18 August 1868

French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovers helium.

Pierre Janssen, a French astronomer, is known for his significant contribution to the field of astronomy and for his role in the discovery of helium. Born on February 22, 1824, in Paris, Janssen’s work was instrumental in advancing our understanding of the Sun and its composition.

In the mid-19th century, Janssen became interested in solar observations and spectroscopy, the study of the interaction between light and matter. In 1868, he traveled to India to observe a total solar eclipse. During this eclipse, he used a spectroscope to analyze the Sun’s spectrum, which is the pattern of colors produced when sunlight is split into its component wavelengths. This technique allowed him to identify the presence of an unknown yellow line in the Sun’s spectrum.

Janssen initially believed that this yellow line was indicative of a new element present in the Sun. He named this new element “helium,” after the Greek word “helios,” which means “Sun.” However, Janssen did not have the means to isolate helium on Earth, and it wasn’t until later that helium was actually discovered as a rare gas on our planet.

Coincidentally, around the same time, the English astronomer Norman Lockyer also observed this yellow line during a solar eclipse and independently identified it as a new element. The discovery of helium is often attributed jointly to Janssen and Lockyer.

It wasn’t until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that scientists were able to isolate and study helium on Earth. Helium was found to be a colorless, odorless, and inert gas, making it valuable for various applications, such as in airships and as a cooling agent in scientific research.

Pierre Janssen continued to make important contributions to astronomy throughout his career. He founded the Meudon Observatory in France and conducted extensive research on solar prominences, the corona, and other solar phenomena. He also played a role in popularizing scientific knowledge and raising public interest in astronomy.

Janssen passed away on December 23, 1907, leaving behind a legacy of groundbreaking research in solar spectroscopy and the discovery of helium’s presence in the Sun. His work laid the foundation for our understanding of the composition and behavior of stars and greatly influenced the field of astrophysics.

29 May 1868

Mihailo Obrenovi? III, Prince of Serbia is assassinated.

Mihailo Obrenovi? III (1859-1868): Mihailo Obrenovi? III was the son of Prince Miloš Obrenovi? and the nephew of Mihailo Obrenovi? I. He was born on September 16, 1859, and ascended to the throne at the age of eight upon the assassination of his predecessor, Mihailo Obrenovi? I, in 1868.

However, Mihailo Obrenovi? III’s reign was short-lived. His father’s advisors held power in his name, but internal conflicts and dissatisfaction with the Obrenovi? rule led to the May Overthrow in 1868. The Kara?or?evi? dynasty, led by Prince Aleksandar Kara?or?evi?, replaced the Obrenovi? dynasty as rulers of Serbia. Mihailo Obrenovi? III and his mother, Queen Draga, were forced into exile and settled in Austria-Hungary.

Tragically, Mihailo Obrenovi? III and Queen Draga faced a gruesome fate. On May 29, 1903, a group of officers, led by a young army officer named Dragutin Dimitrijevi? (also known as Apis), staged a coup d’état and assassinated Mihailo Obrenovi? III and Queen Draga in the royal palace in Belgrade. The coup brought an end to the Obrenovi? dynasty, and the Kara?or?evi? dynasty was reinstated as the ruling family of Serbia.

26 May 1868

The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson ends with his acquittal by one vote.

The impeachment of Andrew Johnson was a significant event in United States history that took place in 1868. Andrew Johnson, who became the 17th President of the United States after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, faced impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives.

The impeachment proceedings against Andrew Johnson were primarily driven by political disagreements and tensions between Johnson, a Democrat, and the Republican-controlled Congress. The main points of contention revolved around Johnson’s resistance to the Reconstruction policies aimed at rebuilding the Southern states after the American Civil War and protecting the rights of freed slaves.

Johnson clashed with the Radical Republicans in Congress, who believed he was obstructing the Reconstruction process and undermining the civil rights of African Americans. The Republicans were particularly dissatisfied with Johnson’s vetoes of several Reconstruction bills and his removal of Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War, from his position in violation of the Tenure of Office Act.

On February 24, 1868, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Andrew Johnson on eleven articles of impeachment. The articles accused him of violating the Tenure of Office Act and engaging in “high crimes and misdemeanors” related to his conduct regarding Reconstruction.

The impeachment trial then moved to the Senate, where Johnson faced removal from office. The trial lasted from March 30 to May 26, 1868. The Senate ultimately fell one vote short of the necessary two-thirds majority to convict Johnson. The vote to convict him on three of the articles was 35-19, while the vote on the remaining articles ranged from 35-16 to 35-19.

Johnson narrowly avoided removal from office, but his presidency was severely weakened by the impeachment trial. Subsequently, the Radical Republicans passed laws that curtailed his powers and limited his ability to influence Reconstruction policies.

The impeachment of Andrew Johnson played a significant role in shaping the balance of power between the presidency and Congress and highlighted the challenges faced by the nation during the Reconstruction era.

18 August 1868

The French astronomer, Pierre Janssen discovers helium.

Despite being the second most abundant element in the observable universe, helium is relatively rare on Earth, the product of the radioactive decay of elements like uranium. In fact, it is so rare that helium was discovered only in 1868, thanks to the efforts of two scientists in particular, one in England, and the other in France.

In 1859, Gustav Kirchoff realized it was possible to deduce the chemical composition of the sun and other stars by analyzing the spectra of the light they emit. Kirchoff used this method to discover cesium and rubidium. Astronomers were particularly interested in studying solar prominences: colorful flame-like bursts now known to be hot clouds of dense gas. The best way to make such observations, scientists believed, was during a solar eclipse.

Born in Paris, Pierre Janssen suffered an accident as a child that left him permanently lame. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Paris, eventually becoming a professor of architecture there in 1865. But his interests extended far beyond that specialty, and he found himself involved in numerous scientific expeditions relating to astronomy and geophysics. For instance, he traveled to Peru to study the magnetic equator, and to Italy and Switzerland to study the solar spectrum.

In 1868, Janssen traveled to Guntur, India, to observe the solar eclipse. He focused on the solar prominences and concluded they mostly comprise hydrogen gas, heated to extremely high temperatures. But on August 18, when he observed the sun’s spectrum through his spectroscope, he noticed that the wavelength of the yellow line supposedly indicating the presence of sodium didn’t actually match up to the wavelength for that element. In fact, it didn’t match the wavelength of any known element to date. The line was bright enough, he thought, that it should be visible even without the aid of an eclipse, provided a means could be found to filter out all but that wavelength of visible light. That is how he came to invent the spectrohelioscope to better analyze the sun’s spectrum.

Some 5,000 miles away, on October 20, 1868, the English astronomer Joseph Norman Lockyer also succeeded in observing the solar prominences in broad daylight. His paper detailing those observations arrived at the French Academy of Sciences on the same day as Janssen’s paper, so both men received credit for the discovery of helium.

Initially it was a dubious honor: Many colleagues doubted this could be a new element and ridiculed their conclusions. Others thought helium could exist only in the sun. In 1882, the Italian physicist Luigi Palmieri was analyzing lava from Mount Vesuvius when he noticed that same telltale yellow spectral line in his data — the first indication of helium on Earth. It would be another 12 years before the Scottish chemist William Ramsey found further experimental evidence of this new element.

The son of a civil engineer and nephew of a well-known Scottish geologist, Ramsey earned his doctorate at the University of Tübingen in Germany and eventually joined the faculty of University College London, publishing several papers on nitrogen oxides. In 1894, inspired by a lecture by Lord Rayleigh, Ramsey successfully isolated a new gas with no chemical reactivity–the first inert gas, which he dubbed argon, after the Greek word for “lazy.” Subsequently he discovered additional inert gases: neon, krypton, and xenon, eventually garnering the 1904 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his accomplishments.

In 1895, Ramsey was studying a chunk of uranium ore, which he treated with mineral acids. He was hoping to isolate argon by separating nitrogen and oxygen from the sample with sulfuric acid. Instead, he noted the presence of an unusual gas locked inside the specimen–appearing in a spectroscope as a “glorious yellow effulgence,” according to Lockyer, to whom Ramsey had sent his sample for verification. Its spectrum matched that of the proposed new element observed in the sun’s chromosphere.

After running tests to ensure that the line was indeed a new element, as opposed to a new form of hydrogen, Ramsey’s work appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London later that year, and Swedish chemists Per Teodor Cleve and Abraham Langlet successfully isolated the gas from cleveite. Lockyer dubbed the new element helium, after the Greek word for the sun.

Janssen, meanwhile, did not remain idle in the years following his seminal observations. He traveled all over the world to witness more solar eclipses in 1870, 1875, 1883 and 1905. For the 1870 eclipse in Algiers, he escaped Paris — then under siege at the height of the Franco-Prussian War — in a hot-air balloon. He also witnessed the transit of Venus in Japan in 1874, and again in Algeria in 1882, with the aim of capturing on film the exact moment when the transit began. He invented an instrument called the clockwork revolver to do so, capable of taking a series of 48 exposures in 72 seconds using the daguerreotype photographic process. The resulting images were sufficiently good to encourage other astronomers to adopt his method for future transits.

In 1893, he constructed an observatory on Mount Blanc, rightly determining that one could gain a considerable advantage at higher altitudes, where the atmosphere was thinner. By then 69, he nonetheless made the climb and spent several days making observations. He even made two cameo appearances in early films by the famed Lumière brothers. Janssen died on December 23, 1907, just three years after his more than 6000 solar photographs were collected and published in the Atlas de Photographies Solaires.

25 July 1868

The Wyoming Territory is established.

On this day in 25 July 1868, Congress created the Wyoming Territory. To do so, Republican-led lawmakers carved out land from the Dakota, Idaho and Utah territories.

The proposal had been on the congressional docket since 1865, when Rep. James M. Ashley, chairman of the House Committee on Territories, pressed his fellow legislators to provide a “temporary government for the territory of Wyoming.” But Ashley’s bill failed to advance out of his committee.

When the Senate took up the issue again, in 1868, several other names were put forward for the new territory. They included Shoshone, Arapaho, Sioux, Platte, Big Horn, Yellowstone, Sweetwater, Lincoln and Cheyenne, the last the name of the eventual state capital.

By then, however, the name “Wyoming” was already in wide use. It soon emerged as the most popular choice of the still sparse populace. It was adopted from a Delaware Indian word that meant “at the big river flat” and originally designated Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley.

The federal government acquired the land that is now Wyoming’s eastern sector in 1803 from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Several years later, John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, became the first non-Native American known to have entered the region. He explored the area around what is now Yellowstone National Park and brought back word of its geysers and hot springs.

18 August 1868

The French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovers helium.

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Pierre Janssen, French astronomer who in 1868 discovered the chemical element helium and how to observe solar prominences without an eclipse. His work was independent of that of the Englishman Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer, who made the same discoveries at about the same time.

Janssen was permanently lamed by an accident in early childhood. He initially worked as a bank clerk. He graduated from the University of Paris in 1852, and in 1865 he became professor of physics at the École Speciale d’Architecture in Paris. He was an enthusiastic observer of eclipses.

While observing a solar eclipse in Guntur, India, on August 18, 1868, Janssen noted that the spectral lines in the solar prominences were so bright that they should be easily observable in daylight. The next day he used his spectroscope to study the solar prominences. That enabled many more such observations to be made than previously, when such phenomena had been observable only for the few minutes’ duration of solar eclipses. During his observations he also noted a yellow spectral line near, but distinct from, the prominent lines of sodium. That line was from helium, which was not observed on Earth until 1895.

In 1870, when Paris was besieged during the Franco-German War, Janssen fled the surrounded city in a balloon so that he could reach the path of totality of a solar eclipse in Algeria. In 1873 he invented the “photographic revolver,” a device designed to take 180 images at the rate of one frame per second. The revolver was used by Janssen in Japan to observe the 1874 transit of Venus and is considered a precursor of the motion-picture camera. In 1876 he was appointed the first director of the Meudon Observatory, near Paris. In 1893, using observations from the meteorological observatory he had established on Mont Blanc, he proved that strong oxygen lines appearing in the solar spectrum were caused by oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere.

Janssen was the first to regularly use photographs to study the Sun, and in 1903 he published his great Atlas de photographies solaires, containing more than 6,000 solar pictures.