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.