The American Scientist Harold Clayton Urey (1893-1981) received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1934 for his discovery of deuterium, the isotope of heavy hydrogen.

Harold Clayton Urey was born on April 29, 1893, in Walkerton, Ind., the son of Samuel Clayton Urey and Cora Rebecca Reinoehl Urey. After graduation from high school at 18, followed by some three months of education training at Earlham College, Harold taught in small country schools in Indiana and then Montana, where the family had moved. In 1914 he entered Montana State University (Bozeman) and graduated in three years with a baccalaureate in science.

The United States entered World War I in 1916 and Urey began work at the Barrett Chemical Company in Frankford near Philadelphia, preparing toluene for the production of TNT (trinitrotoluene) in 1917. In 1919 he returned to Montana to teach in the department of chemistry for 2 years. In 1921 he entered the graduate school at the University...