spooky season

23 October 2023

One of pitfalls in thinking about language is the recency illusion, the idea that a word or phrase is of rather recent vintage when in fact it is much older. Even experts can fall victim to this cognitive bias. I did with the term spooky season, referring to the season leading up to Halloween. Since I had only recently noticed the term, I had thought the alliterative phrase was rather new, when it is actually over a century old.

The earliest appearance of spooky season that I have found is in a headline in the Whittier Daily News for 1 November 1905. The California newspaper places the word spooky in quotation marks, indicating that the editors did not yet consider it a stock phrase:

Mirthful Events
Halloween Parties Many and Delightful
“Spooky” Season is Observed

The next year, another California paper, the Fresno Morning Republican, did the same on 27 October 1906:

This concluded the conventional part of the evening, later the audience being escorted to the social hall down stairs, where ghosts and hobgoblins, pumpkins and apples vied with each other in carrying out the Hallowe’en sentiment. At a mysterious fortune telling booth in one corner the present, past and future was the subject of the witches’ discourse, and all the tricks known to the “spooky” season were tried. The affair was most successful in every way and the ladies are to be congratulated upon having entertained well.

But a week later we get spooky season without any quotation marks in New Orleans’s Daily Picayune of 4 November 1906:

Misses Bertie Moore and Stella Relly entertained the Young Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Y.M.C.A. at a social in which Halloween was celebrated, Wednesday afternoon. The young hostesses, beautifully gowned in white, received their guests in a darkened parlor illuminated only by grotesque jack-o’-lanterns. All the mysticisms of the spooky season bewitched the guests, whose fortunes were told by two forlorn witches that resided in a darkened tent. The refreshments served were appropriate to the occasion.

And within a few years we see the phrase in papers from the Midwest. Omaha’s Evening World-Herald of 28 October 1911 has this:

Ghosts, ghosts everywhere; in the yard, on the porch, in the hall and every room in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jay Laverty of South Omaha, who entertained at a Halloween party Friday evening for the members of the Frances Willard union of the Women’s Christian Temperance union. The beautiful home of Mr. and Mrs. Laverty had a most elaborate decoration of autumn leaves and yellow pumpkins cut from cardboard. The green and yellow eyes of black cats gleamed from dark corners, and witches with their brooms swept all the remaining cobwebs from the spirits of the guests.

Upstairs, in the attic, there was a wealth of decoration, all suggestive of the “spooky” season. A gayly dressed gypsy read palms and foretold all sorts of good fortunes for the guests.

A buffet supper of doughnuts, apples, and coffee was served to the 200 guests present. Before going to the attic, a delightful musical program was given by Mr. James Colvin, who has recently returned from abroad. Mrs. Richabau of South Omaha sang a solo in a most pleasing manner.

 And this from Iowa’s Atlantic Evening News of 1 November 1911:

Hallowe’en is always the season for many delightful social affairs and this year was no exception to the rule in that respect for there were many pleasant affairs about the city and in this vicinity last evening, appropos [sic] the spooky season.”

But those of us who have fallen victim to the recency illusion regarding spooky season are not completely off the mark. The phrase has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years. The News on the Web (NOW) Corpus, which tracks usage in online newspapers and magazines shows that between 2011 and 2015 the phrase’s appearances in the corpus number in single digits. It rises to double digits in 2016, and then jumps to over two hundred appearances in 2019. Since then, there has been a steady rise in spooky season’s frequency, reaching 854 in 2022. It’s too early to tell what the number for this year will be, but it looks like last year was peak spooky season. Whether that marks the beginning of a declining trend or if the frequency is just leveling off remains to be seen.

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Sources:

Davies, Mark. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW), accessed 7 October 2023.

“Mirthful Events.” Whittier Daily News (Whittier, California), 1 November 1905, 1/2. Newspapers.com.

Schwedel, Heather. “When Did this Time of Year Become ‘Spooky Season’?” Slate.com, 19 October 2021.

“Social and Club News.” Fresno Morning Republican (Fresno, California), 27 October 1906, 8/4. Newspapers.com.

“Social Events of the City.” Atlantic Evening News (Atlantic, Iowa), 1 November 1911, 1/1. NewspaperArchive.

“Social Whirl.” Evening World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska), 28 October 1911, 4/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Society.” Daily Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), 4 November 1906, Section 2, 4/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Aglampet Gruodje, 2020. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

holmium / thulium

Portion of the periodic table containing holmium (Ho) and thulium (Tm)

20 October 2023

Holmium, atomic number 67 and symbol Ho, and thulium, atomic number 69 and symbol Tm, are soft, malleable, silvery metals. Their oxides were first isolated by Per Teodor Cleve in 1879, although the existence of holmium had been observed spectrographically the previous year by Jacques-Louis Soret and Marc Delafontaine. Holmium is used in the production of lasers and spectrometers, as well as magnets, and it is used as a neutron regulator in nuclear reactors. Thulium is used in some portable x-ray devices and in lasers, but its rarity and resulting high price limit its practical utility.

Cleve proposed the names for both elements. Holmium is named for Stockholm, whose modern Latin name is Holmia. Thulium is named for Thule, a classical Latin name for a specific but vaguely identified land in the North Sea region. In the announcement of his discovery, published 1 September 1879, Cleve wrote of the names:

Pour le radical de l’oxyde placé entre l’ytterbine et l’erbine, qui est caractérisé par la band x dans la partie rouge du spectre, je propose le nom de thulium, dérivé de Thulé, le plus ancient nom de la Scandinavie.

[…]

Le troisième metal, caractérisé par les bandes y et z et qui se trouve entre l’erbine et la terbine, doit avoir un poids atomique inférieur à 108. Son oxyde paraît être jaune; au moins toutes les fractions d’un poids moléculaire inférieur à 126 sont plus ou moins jaunes. Je propose pour le metal le nom de holmium, Ho, dérivé du nom latinsé de Stockholm, don’t les environs renferment tant de minéraux riches en yttria.

(For the radical of the oxide placed between ytterbia and erbia, which is characterized by the band x in the red part of the spectrum, I propose the name of thulium, derived from Thule, the ancient name of Scandinavia.

[…]

The third metal characterized by the bands y and z, and which is found between erbia and terbia, must have a lower atomic number than 108. Its oxide appears to be yellow; at least all the fractions of the molecular weight lower than 108 are more or less yellow. I propose for this metal the name Holmium, Ho, derived from the latinized name of Stockholm, in the neighborhood of which so many minerals rich in yttria are to be found.)

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Sources:

Clève, P. T. “On Two New Elements in Erbia.” Chemical News, 40.1033, 12 September 1879, 125–126 at 126. HathiTrust Digital Library.

———. “Sur deux nouveaux éléments dans l’ erbine.” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences, 89.9, 1 September 1879, 478–80 at 480. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century." Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. holmium, n., thulium, n.

Image credit: N. Hanacek, 2019, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Public domain image.

Underground Railroad

An 1872 engraving depicting the Underground Railroad

18 October 2023

The Underground Railroad is the name given to the various networks of secret routes and safe houses that escaped enslaved people used to flee the Southern States to the North and to Canada. Some routes also led to Mexico. The networks were run primarily by free African Americans with assistance from white abolitionists. Underground Railroad is a metaphorical phrase referring to its secretive nature, as subways and literal underground rail lines did not exist at the time of the term’s coinage.

Until recently, the origin of the name had been lost in the mists of time, but Scott Shane, writing in the New York Times on 11 September 2023, uncovered the earliest known use of the term and the likely point of origin. This first use was by Thomas Smallwood, a freedman who had purchased his emancipation in 1831, and who was residing in Washington, DC at the time of the coinage. Besides being active himself in helping enslaved persons escape to the North, at this time, Smallwood was writing a series of letters, under the pseudonym Samuel Weller, to the abolitionist newspaper the Tocsin of Liberty recounting tales of escapees and the efforts of their enslavers to recapture them. In a letter in the 10 August 1842 issue of that paper, Smallwood responded to an ad placed by a Thomas Scott, offering a reward for an escaped enslaved man from Washington, DC, a Henry Hawkins. The ad, besides giving a description of Hawkins, also listed a rather extensive wardrobe of clothes that Hawkins was supposedly carrying in a carpet bag:

Pretty accurate Mr. Scott! only not quite so exact as to the clothing.—Poor fellow, he couldn’t take all the clothing you speak of, from his haste! I half suspect you describe so much clothing merely to give northern people the idea that you clothed him well, when you know that he had to buy for himself, and that it was your cruelty to him, that made him disappear by that same “under ground rail-road” or “steam balloon,” about which one of your city constables was swearing so bitterly a few weeks ago, when complaining that the “d----d rascals” got off so, and that no trace of them could be found! […] it is true his boots are “fine,” but I am quite sure you didn’t buy them for him, and you are quite mistaken about the “carpet bag.” He could get it to the depot of the subterranean rail-road, without notice.

By his own account, Smallwood first heard the term under ground rail-road uttered by an exasperated police offer and escaped-slave hunter, who was using the term as a label for the way that escaped enslaved persons disappeared, as if they were mysteriously vanishing into the ground. 

On 21 September in the Tocsin, a notice gives the news that Hawkins successfully reached his destination in the North and again used the phrase:

Sam Weller is requested to tell the Slaveholders that we passed 26 prime slaves to the land of freedom last week and several more this week thus far; don’t know what the end of the week will foot up. All went by “the underground rail road.”

[…]

Henry Hawkins would like to have Sam inform Austin Scott, at Washington city, that he is well and delighted with Northern scenery and society, and hopes he may get along without his services in future. He wants to send the editor of the Tocsin money enough to buy him a new coat, as the linen roundabout is nearly wore out, and it is coming on cold soon. This would only be a very small item in the amount of which Scott has robbed him of his services.

This notice was reprinted in a number of other abolitionist newspapers, including William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, on 28 September, so we have a record of Underground Railroad spreading from Smallwood’s use of it to wider abolitionist circles.

In a 3 November 1842 missive to the Tocsin, Smallwood gave more details about the coinage, identifying the police officer in question as a Baltimore man named Zell and using the phrase multiple times:

Don’t you think it was wrong to treat that Christian mother as a mere “breeding wench,” and refuse her husband for months together, all access to her society? If you have a mind to confess your wrong to Mrs. Tilly, and bay Dennis Shaw his wages, and make his double and twisted eyes sparkle, I will give you a letter to them, on application at the “office of the underground railroad.”

[…]

Here am I, Samuel Weller, jun., still in the city to scourge and mock at them, and defy all their puny efforts to discover me, or the “underground railroad.”

[…]

At other times they reckon their victims escape in coaches or wagons. Then they imagine they go by water, which is often the case. All this shows that they would give a plum to know where the under-ground Rail Road begins! That name was given to it by constable ZELL of Baltimore.

[…]

I must close my letter without paying my respects to the large number who have recently been afflicted by the loss of their servants! The conductor of the U.G.R. Road tells me that over 20 have gone, this month! you may depend on hearing from them, through me, as soon as I learn of their reaching the other end of their journey.

While it is highly likely that Smallwood and Zell are the originators of Underground Railroad, there is one claim, that while doubtful, cannot be dismissed outright. Eber Pettit, a white abolitionist who was active in ferrying escapees northward, in his 1879 book Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad, claims to have first encountered the phrase in an October 1839 Washington, DC newspaper article with the title “Underground Railroad—A Mystery Not Yet Solved.” He includes the text of said article, copied “as closely as I can from memory, not having time to look up the paper.”

In addition to the title, Petit remembers the article quoting an escapee who had been caught saying, "the railroad went underground all the way to Boston.”

I have been unable to find an article that even vaguely resembles the transcript that Pettit has produced from any time prior to the Civil War.

While this is a lead worth investigating further, it hardly constitutes solid evidence. The transcript he produces in his book is from memory, forty years after the fact. It cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered reliable. As a general rule, humans are notoriously bad at recalling verbatim accounts of past texts and conversations, and slipping anachronistic wording into remembered conversations or texts is commonplace. In this case, we must keep our eyes peeled for that 1839 article, if it exists, but until it is found, Smallwood must be considered the likely point of origin.

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Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. underground, adj. and n.

Pettit, Eber M. Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad. Freedonia, NY: W. McKinstry & Son, 1879, 35–36. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Shane, Scott. “How the Underground Railroad Got Its Name.” New York Times, 11 September 2023.

Smallwood, Thomas [Sam Weller, pseud.]. “Communications” (1 August 1842). Tocsin of Liberty (Albany, New York), 1.45, 10 August 1842, 2/1. Digital Commonwealth.

———. “Communications” (22 October 1842). Tocsin of Liberty (Albany, New York), 2.5, 3 November 1842, 2. Digital Commonwealth.

“Twenty-Six Slaves in One Week.” Tocsin of Liberty (Albany, New York), 1.51, 21 September 1842, 3/3. Digital Commonwealth.

Image credit: Unknown artist, 1872, in Still, William. The Underground Rail Road. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872, between 102 & 103. Archive.org. Public domain image.

booby / boob / booby hatch / booby prize

Illustration of a booby by Thomas Herbert, 1634

16 October 2023

What I love most about what I do is that my work strikes many cultural touchstones throughout the centuries, but this one takes the cake, running the gamut from nursery slang to Elizabethan drama to seabirds to nautical justice to the Free Silver movement and ending up with Civil War pornography

Booby, and the clipped form boob, can mean many things. It can mean a fool, a type of seabird, or a woman’s breast. A booby hatch is a prison or mental hospital, and booby prizes are awarded to losers. Most of these senses are etymologically related, but the breast sense comes from a different etyma.

The fool/childish sense is the oldest and is of uncertain origin. There are two main contenders as to the origin, and either, or both, may be correct—independent coinages that reinforce one another. It could arise out of a nursery variation on babe or baby. Alternatively, it may come from the Spanish bobo, meaning stupid or a fool. The seabird sense most likely comes from the Spanish, borrowed into English by sailors, as the name of the bird is attested in half a century earlier in that language than English.

Booby, referring to a fool or a childish person, appears at the end of the sixteenth century. George Peele’s 1595 play The Old Wiues Tale has a clown character named Booby. And the word is used as an epithet in the c. 1600 play Club Law:

Why, what a company of bobies were yee? could you not catch him?

And later in the play there is this line:

Make rome Gentlemen, you gamesters what bobies you be.

Thomas Dekker uses the word in its present-day spelling in two of his plays. The first being his 1602 play Satiro-Mastix:

You lye s[i]r varlet sir villaine, I am sir Salamanders, ounds, is my man Master Peter Salamanders face as vrse as mine; Sentlemen, all and Ladies, and you say once or twice Amen, I will lap this little Silde, this Booby in his blankets agen.

And the second being The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisill:

By Cod is meane ta let Gwenthyan see what bobie foole loue her, apogs on you.

The name of the seabird (genus Sula) probably comes from their reputation for being none too bright, being easily caught and eaten by sailors. As mentioned above, this sense of word is almost certainly a borrowing from Spanish. The name appears in English in Samuel Purchas’s Purchas His Pilgrimes, a 1625 collection of travel accounts. This passage is found in a description of Sierra Leone:

Of Fowles are Pellicans, white, as bigge as Swannes, with a large and long bill; Hearnes, Curlews, Boobies, Oxe-eyes, with diuers strange kindes of water-fowles.

And this passage, from Thomas Herbert’s 1634 A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile, makes reference to the bird’s supposed low intelligence:

The foure and twentieth of May, we were vnder nineteene degrees and thirty one minutes of South latitude, where one of the Saylers espying a Bird filty called a Booby, hee mounted to the top-mast and tooke her. The foolish quality of which Bird to sit still, not valuing danger, which Bird I haue simply depicted as you see.

Sailors also bequeathed us the term booby hatch. The term originally referred to a cover for a hatch leading down into the lower decks, intended to prevent foolish sailors, or boobies, from falling down into the hold. Over time the term for the hatch cover transferred down to the space below. By the mid nineteenth century, a booby hatch was a place in the hold used as a jail or brig for disobedient sailors.

There is this description an 1842 case before a court in the United States:

The case in the Marine Court was for unnecessarily severe punishment. Plaintiff was ordered to mend a sail, and refused, alleging that he shipped as a seaman and not as a sail maker. He was immediately ordered over the side, to scrape the vessel, but refused, alleging that the employment was dangerous, as the vessel was under way; he was willing to go if a boat were lowered, ready to pick him up in case of his falling overboard.

He was then put in irons, confined in the booby hatch, where he could neither sit nor stand, and could only lie in an uneasy position; kept there till the next morning, then flogged, replaced in the booby hatch, and kept there until afternoon, when, by the advice of his shipmates, he consented to go over the side.

The Court charged that the officers of the vessel had a right to flog a seaman, provided it were done in a proper manner, but they had no right to put a man in irons, unless in case of mutiny, no shade of which appeared to exist in the present case. The general course of the captain and mate seemed to be kind to their crew. Verdict for the plaintiff, $14 damages, and 6 cents costs.

And there is this from the Boston Semi Weekly Courier of 23 October 1851:

The punishment was inflicted on the 27th ult., and Pryson died five days after. The complainant and principal witness, William Frill, testified that the captain flogged the deceased several times with a three-inch rope, for alleged remissness of duty, and subsequently confined him in the “booby hatch,” a most unwholesome place.

By 1859, booby hatch had come ashore and into the jargon of US police forces. In that year George W. Matsell, a former New York City police commissioner, published Vocabulum; or, the Rogue’s Lexicon, which included this entry:

BOOBY-HATCH. Station-house; watch-house.

Presumably such station houses had jails or holding cells for prisoners, because we see this in the Omaha World-Herald of 18 February 1894:

Mr. Sheckles made objections to the manner in which his wealth was distributed, but his objections were overruled. He took exceptions to the ruling and sailed in a la Corbett, but was neatly stopped by Referee Ryan, the man in blue, who called the golden chariot and landed the gang in the booby hatch.

Corbett is a reference to boxer “Gentleman Jim” Corbett (1866–1933), and “Ryan,” the “man in blue,” is obviously a police officer.

The use of booby hatch to refer to a mental hospital was in place by the end of the nineteenth century. Journalist Finley Peter Dunner, creator of the fictional Irish-American bartender Mr. Dooley, put this commentary about advocates for Free Silver in the mouth of his creation on 2 October 1896:

They’re crazy, plumb daffy, Jawnny. In this whole city iv Chicago there ain’t wan hundred silver men that culdn’t give post-graduate insthructions to th’ inmates iv th’ booby hatch out at Dunning. Not wan hundhred.

Finally, to wrap up the discussion of this etymon, the phrase booby prize appears to have arisen in the jargon of the card game of progressive euchre in the 1880s. A booby prize is awarded to the loser of a contest and is usually a gag prize. From the Detroit Free Press of 28 December 1884:

At a recent game a painted pipe tied with ribbon and filled with candy was given as a booby prize.

And this from Michigan’s Jackson Daily Citizen of 14 February 1885 with a less desirable booby prize:

At a recent progressive euchre party the booby prize was a live mouse in a box.

The use of booby to refer to the female breast probably got its start as a seventeenth-century nursery word in the form bubby. It’s likely echoic in origin, reminiscent of the sound of sucking. There are similar words in a number of European languages: Middle High German buobe, Swiss-German Bübbi or Büppi, French poupe, and the Italian poppa.

We see bubby in Youths Lookinglass, a 1660 poem that describes the process of growing up:

Thus void of sense twelve months dully spent,
The child no pleasure knows, nor Nurse content,
But time progreding [sic] the child grows amain
And now some little sense it doth obtain,
Whilst lying in the lap it laughs and smiles
Which pretty charms the mothers heart beguiles,
It gapes and crows and playes before it stands
Grasping the Nurses Bubbies with its hands,
Playing with the breasts, being nourished by sleep
The pretty boy at length begins to creep
About the house, and tumble up and down,
Thus tis with all, though born to great renown.

The present-day spelling booby dates to the mid nineteenth century. And the earliest known use of this spelling, unlike the wholesome Youths Lookinglass, is in the very pornographic 1865 The Love Feast. The following lines describe bridesmaids preparing the bride for her wedding bed:

While one, more wanton than the rest
Seized on love’s moss-bounded nest.
And cried, “Poor puss shall have a treat
For the first time of juicy meat.”
While one my rosy nipples seized,
And my ripe, rounded boobies squeezed,
‘til stiff each little rosebud stood,
Like cuckoo pintles in the bud.

This sense of booby, however, wouldn’t commonly be seen in print until the mid twentieth century.

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Sources:

“City Intelligence.” Boston Semi Weekly Courier (Massachusetts), 23 October 1851, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Club Law (c. 1600). G.C. Moore Smith, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1907, 1.4, 5 and 4.6, 79. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dekker, Thomas. The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisill. London: Edward Allde for Henry Rocket, 1603, sig. C3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Satiro—Mastix. London: Edward Allde for Edward White, 1602, sig. I3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dunne, Finley Peter. “Philosopher Dooley Talks; In Doubt About His Vote.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia) (orig. published in the Chicago Evening Post), 2 October 1896, 4/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“General State News.” Jackson Daily Citizen (Michigan) (orig. published in the Grand Rapids Leader), 14 February 1885, 4/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. booby, n.1, boob, n.2, booby, n.2, boob, n.3, boob, n.1.

Herbert, Thomas. A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile. London: William Stansby and Jacob Bloome, 1634, 10. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The Love Feast (1865). In Thomas P. Lowry. The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994, 58. Google Books.

Matsell, George W. Vocabulum; or, the Rogue’s Lexicon. New York: 1859, 13. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Never Again.” Omaha World-Herald (Nebraska), 18 February 1894, 9/7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v., booby, n.1, boob, n.1, booby, n.2, boob, n.2.

Peele, George. The Old Wiues Tale. London: John Danter, 1595. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Punishment of Sailors.” New York Commercial Advertiser, 22 April 1842, 2/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Books. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625, 416. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Social Bric-A-Brac.” Detroit Free Press (Michigan), 28 December 1884, 14/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Youths Lookinglass. London: J. Williamson, 1660, 6. Google Books.

Image credit:

Booby bird, Thomas Herbert, 1634. In A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile. London: William Stansby and Jacob Bloome, 1634, 11. Early English Books Online (EEBO). Public domain image.

helium

A vial of glowing helium

13 October 2023

Helium is the second lightest and second most abundant element in the universe. It has atomic number 2 and the symbol He. It is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, and inert, the first of the noble gases on the periodic table. Most of the helium in the universe was created during the Big Bang, but new helium is also continuously being formed through the fusion of hydrogen in stars. Helium is perhaps best known for its use in balloons, but it has numerous industrial uses.

Helium also has the distinction of being the first element discovered outside of earth before it was found on earth, being first seen by astronomer Jules Janssen as a line in the spectra of the sun during the solar eclipse in 1868 in India. Later that year, Norman Lockyer also observed the same spectral line and postulated that it was a new element. Lockyer evidently proposed the name helium, from the Greek ἥλιος (helios, meaning sun) + -ium, but did not include the name in any of his published papers.

The first person to use the name helium in publication was William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in his August 1871 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Thomson credited Lockyer, along with chemist Edward Frankland with the name in a footnote in the published address:

During six or eight precious minutes of time, spectroscopes have been applied to the solar atmosphere and to the corona seen round the dark disk of the Moon eclipsing the Sun. Some of the wonderful results of such observations, made in India on the occasion of the eclipse of August 1868, were described by Professor Stokes in a previous address. Valuable results have, through the liberal assistance given by the British and American Governments, been obtained also from the total eclipse of last December, notwithstanding a generally unfavourable condition of weather. It seems to have been proved that at least some sensible part of the light of the “corona” is a terrestrial atmospheric halo or dispersive reflection of the light of the glowing hydrogen and “helium”* round the sun.

[…]

* Frankland and Lockyer find the yellow prominences to give a very decided bright line not far from D, but hitherto not identified with any terrestrial flame. It seems to indicate a new substance, which they propose to call Helium.

In 1881 physicist Luigi Palmieri detected helium in the spectra of material erupted from Mount Vesuvius, and in 1895, chemist William Ramsay was the first to isolate helium on Earth.

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Sources:

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 6 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. helium, n.

Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin). “Address of Sir William Thomson, Knt., LL.D., F.R.S., President.” Report of the Forty-First Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Held at Edinburgh in August 1871. London: John Murray, 1872, lxxxiv–cv at xcix. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Photo credit: Chemical Elements: A Virtual Museum, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.