Spedding recruited two chemistry professors at Ames for his group there, Harley Wilhelm and I. B. Johns. Spedding and Wilhelm began looking for ways to create the uranium metal. At the time, it was produced in the form of a powder, and was highly pyrophoric. It could be pressed and sintered and stored in cans, but to be useful, it needed to be melted and cast. The Ames team found that molten uranium could be cast in a graphite container. Although graphite was known to react with uranium, this could be managed because the carbide formed only where the two touched.