The helium story began in 1868 when French astronomer Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen noticed a yellow line in the sun’s spectrum whilst studying a total solar eclipse. The story goes that the English astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer identified this line could not have been produced by any known element at the time and named the new unknown element ‘helium.’
It was not until 1895 that the hunt for helium on Earth ended, when Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsey discovered helium in uranium minerals and then trace amounts in the atmosphere.
On Earth, helium is formed from the radioactive decay of naturally occurring isotopes of uranium and thorium in the Earth’s crust. It is found in significantly high concentrations in certain natural gas deposits, with the large-scale recovery of helium from natural gas remaining the main source of helium for decades.
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