His principal achievement was his research on the properties of materials exposed to very high pressures, which he used to derive information on the nature of the Earth's interior.

[2][3] Born on 16 January 1887, Adams grew up in central Illinois, where he received his early education in a one-room school.

Adams retired from the Carnegie Institution in 1952 but continued to carry out research, first as a consultant to the director of the National Bureau of Standards and then from 1958 until 1965 as a professor of geophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He helped to develop a new method for annealing glass which was effective for large blocks, and then used this technique to make a 200-inch mirror for the Hale Telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory.

By recording the piston displacement required in order to achieve a given pressure, Adams could find the volume change of the rocks and their bulk modulus.