F.G. Brickwedde, Co-Discoverer of Deuterium, Dies

Ferdinand Graft Brickwedde, one of the scientists who discovered deuterium, has died at age 86.

Brickwedde, Harold C. Urey and George M. Murphy discovered deuterium, and Urey, director of the project, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery in 1934. Deuterium, a hydrogen isotope, is used to slow fission reactions in nuclear reactors in so-called “heavy water” experiments. The isotope has also been used in recent ground-breaking experiments in nuclear fusion.

Brickwedde died of a heart attack Wednesday at a nursing home.

Born in 1903 in Baltimore, Brickwedde earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, and master’s and doctoral degrees in physics at Johns Hopkins University. He joined the National Bureau of Standards in Washington in 1925. In 1932 Brickwedde directed the first U.S. research team to liquefy helium.

From 1946 to 1956, Brickwedde headed the National Bureau of Standards’ low-temperature laboratory, and was chief of the bureau’s thermodynamics section from its inception in 1946 to 1952. During that time, Brickwedde headed a group that designed and established the Cryogenic Engineering Laboratory for hydrogen liquefaction at Boulder, Colo.

Brickwedde also was a consultant at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and the Cryogenics Laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M.

He came to Penn State in 1956 and was dean of the College of Chemistry and Physics until 1963, when he was named to an emeritus position.