Solar Discovery

1868

A noble gas, helium was first discovered 150 years ago, on August 18, 1868 by several scientists who concurrenlty observed the same spectral line around the world, however the French astronomer, Pierre-Jules-Cesar Janssen (far left) used this opportunity to examine spectrographs of the sun’s corona. It was Sir Norman Lockyer who realized that this line was produced by a previously unknown element, Janssen and Lockyear named helium after the source of the discovery, the sun, or helios, and thinking that the readings were showing a metal the ium was added to its name, at the time, no helium had been detected on Earth. A side note the naming of events and devices using the name Helios was normal during this period such as the Heliometer the telescope that enabled measurement of distances between stars.