Born. He paid a visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, and gave a lecture in Leningrad. When Spedding returned to the United States in 1935, the country was still in the grip of the Great Depression, and the job market had not improved. He was George Fisher Baker assistant professor at Cornell University from 1935 to 1937. It was another temporary position, but it did allow him to work with Hans Bethe. At one point he drove out to Ohio State University hoping to find a tenure track position. The position had already been filled, but the professor of chemistry there, W. L. Evans, knew that Winfred F. (Buck) Coover at Iowa State College in Ames, Iowa, had a position. "I wouldn't normally have chosen the place," Spedding later recalled, "but I was desperate. I thought: I can go there and build up physical chemistry and when jobs really open up I can go to another school." Spedding took up the position as assistant professor and head of the department of physical chemistry at Iowa State College in 1937. His efforts at building up the school were so successful that he would spend the rest of his career there, becoming a professor of chemistry in 1941, a professor of physics in 1950, a professor of metallurgy in 1962, and ultimately professor emeritus in 1973. Manhattan Project By February 1942, the United States had entered World War II, and the Manhattan Project was building up. At the University of Chicago, Arthur H. Compton established its Metallurgical Laboratory. Its mission was to build nuclear reactors to create plutonium that would be used in atomic bombs. For advice on assembling the laboratory's Chemistry Division, Compton, a physicist, turned to Herbert McCoy, who had considerable experience with isotopes and radioactive elements. McCoy recommended Spedding as an expert on the rare earth elements, which were chemically similar to the actinide series that included uranium and plutonium. Compton asked Spedding to become the head of the Metallurgical Laboratory's Chemistry Division. Due to lack of space at the University of Chicago, Spedding proposed to organise part of the Chemistry Division at Iowa State College in Ames, where he had colleagues who were willing to help. It was agreed that Spedding would spend half of each week in Ames, and half in Chicago. The first problem on the agenda was to find uranium for the nuclear reactor that