A vial of glowing helium
13 October 2023
Helium is the second lightest and second most abundant element in the universe. It has atomic number 2 and the symbol He. It is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, and inert, the first of the noble gases on the periodic table. Most of the helium in the universe was created during the Big Bang, but new helium is also continuously being formed through the fusion of hydrogen in stars. Helium is perhaps best known for its use in balloons, but it has numerous industrial uses.
Helium also has the distinction of being the first element discovered outside of earth before it was found on earth, being first seen by astronomer Jules Janssen as a line in the spectra of the sun during the solar eclipse in 1868 in India. Later that year, Norman Lockyer also observed the same spectral line and postulated that it was a new element. Lockyer evidently proposed the name helium, from the Greek ἥλιος (helios, meaning sun) + -ium, but did not include the name in any of his published papers.
The first person to use the name helium in publication was William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in his August 1871 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Thomson credited Lockyer, along with chemist Edward Frankland with the name in a footnote in the published address:
During six or eight precious minutes of time, spectroscopes have been applied to the solar atmosphere and to the corona seen round the dark disk of the Moon eclipsing the Sun. Some of the wonderful results of such observations, made in India on the occasion of the eclipse of August 1868, were described by Professor Stokes in a previous address. Valuable results have, through the liberal assistance given by the British and American Governments, been obtained also from the total eclipse of last December, notwithstanding a generally unfavourable condition of weather. It seems to have been proved that at least some sensible part of the light of the “corona” is a terrestrial atmospheric halo or dispersive reflection of the light of the glowing hydrogen and “helium”* round the sun.
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* Frankland and Lockyer find the yellow prominences to give a very decided bright line not far from D, but hitherto not identified with any terrestrial flame. It seems to indicate a new substance, which they propose to call Helium.
In 1881 physicist Luigi Palmieri detected helium in the spectra of material erupted from Mount Vesuvius, and in 1895, chemist William Ramsay was the first to isolate helium on Earth.
Sources:
Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 6 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. helium, n.
Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin). “Address of Sir William Thomson, Knt., LL.D., F.R.S., President.” Report of the Forty-First Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Held at Edinburgh in August 1871. London: John Murray, 1872, lxxxiv–cv at xcix. Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Photo credit: Chemical Elements: A Virtual Museum, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.