Harold Urey and the discovery of deuterium

Abstract

It was on Thanksgiving day in 1931 that Harold Clayton Urey found definitive evidence of a heavy isotope of hydrogen. Urey's discovery of deuterium is a story of the fruitful use of primitive nuclear and thermodynamic models. But it is also a story of missed opportunity and errors—errors that are particularly interesting because of the crucial positive role that some of them played in the discovery. A look at the nature of the theoretical and experimental work that led to the detection of hydrogen of mass 2 reveals much about the way physics and chemistry were done half a century ago.

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