Harold Clayton Urey: born here, 1893 — the Nobel laureate

29 April 1893 – 5 January 1981 · tie: BORN here, printed exactly so

The birth, verified: Harold Clayton Urey was born in Walkerton, Indiana, on 29 April 1893 — stated in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's biography and in the Nobel Foundation's biographical record alike, read first-hand. He was the son of Samuel Clayton Urey, a schoolteacher and minister of the Church of the Brethren, and Cora Rebecca Reinoehl (one Britannica rendering prints the surname "Reinsehl"; the main biographical record gives "Reinoehl," and the variant is noted, not merged). The tie is birth, and its limits are printed with it: the family's Hoosier years were his first years only. The schooling record the biographies give is that he taught in rural public schools from 1911 to 1914, first in Indiana and then in Montana, where the family had removed and where he was chiefly raised and schooled. No record reached puts the boy Urey in a Walkerton schoolroom; any telling that has him educated here outruns its sources, and this section does not make it. What the town can claim, whole and exactly, is the birth — and it is claim enough.

The career: from Montana he went to the University of California, Berkeley, and took his doctorate under Gilbert N. Lewis; to Columbia University in 1934; and into the first rank of the century's scientists on one discovery: heavy hydrogen — deuterium — for which he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934, "for his discovery of heavy hydrogen," in the prize's own words. In the Second World War he directed the isotope-separation work at Columbia that fed the Manhattan Project, and for it received the Medal for Merit in 1946 — a civilian decoration, printed in the Wars file at its proper boundary so it is never mistaken for a soldier's award. In 1953, with his student Stanley Miller, he ran the Miller–Urey experiment, the first laboratory simulation of the conditions of the early Earth, which produced amino acids from simple gases and founded a field. The honors roll the biographies carry: the Willard Gibbs Medal (1934), the Davy Medal (1940), the Franklin Medal (1943), fellowship of the Royal Society (1947), the J. Lawrence Smith Medal (1962), the National Medal of Science (1964), the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1966), the Priestley Medal (1973), the Goldschmidt Award (1975). He died at La Jolla, California, on 5 January 1981.

The town's keeping of him: Walkerton keeps a state historical marker to Urey — listed in the Historical Marker Database within the town, six-tenths of a mile from the 1947 war memorial in Woodlawn Cemetery — the town's one commemoration of its most famous son, standing in the town he left as a child. His summit standing in this section needs no embroidery: of every person in this build, he is the one whose name the whole world holds, and he is Walkerton's by the first fact of his life.

Sources:

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Harold C. Urey" — birth, parents, teaching years, career and awards, read.
2. Nobel Foundation / Lindau Mediatheque, Harold C. Urey profile — the 1934 prize and its citation, the Manhattan Project work, the Medal for Merit (1946), the National Medal of Science (1964).
3. Historical Marker Database — the Urey marker's existence and position in Walkerton.