Harold C. Urey

Harold C. Urey (born April 29, 1893, Walkerton, Ind., U.S.—died Jan. 5, 1981, La Jolla, Calif.) American scientist awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1934 for his discovery of the heavy form of hydrogen known as deuterium. He was a key figure in the development of the atomic bomb and made fundamental contributions to a widely accepted theory of the origin of the Earth and other planets.

Background and early life

Urey was one of three children of Samuel Clayton Urey and Cora Rebecca Reinsehl. The elder Urey, a schoolteacher and minister, died when the boy was six. His mother remarried and had two daughters in that marriage.

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Faces of Science

After high school, Urey taught in rural public schools from 1911 to 1914, first in Indiana and then in Montana. While teaching at a mining camp in Montana, Urey decided to attend the University of Montana in Missoula, where he majored in zoology with additional study in chemistry. After graduating in 1917, Urey worked as a chemist during World War I, an experience that set his future in chemistry. After the war, he returned to the University of Montana, where he taught chemistry for two years before beginning graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley. Under the direction of Gilbert N. Lewis, he received a doctorate for his dissertation on electron distribution in the energy levels of the hydrogen atom and thermodynamic calculations on gaseous molecules. Although the necessary molecular properties were not then available, Urey developed good approximate values. His work led to accepted methods for calculating thermodynamic properties from spectroscopic data. With an American-Scandinavian Fellowship, Urey spent 1923–24 with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. Afterward, Urey joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., where he emphasized the importance of quantum mechanics for students of chemistry and directed his research toward the spectroscopic study of molecules. With the American physicist Arthur E. Ruark, he published Atoms, Molecules and Quanta (1930), an early discussion in English of the new field of quantum mechanics.

While visiting his mother in Seattle, Wash., in 1926, Urey met Frieda Daum, a bacteriologist from Lawrence, Kan. They married and had four children.

Deuterium and atomic bomb research

In 1929 Urey moved to Columbia University in New York City, where he continued his work on the properties of molecules and atoms. The theory of isotopes—i.e., the idea that an individual element may consist of atoms with the same number of protons but with different masses—had been developed by the English chemist Frederick Soddy in 1913. The less-abundant isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen had been discovered by others by the end of the 1920s, and Urey remarked that only the discovery of isotopes of hydrogen—the lightest element—could be more significant. Urey had a systematic chart of the isotopes, both known and predicted, on his office wall. This system included two additional isotopes of hydrogen—both undiscovered—one with twice the mass (²H) and one with three times the mass (³H) of ordinary hydrogen (¹H). A letter to the editor from two physicists in the July 1, 1931, issue of Physical Review discussed some indirect evidence for the natural abundance of ²H—i.e., “heavy hydrogen” (which Urey later named deuterium) as one atom for every 4,500 atoms of ¹H. Within days of reading this article, Urey devised an experiment to look for deuterium. After obtaining samples of hydrogen expected to be enriched in deuterium, he detected a spectrum that agreed with his predictions for deuterium from the Bohr atomic model. In 1934 Urey received the Nobel Prize, as well as the Willard Gibbs Medal from the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society, for this discovery. Shortly after winning the Nobel Prize, Urey wrote the entry on deuterium for the 1936 printing of the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Urey continued to investigate isotopes of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur. By 1939 he and his associates had developed successful methods for separating the rarer isotopes of all these elements, making them readily available for laboratory research. Urey wrote several papers on the separation of isotopes, including those of the heavy elements, and during World War II he was active in the U.S. government’s program for separating the fissionable uranium isotope ²³⁵U from the more-abundant ²³⁸U for use in the atomic bomb.

Urey served on various advisory committees for the Manhattan Project and directed efforts to separate the isotopes with several techniques, including gaseous diffusion. This was a huge and complex operation, beset by numerous problems in the development of a suitable diffusion barrier for the uranium hexafluoride. When the barrier that Urey had been working on was not chosen for the diffusion plant being built at Oak Ridge, Tenn., he gave up his work on diffusion. Although he remained nominal head of the project, he tried to convince U.S. President Harry S. Truman not to drop the bomb on Japan. After the war, Urey worked for civilian, rather than military, control of atomic weapons, and he proposed an international ban on their production and stockpiling.

Origin of the solar system

Two postwar events at the University of Chicago, where Urey became a professor in 1945, dramatically altered the focus of his research. The Face of the Moon (1949) by Ralph Baldwin, which presented scientific evidence that lunar craters were formed by asteroid and comet impacts and that the lunar mares were formed by lava flows, inspired an intense interest in the origin of the solar system that lasted for the rest of Urey’s life. His book The Planets: Their Origin and Development (1952) has been described as “the first systematic and detailed chronology of the origin of the Earth, Moon, the meteorites, and the solar system.” Initially, Urey rejected the hypothesis that the Moon and Earth had a common origin, believing instead that the Moon arose independently, was older than the Earth, and was only later captured by the Earth. Thus, Urey argued, the Moon should provide clues to the early solar system that the Earth could not. His ideas led to intense debates among scientists in the 1950s and ’60s, but he was ultimately able to influence the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in undertaking the Apollo program of lunar exploration. After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1958, Urey became professor-at-large at the new campus of the University of California at San Diego. There he continued his research program in the planetary sciences. When Apollo 11 brought back rocks and dust from the Moon in 1969, Urey was one of the six scientists who first examined them. Later examinations of these rocks showed that his hypothesis about the Moon was wrong. Still the good scientist in his late 70s, however, Urey revised his thinking on the basis of the new evidence.

Legacy

Urey cared deeply about his fellow human beings, and he regarded the United States’ major problem as “the proper education and inspiration of our youth.” Politically active, he served as science advisor to the Democratic Party and to president-elect John F. Kennedy. He received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1964. After retiring in 1970, Urey suffered from parkinsonism and cardiac disease.