Norman Lockyer

Based on Wikipedia: Norman Lockyer

The Man Who Found Sunlight's Secret Element

In 1868, a clerk at the British War Office pointed a telescope at the Sun from his garden in West Hampstead and discovered an element that didn't exist on Earth. He named it helium, after the Greek word for sun. Twenty-seven years would pass before anyone found the stuff here on our own planet.

This was Norman Lockyer, a man whose restless curiosity would lead him to co-discover an element, found one of the world's most influential scientific journals, and pioneer an entirely new field that connected ancient stone monuments to the movements of stars.

An Unlikely Path to the Stars

Norman Lockyer wasn't trained as a scientist. He was a civil servant, pushing papers at the War Office while the real action of his life happened after work hours. His father had been a pioneer of the electric telegraph, and something of that tinkering spirit passed down to the son. After a conventional education enriched by travel through Switzerland and France, Lockyer settled into what looked like an ordinary Victorian life in Wimbledon with his wife Winifred, who translated French scientific works into English.

But Lockyer was anything but ordinary in his private hours. He was a "keen amateur astronomer," as the polite phrase goes, which meant he spent his evenings squinting through a telescope at the heavens. His particular obsession was the Sun.

This fixation would change everything.

Breaking Light Apart

To understand what Lockyer accomplished, you need to understand spectroscopy, which is essentially the science of breaking light into its component colors and reading the story hidden within.

When you pass sunlight through a prism, it spreads into a rainbow. But look closely at that rainbow through the right instruments, and you'll see something strange: dark lines cutting across the spectrum at specific wavelengths. These aren't flaws or noise. They're fingerprints.

Every element absorbs light at characteristic wavelengths. Sodium leaves its mark at one set of positions, iron at another, hydrogen at still another. By reading these dark absorption lines, scientists could determine what distant objects were made of without ever touching them. It was, and remains, one of the most powerful tools in all of science.

In the 1860s, Lockyer became captivated by this technique. From his new home in West Hampstead, using a six-and-a-quarter-inch telescope, he began systematically studying the Sun's spectrum.

A Yellow Line That Shouldn't Exist

In 1868, Lockyer observed a prominent yellow line in the spectrum taken near the edge of the Sun. Its wavelength was about 588 nanometers, just slightly shorter than the well-known "D" lines produced by sodium.

But here's the thing: no known element produced a line at that wavelength.

Lockyer faced a choice. He could assume he'd made a measurement error, that the line was simply a misidentified sodium signal. This would have been the safe, conservative interpretation. Instead, he made a bold leap: he proposed that the Sun contained an element unknown on Earth.

He called it helium.

The name came from "helios," the Greek word for sun. It was an audacious bit of naming for something that existed only as a mysterious yellow line in a spectrum. Lockyer was essentially saying: I believe this element is real, even though no one has ever isolated it, touched it, or detected it anywhere except in sunlight.

A French Connection

Lockyer wasn't quite alone in his observation. On August 18, 1868, the French scientist Pierre Janssen had observed the same yellow line during a solar eclipse. When their papers announcing the discovery reached the French Academy of Sciences, they arrived on the same day.

This simultaneous arrival created one of those happy coincidences in scientific history where credit could be shared gracefully rather than fought over bitterly. Lockyer and Janssen are now jointly credited with helium's discovery, and the French government even struck a medal commemorating their achievement, featuring both men's profiles.

But there was a crucial difference in their situations. Janssen had needed a total solar eclipse to make his observation, when the Moon blocked the Sun's blinding disk and allowed the faint spectrum of the solar atmosphere to be seen. Lockyer, working from cloudy London with his modest backyard telescope, had figured out how to observe the same spectral features without an eclipse at all.

This technical innovation was arguably as important as the discovery itself.

Twenty-Seven Years in Limbo

For more than a quarter century, helium remained a solar phantom. Scientists could see its fingerprint in sunlight, but no one could find a trace of it on Earth. The element existed only as a theoretical construct, a name attached to a spectral line.

Then, in 1895, the Scottish chemist William Ramsay was studying a uranium mineral called cleveite. When he heated the mineral and analyzed the gases released, he found that same telltale yellow line. Helium, it turned out, had been hiding in Earth's rocks all along, trapped in minerals and slowly released through radioactive decay.

Lockyer had been right. The element he'd inferred from nothing more than a sliver of yellow light was as real as iron or gold.

Founding Nature

Discovering a new element would have been enough for most careers. Lockyer wasn't most people.

In 1869, he founded a journal called Nature. His goal was to facilitate the transmission of ideas between scientific disciplines, to create a venue where physicists and biologists and chemists could all encounter each other's work.

Nature would become, over the following century and a half, arguably the most prestigious scientific journal in the world. The double helix structure of DNA was announced in Nature. The discovery of the ozone hole was published in Nature. When scientists want to tell the world about their most significant findings, Nature is often where they turn.

Lockyer remained its editor for fifty years, from 1869 until shortly before his death in 1920. He shaped the journal's character, its standards, and its role in scientific communication during the most transformative period in the history of science.

From Amateur to Professor

By 1885, Lockyer had shed any remaining amateur status. He became the world's first professor of astronomical physics at the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, which would later become part of Imperial College London. A Solar Physics Observatory was built specifically for him there, and he directed research until 1913.

He led eight expeditions to observe solar eclipses, traveling to Sicily in 1870, India in 1871, and India again in 1898, among other destinations. Each eclipse offered a brief window when the Sun's corona and outer atmosphere could be studied directly, and Lockyer made the most of these fleeting opportunities.

Reading the Stars in Stone

In his later years, Lockyer became fascinated by an entirely different question: did ancient peoples align their monuments to the stars?

While traveling in Greece in 1890, he noticed that many temples faced east-west, toward the rising or setting sun. In Egypt, he found temples oriented toward the midsummer sunrise or toward Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. These alignments, he suspected, weren't coincidental.

His most famous work in this area concerned Stonehenge. Lockyer noted that the monument's Heel Stone aligned with the midsummer sunrise. Using the slow shift in the Sun's rising position caused by changes in Earth's axial tilt, he calculated backward to determine when the alignment would have been perfect.

His answer: roughly 1680 BCE.

When radiocarbon dating became available in the 1950s, scientists tested materials from Stonehenge and got a date of about 1800 BCE. Lockyer had been off by only about a century, a remarkable result given that he'd worked solely from astronomical calculations with no way to directly date the stones.

Lockyer effectively pioneered what we now call archaeoastronomy, the study of how ancient peoples understood and used celestial phenomena. His 1894 book "The Dawn of Astronomy" laid out his findings about Egyptian temple alignments and remains a founding text of the field.

A Prolific Author

Lockyer wrote constantly. His published works include "Elementary Lessons in Astronomy," "The Spectroscope and Its Applications," "Studies in Spectrum Analysis," "The Chemistry of the Sun," and dozens more. He wrote about golf. He wrote about Tennyson's nature poetry. He wrote about the influence of brain power on history.

This breadth was characteristic of Victorian polymaths, who hadn't yet been forced by the explosion of knowledge into narrow specializations. Lockyer could move between spectroscopy and ancient temples, between solar physics and literary criticism, because the modern boundaries between disciplines hadn't fully hardened.

Personal Life and Legacy

Lockyer's first wife Winifred died in 1879. They had eight children together, six sons and two daughters. In 1903, at age sixty-seven, Lockyer married again, to Thomazine Mary Brodhurst, who was active in the suffragist movement.

After retiring in 1913, Lockyer didn't retreat into quiet contemplation. Instead, he built an observatory near his new home in Salcombe Regis, a village on the Devon coast. Originally called the Hill Observatory, it was renamed the Norman Lockyer Observatory after his death and was directed for a time by his fifth son, William.

The observatory still exists. After passing through various institutional hands, including a period as part of the University of Exeter, it's now owned by the local council and run by the Norman Lockyer Observatory Society. The University of Exeter maintains a Norman Lockyer Chair in Astrophysics.

The Moon has a crater named Lockyer. So does Mars. There's a Norman Lockyer Island in Nunavut, the Canadian Arctic territory.

The Accidental Element

Helium turned out to be far more important than anyone could have guessed in 1868. It's the second most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen. Stars fuse hydrogen into helium in their cores, releasing the energy that makes them shine. Our Sun converts about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second.

On Earth, helium has become essential for applications Lockyer couldn't have imagined. It's used to cool the superconducting magnets in MRI machines and particle accelerators. It fills party balloons and makes voices squeaky. It's crucial for deep-sea diving, where a helium-oxygen mixture prevents nitrogen narcosis.

And unlike most elements, helium is truly a non-renewable resource on Earth. Once released into the atmosphere, it's light enough to escape our planet's gravity and drift off into space forever. The helium we have comes from radioactive decay deep in Earth's crust, a process far too slow to replenish what we use.

When Norman Lockyer named an element after the Sun, he couldn't have known that he was identifying something that would one day be considered so precious that its waste would become a matter of national policy debate.

The Convergence of Interests

What connects helium, Nature journal, and Stonehenge? At first glance, nothing. But look closer and you see a mind that refused to accept boundaries between domains of inquiry.

Lockyer understood that science advances through cross-pollination. His journal Nature was built on this principle, creating a space where researchers from different fields could encounter each other's ideas. His work on spectroscopy required him to understand both physics and chemistry. His archaeoastronomy demanded knowledge of astronomy, archaeology, history, and ancient religions.

He was a civil servant who became a professor, an amateur who became a professional, a specialist who became a generalist. In an age that increasingly rewarded narrow expertise, Lockyer insisted on following his curiosity wherever it led.

He died in 1920 at his home in Salcombe Regis, at eighty-four years old, and was buried in the local churchyard of St Peter and St Mary. The element he'd found in sunlight had been isolated on Earth for twenty-five years by then. The journal he'd founded was approaching its fiftieth anniversary. The field of archaeoastronomy he'd helped create was beginning to gain academic respectability.

Not bad for someone who started out as a clerk with a telescope in his backyard.