Hurst was born on 13 October 1927 in the rural town of Ponza, Bell County, Kentucky located near Pineville, Kentucky. His father was James H. Hurst and mother was Myrtle Wright Hurst. As a boy, he had a keen interest in Thomas Edison. Hurst grew up on the family farm and came from a large family with two brothers and two sisters. In 2010, he died of a brain aneurism and was buried at Oak Ridge Memorial Park.
Education
Hurst attended high school at Bell County High School in Pineville, Kentucky. At the age of 15, he enrolled in Berea College. In 1947, Hurst received a B.A. degree in physics and a minor in mathematics from Berea College. He attended the University of Kentucky and graduated in 1948 with the M.S. degree in physics. During registration at UK, he met Rufus Ritchie. Ritchie became a longtime friend and the two worked on several projects together. After graduation, they both went to ORNL. In 1959, Hurst was awarded a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Tennessee with a dissertation titled "Attachment of Low-Energy Electrons in Mixtures Containing Oxygen."
Work
In 1948, Hurst was recruited by Karl Z. Morgan and landed a research position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the Health Physics Division. His starting salary was $325 per month. He made significant contributions in the development of radiation detectors and instrumentation, neutron dosimetry and spectroscopy, and field sample analysis. While working at Oak Ridge, he earned a PhD in physics from the University of Tennessee in 1959. In 1966, Hurst accepted a position at the University of Kentucky as Professor of Physics. Hurst and the team of L.J. Deal and H.H. Rossi performed gamma and neutron radiation measurements at the Nevada Test Site during Operation Upshot–Knothole for the Atomic Energy Commission. For Operation PLUMBBOB, Hurst was again asked to participate along with Ritchie at the Nevada Test Site to collect radiation dosimetry data for human exposures during the tests. In the 1960s, Hurst along with L.B. O'Kelly, E.B. Wagner, J.A. Stockdale, James E. Parks, and F.J. Davis investigated time-of-flightelectron transport in gases. The group utilized ethylene, water vapor and hydrogen to study and determine time-of-flight electron diffusion coefficients and electron drift velocities for these gases. Hurst led efforts to investigate time-of-flight of electron transport in atomic and molecular gases. In the mid 1960s, Hurst pursued researches that involved electron swarm measurement, swarm‐beam techniques and swarm drift to determine electron capturecross sections in heavy water, chlorobenzene, bromobenzene, ethylene and ethylene mixtures.
