He

Helium

Helium was first discovered in 1868, not on Earth but in the Sun’s spectrum. French astronomer Pierre Janssen observed an unexpected yellow spectral line during a solar eclipse in India, which indicated the presence of a new element. The element was named helium after Helios, the Greek word for Sun.

It wasn’t until 1895 that helium was finally found on earth, when Sir William Ramsay isolated it from a uranium-bearing mineral called cleveite. The discovery that helium existed on Earth in significant quantities came in 1905, when scientists found large reserves of it in natural gas wells in Kansas.