Harold Clayton Urey, 29 April 1893 - 5 January 1981

Abstract

Harold Clayton Urey was born in Walkerton, Indiana, on 29 April 1893. He only narrowly passed the examination after grade school for entry into high school. After graduating from high school in 1911 and spending the required three months of educational training, he taught in country schools for three years, first in Indiana and then in Montana, where his mother and stepfather, brother and sisters had gone. It was while teaching at a school in a mining camp in the Gallatian Mountains and staying with a family whose son, Brian O. Wilson, decided to go to college that Urey formed a desire to get a college education. In September 1914 he entered the University of Montana, Missoula, with the intention of studying psychology, but he majored in biology with a minor in chemistry. To earn money during these three years he waited at table in a girls’ dormitory and after the first year became an instructor in the biology department; one summer he worked on the railroad and on an irrigation scheme. On the occasion of his Willard Gibbs medal address, years later, Urey spoke warmly of the friendships and inspiration he had received from his professors at Montana, and singled out A. W. Bray in biology and E. H. Jesse, J. W. Howard and W. N. Jones in chemistry, who, he said, largely determined the direction of his scientific career. His first independent research project was a study of the protozoans in the Missoula river.