the government askocl Specicling en cl his coworkers to produce all the uranium metal they could. During the ensuing several months, more than 2 million pouncis of uranium metal were proclucecl at Iowa State College in a scalecI-up pilot plant set up in a temporary wooden buckling the college inherited!
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The remainder went to Hanford to help builcl the first plutonium procluction reactor. This Iowa State work was all carried out on two floors in one quadrant of the chemistry bubbling, partly in the former physical chemistry laboratory.
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After peace was clecIarecl in 1945 an Institute for Atomic Research was set up by Iowa State College with moclest support from state funcis, en cl Specicling became its director. The builcling constructed afforclecl space for the director, for administration, en c!
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Research at the Ames Laboratory at that time was consiclerecl by the AEC to be relatecl to the clevelopment of nuclear power, anct materials research along these tines was particularly encouraged. A strong emphasis on pure metals and their properties became a lasting feature.
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his back when he took visitors into the calorimetry laboratory where they were making heat capacity measurements en cl venting gaseous hydrogen (with warning signs everywhere)
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Once the rareearth compounds became generally available to the general scientific community, many practical applications were found, en cl a consiclerable in clustry clevelope cl that involve cl th e use of rare earths. Parallel with this work, Specicling, Wilhelm, Adrian Daane, Wayne Keller, en cl others clevelopecl processes for proclucing very pure rare-earth metals in quantity (1952, 1953, ~ 958)
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From page 320... ...
Again the research group under the direction of Spedding was able to take a process developed on a laboratory scale and produce gross amounts of a needed commodity. In this period Spedding also established extensive joint programs in fundamental solid-state physics and in metallurgy.
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260 scientific articles, a select 25 of which are listecl at the end of this memoir. The nature of the Ames Laboratory research en cl clevelopment also lee!
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His crowning accomplishment in many eyes was the establishment of the Ames Laboratory, a national laboratory now supported by the U
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Svec and published in 1988 in the leading serial series on the rare earths.4 Second are the former graduate students and colleagues of Spedding, who furnished many of the more personal experiences with and insights into the man: Adrian Daane, Tim Dye, Tack Powell, Bernie Gerstein, Earl Wheelwright, Toe Rard, John Croat, and Karl Gschneidner.
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Activity coefficient of rare earth chlorides in aqueous solutions at 25°C.
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Dye. Conductances, transference numbers and activity coefficients of aqueous solutions of some rare earth chlorides at 25°C.
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326 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 1962 With R
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