thumb|upright|Harold Urey, deuterium's discoverer It was first detected spectroscopically in late 1931 by Harold Urey, a chemist at Columbia University. Urey's collaborator, Ferdinand Brickwedde, distilled five liters of cryogenically produced liquid hydrogen to of liquid, using the low-temperature physics laboratory that had recently been established at the National Bureau of Standards (now National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Washington, DC. The technique had previously been used to isolate heavy isotopes of neon. The cryogenic boiloff technique concentrated the fraction of the mass-2 isotope of hydrogen to a degree that made its spectroscopic identification unambiguous.
thumb|upright|Harold Urey deuterium's discoverer It was first detected spectroscopically in late 1931 by Harold Urey a chemist at Columbia University Urey's collaborator Ferdinand Brickwedde distilled five liters of cryogenically produced liquid hydrogen to of liquid using the low-temperature physics laboratory that had recently been established at the National Bureau of Standards (now National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Washington DC The technique had previously been used to isolate heavy isotopes of neon The cryogenic boiloff technique concentrated the fraction of the mass-2 isotope of hydrogen to a degree that made its spectroscopic identification unambiguous