Leo Brewer - Manhattan Project

Manhattan Project

Following his doctoral work, Brewer was immediately recruited by UC Berkeley professor Wendell Latimer to join the top-secret wartime research group that would become known as the Manhattan Engineering District Project. Assigned to work under Professor E.D. Eastman (whose deteriorating health forced him to withdraw from the project soon after work had begun), Brewer headed a group composed of Leroy Bromley, Paul Gilles and Norman Lofgren, assigned with the threefold task of predicting the possible high-temperature properties of the newly discovered element plutonium, then available only in trace amounts; developing refractory materials capable of containing molten plutonium without excessive contamination, even if the worst predictions should be true; and developing a micro-analytical procedure for the determination of oxygen.

The first of these tasks led to a fundamental examination of the behavior of all elements at high temperature, and resulted in a series of papers describing the high-temperature behavior of metals, oxides, halides, and many other compounds. The second task led to the development of the refractory sulfides of Cerium (Ce), Thorium (Th), and Uranium (U). The third task led to development of a micro method of analysis of electropositive metals using a molten platinum bath.

The immediate result of the research was the creation of the new material Cerium Sulfide (CeS), from which they made several hundred crucibles for use at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Brewer's crucibles were ready when the plutonium became available.