Hydrogen isotope biogeochemistry spectroscopic lines for publishable data, Murphy and Urey paired with Ferdinand Brickwedde and distilled a more concentrated pool of heavy hydrogen, known today as deuterium. This work on hydrogen isotopes won Urey the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Also in 1934, scientists Ernest Rutherford, Mark Oliphant, and Paul Harteck, produced the radioactive isotope tritium by hitting deuterium with high energy nuclei. The deuterium used in the experiment was a generous gift of heavy water from the Berkeley physicist Gilbert N Lewis. Bombarding deuterium produced two previously undetected isotopes, helium-3 and hydrogen-3. Rutherford and his colleagues successfully created tritium, but incorrectly
Isotope (counting as stable), and 26 elements have only a single stable isotope (of these, 19 are so-called mononuclidic elements, having a single primordial stable isotope that dominates and fixes the atomic weight of the natural element to high precision; 3 radioactive mononuclidic elements occur as well). In total, there are 253 nuclides that have not been observed to decay. For the 80 elements that have one or more stable isotopes, the average number of stable isotopes is 253/80 = 3.1625 isotopes per element. The proton:neutron ratio is not the only factor affecting nuclear stability. It depends also on evenness or