Norman Feather FRS[1] FRSE PRSE (16 November 1904 – 14 August 1978),[4] was an English nuclear physicist.
Feather and Egon Bretscher were working at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge in 1940, when they proposed that the 239 isotope of element 94 (plutonium) would be better able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction.
Feather was the author of a series of noted introductory texts on the history, fundamental concepts, and meaning of physics.
[5] Feather was educated at Bridlington Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, before taking a year in the University of London and gaining a Bachelor of Science degree (first class) in 1926.
Since polonium was difficult to obtain and expensive at the time, Feather acquired a large number of the discarded radon tubes.
[12] In 1940 Feather and Egon Bretscher at the Cavendish Laboratory, made a breakthrough in nuclear research for the Tube Alloys project.
Bretscher and Feather showed theoretically feasible grounds that element 94 would be readily 'fissionable' by both slow and fast neutrons, and had the added advantage of being chemically different from uranium and therefore could easily be separated from it.
The production and identification of the first sample of plutonium in 1941 is generally credited to Glenn Seaborg, who used a cyclotron rather than a reactor.