1868-1895: Helium - The book of science

Helium
Atomic number 2
Noble
Commentary

Guntur, West Hampstead—Pierre Janssen, Norman Lockyer, Luigi Palmieri, William Ramsay, Per Teodor Cleve, Nils Abraham Langlet elements

Helium

I. Celestial
Separately, Pierre Janssen and Norman Lockyer
observed light from the solar chromosphere
with a spectroscope during the eclipse in 1868
and found a bright yellow line
that didn’t show for any element
known to exist on Earth.
Lockyer and Edward Frankland
named the new element
after the Greek word for the sun, hèlios.
II. Terrestrial
In 1882, Luigi Palmieri
detected the yellow spectral line of helium
in gases from lava of Mount Vesuvius.
In 1895, Henry Meirs told William Ramsay
that heating a mineral from Norway
gave off a gas that might be nitrogen.
Ramsay thought the gas might be argon,
but his spectroscope showed a bright yellow line
which showed the gas to be helium.
Meanwhile, in France,
both Per Teodor Cleve and Nils Abraham Langlet
also discovered helium in the same mineral.

Atomic number 2

Almost a quarter of the universe is helium-4;
however, helium is rare on Earth.
In 1903, an oil well in Kansas struck a gas geyser
that was almost two percent helium,
resulting in helium production
for helium-filled airships for World War I.
Cooled liquid helium is a superfluid;
with zero viscosity and zero friction,
it creeps up surfaces to escape containers.

Noble

Helium is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, inert, and monatomic.
It’s the first of the noble gases, and it hardly inspires comparisons.

Why is helium rare on earth? It it light and it doesn’t combine with other elements, so it has floated off into space. What we have is produced by radioactive decay of uranium and thorium inside the earth. No minerals contain helium in their chemical formulae.

Norman Lockyer was the founder, in 1869, of the science journal Nature.