History
Harold Urey discovered the isotope deuterium in 1931 and was later able to concentrate it in water. Urey's mentor Gilbert Newton Lewis isolated the first sample of pure heavy water by electrolysis in 1933. George de Hevesy and Hoffer used heavy water in 1934 in one of the first biological tracer experiments, to estimate the rate of turnover of water in the human body. The history of large-quantity production and use of heavy water in early nuclear experiments is given below. Emilian Bratu and Otto Redlich studied the autodissociation of heavy water in 1934.
Read more about this topic: Heavy Water
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“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
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“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
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