Harold Urey
American physical chemist (1893-1981)
- Fame58.9
- Momentum0.8
- Wikipedia3.6K
United StatesHe found heavy hydrogen—deuterium—and won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. Then he helped split uranium for the bomb, then sparked the idea that life emerged from methane and lightning, then read Moon rocks like climate diaries.
About
Born in Walkerton, Indiana, in 1893, Harold Clayton Urey studied thermodynamics under Gilbert N. Lewis at Berkeley, earned his PhD in 1923, and spent a year at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen. At Columbia in 1931, his work separating isotopes led to the discovery of deuterium. During World War II he turned that skill toward uranium enrichment, heading the Columbia team that developed gaseous diffusion—the sole method used in the early postwar period. At the University of Chicago after the war, he speculated that Earth's early atmosphere was ammonia, methane, and hydrogen; his student Stan…
Photos
Platforms
Score breakdown
The six component signals behind the Fame score, and their ranks across the leaderboards.
Sources
- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
You might know
Similar profiles worth watching
_(cropped).jpg?width=1200)
%2C_microbiologist_and_chemist_Wellcome_V0026980.jpg)