David Myers, Jr., age 11, of Decatur, I11., for his question:
WHEN WAS HELIUM DISCOVERED?
Helium is a lightweight gas and chemical element. It is called an inert gas or noble gas because it does not combine with other elements. It was first found on earth in 1895.
A Scottish chemist named Sir William Ramsay and two Swedish chemists, Nils Langlet and Per Theodor Cleve, were the first to find helium in the mineral clevite.
Evidence of helium in the sun was discovered by an English astronomer named Sir Joseph Lockyer in 1868. Lockyer found the evidence while studying the sun's light during an eclipse. It was Lockyer who invented the heilum name from the Greek word "helios," meaning "sun."
Helium makes up only a small fraction of the earth's matter, but it is one of the most common elements in the universe. The sun and other stars are made mostly of helium and hydrogen. Helium makes up about 23 percent of th matter in the visible universe.
Helium was first found in natural gas in Kansas in 1903. In 1929, the first United States Bureau of Mines began producing helium at Amarillo, Texas. Since then, other government plants have been built in Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
Privately owned helium plants are now located in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Helium is also produced in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Most of the world's helium today comes from five natural gas fields in the United States: the Cliffside field in the Texas Panhandle; the Greenwood field in Kansas and Colorado; the Hogoton field in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas; the Keyes field in Oklahoma; and the Panhandle field in Texas.
These five fields contain an estimated 180 billion cubic feet of helium.
Helium plants in the United States produce about 2 billion cubic feet of helium each year. The government stores more than half of this amount underground in the Cliffside field for future use.
About 700 million cubic feet of helium are used in the United States each year. Federal agencies use about, three fourths of this amount while private industries use the rest.
The government's chief use of helium is in maintaining the proper pressure in rockets. Pressure must be maintained in rocket fuel tanks during flight, or the thin walls of the large tanks might collapse as the fuel drains from them. Helium also produces the pressure that forces fuel into rocket pumping systems.
The largest industrial use of helium is in heliarc welding, a type of electric arc welding. The inert helium keeps oxygen in the air from reaching the metal. If oxygen reaches the metal, it may cause the metal either to burn or to corrode. Helium is used to prevent chemicals from reacting with other elements during storage, handling and transportation.
Helium is also used to fill scientific balloons. In air, helium has 92 percent of the lifting ability of hydrogen. It is safer than hydrogen because it will not burn, as hydrogen will.
Helium is a colorless, oderless and tasteless gas.