Joseph Norman Lockyer

Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer was an English scientist and astronomer, born in Rugby, Warwickshire, on 17 May 1836, who is credited with discovering the gas helium. Simultaneously with the French scientist Pierre Janssen, he developed a new spectroscopic method for analysing solar flares in a laboratory. His early introduction to science was through his father, a pioneer of the electric telegraph, and he worked for some years as a civil servant in the British War Office while pursuing a keen amateur interest in the Sun. In 1885 he became the world's first professor of astronomical physics at the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, now part of Imperial College, where the Solar Physics Observatory was built for him and where he directed research until 1913. He was the founder and first editor of the influential journal Nature, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1869 and received its Rumford Medal in 1874.