Lockyer, Joseph Norman (1836-1920), a British astronomer, discovered the chemical element helium on the sun about 30 years before that element was found on Earth.
Lockyer started investigating the sun during the 1860’s, using a telescope with a spectrometer attached to it. A spectrometer is a device that spreads out light into a spectrum (a band of colors; plural spectra) and displays it for study. During a solar eclipse in 1868, Lockyer observed the spectra of prominences, threads of material that rise from the solar surface. He found that prominences are gaseous. The French astronomer Pierre J. Janssen, working in India, made the same discovery.
Lines in the solar spectrum correspond to elements that are present on and near the sun. But both Lockyer and Janssen observed a line that did not correspond to any element then known. Lockyer concluded that this line had to be produced by a new element. Lockyer and the English chemist Sir Edward Frankland suggested the name helium for the element. The name comes from helios, the Greek word for sun.
Lockyer was knighted in 1868. In 1869, he was elected to the Royal Society, one of the world’s foremost scientific organizations. In the same year, he founded the scientific journal Nature, which he edited for the following 50 years.
Lockyer was born on May 17, 1836, in Rugby, near Coventry, England, and was educated at private schools on the European continent. In 1857, he was appointed to the British War Office. In 1870, he became secretary of a royal commission for the advancement of science. When the commission finished its work in 1875, Lockyer received an appointment to the Royal College of Science (now part of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) of the University of London. He became a professor of astronomical research there in 1885. The college built a solar observatory, which he directed until 1902. Lockyer then built his own observatory near his home in Salcombe Regis, near Exeter. He opened the observatory in 1912, and he worked there until his death on Aug. 16, 1920.
