Charles Allen Thomas (February 15, 1900 – March 29, 1982) was a noted American chemist and businessman, and an important figure in the Manhattan Project.
He researched the chemistry of hydrocarbons and polymers, and developed the proton theory of aluminium chloride, which helped explain a variety of chemical reactions, publishing a book on the subject in 1941.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson appointed Thomas to serve on a 1946 panel to appraise international atomic inspection, which culminated in the Acheson–Lilienthal Report.
At General Motors, Thomas also worked on a process for extracting bromine from sea water, and with Midgely on making synthetic rubber from isoprene.
Thomas left General Motors in 1924 for a job as a research chemist, a joint venture between GM and Esso to make and sell tetraethyllead gasoline additives.
Queeny moved Thomas to St Louis, Missouri, where he became director of Central Research, while Hochwalt remained in Dayton to work on Acrilan, Monsanto's acrylic fiber.
[8] In December 1942, during World War II, Thomas joined the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) as the Deputy Chief of its Division 8, which was responsible for propellants, explosives and the like.
Thomas was then invited to a meeting in Washington DC with Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project, and, as he discovered when he got there, Conant.
[14] They offered him a post as a deputy to Robert Oppenheimer, at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, but he did not wish to move his family or give up his responsibilities at Monsanto.
[18] Unfortunately, experiments by Emilio G. Segrè and his P-5 Group at Los Alamos on reactor-produced plutonium showed that it contained impurities in the form of the isotope plutonium-240, which has a far higher spontaneous fission rate than plutonium-239, making it unsuitable for use in the Thin Man gun-type nuclear weapon design.
[19] Thomas attended a series of crisis meetings in Chicago with Connant, Groves, Arthur Compton, Kenneth Nichols and Enrico Fermi.
In April 1943, Robert Serber had proposed that instead of relying on spontaneous fission, the chain reaction inside the bomb should be triggered by a neutron initiator.
[21][17] Thomas established the project in the Runnymede Playhouse on the grounds of his wife's family estate in a wealthy residential section of Oakwood, a suburb of Dayton.
[26] Thomas brought in some 60 new staff from Dayton to help run the Clinton Laboratories, and he persuaded Eugene Wigner to come from Chicago to work on new reactor designs.
[27] In 1946 Secretary of State Dean Acheson appointed Thomas to serve on a panel with Robert Oppenheimer, David Lilienthal, Chester I. Barnard and Harry Winne to appraise international atomic inspection, culminating in the Acheson–Lilienthal Report.
[28] In the wake of the Sputnik crisis, Thomas was part of a group that persuaded Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy to establish DARPA.
He was involved with organizations including the Boy Scouts of America, Radio Free Europe and the St Louis Research Council.
To this end he donated $600,000 to Washington University in St. Louis as an endowment for a chair, the Charles Allen Thomas Professor of Chemistry.
"[7] In retirement, Thomas spent much of his time managing Magnolia Plantation, a 15,000-acre (6,100 ha) family farm near Albany, Georgia, where he employed a staff of 50 and grew peanuts, pecans, soybeans, corn and timber.