Word: hydrogen
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Professor Urey is the discoverer of the heavy isotope of hydrogen, which is the essential element of "heavy water...
Last week Dr. Lawrence reported that, by whirling deutons (heavy hydrogen nuclei) between the poles of his magnet, he had induced radioactivity in copper, heaviest of the dozens of elements in which this behavior has been observed. In so doing he observed a curious effect which he could only interpret thus: The flying deuton, as if daunted by the massive copper nucleus and its powerful positive charge, split just outside it into a neutron and a proton having no charge to encumber it, the neutron slipped into the nucleus, leaving the proton outside...
Every molecule of pure "heavy water" contains two atoms of deuterium, which is hydrogen of the double-weight form identified in 1931 by Columbia's Harold Clayton Urey. Deuterium is not rare in nature. It is present in ordinary water to the extent of one part in 4,500.* Thus when suitable methods for separating it were worked out, high concentrations of heavy water became common. Nowadays one or two chemical manufacturers list and sell heavy water 99.5% pure...
...case of tritium, triple-weight hydrogen, is different. Its discovery was foreshadowed by the somewhat dubious magneto-optic method which anticipated the identification of deuterium. Then, in England, Lord Rutherford bounced deutons (deuterium nuclei) together, got protons and something of mass three which he thought was either an unknown form of helium or triple-weight hydrogen. Cautious Lord Rutherford took his time ascertaining that the new particles were both helium and tritium. Meantime Dr. Merle Antony Tuve and his associates at the Carnegie Institution of Washington had identified tritium particles by measuring their mass as indicated by the curvature...
Nonetheless at Princeton, where intensive research on the heavy forms of hydrogen was under way, Dr. Pierce Wilson Selwood took 75 tons of tap water and started reducing it by repeated electrolysis and selective evaporation. The tons shrank to hundredweights, the hundredweights to pounds, the pounds to ounces. Last week Chairman Hugh Stott Taylor of the Chemistry Department announced that Dr. Selwood's final residue is ten drops (half a gram) of heavy water containing one part of tritium in 10,000- richest sample of triple-weight hydrogen in the world, possibly rich enough to reveal something...