Dr. Theodore “Ted” Magel (1918-2008) was an American metallurgist.
After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, Magel joined the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory as a research associate. In 1944, he was asked to come to Los Alamos by J. Robert Oppenheimer to work on purifying plutonium.
At Los Alamos, Magel conducted one of the earliest refinements of plutonium metal using a centrifuge, producing the world’s first gram-scale pieces, or “buttons,” of plutonium metal. Subsequently, he was accidentally exposed to plutonium and had a piece of plutonium permanently lodged in his finger, but reported no health effects.