McFarland and Hamilton P. Cady began removing the nitrogen from the gas sample by applying a spark discharge with oxygen over an alkaline solution. Cady and McFarland found the procedure tedious and time consuming. “While it was going on,” Cady said, “we decided to take advantage of [Sir James] Dewar’s recently published discovery that coconut charcoal would adsorb all gases [in the atmosphere] except helium, hydrogen, and neon very completely at the temperature of boiling liquid air” (-310° F). After making some coconut charcoal and building a glass apparatus to handle the gases, Cady and McFarland proceeded to immerse glass bulbs of the Dexter gas in liquid air and allowed them to stand for some time. This removed the hydrocarbons by condensation. The remaining gases were then transferred to glass bulbs containing coconut charcoal immersed in liquid air. The small amount of unabsorbed gas left after this treatment was passed into a glass tube and placed in a spectroscope.
On Dec. 7, 1905, Cady and McFarland found that “instantly the yellow of the helium flashed up and the spectroscope showed all the lines of helium.” The dominant spectroscopic line was identical to that found almost 40 years earlier in the spectroscopic analysis of the Sun that led to the extraterrestrial discovery of helium in the Sun. The total amount of helium present in the Dexter gas was an astonishing 1.84%.
Siebel was selling meager quantities of helium for $2500 per cubic foot. He quickly calculated that at that rate, the cost of filling a small blimp was more than $100 million. Ten years later, after the U.S. government established plants at Forth Worth and Amarillo, TX, the cost had dropped to three cents per cubic foot. Large-scale production of helium came too late to be of much value in World War I, but it did play a major role in World War II, when helium-filled U.S. Navy patrol blimps safely escorted thousands of ships carrying troops and supplies. The blimps used sensitive listening devices that when lowered into the water could detect submarines up to five miles away. At the time, the Allies had a virtual monopoly on helium, because the only known gas wells capable of producing helium in large quantities were in the United States and Canada.
Once helium became readily available in large quantities, other uses quickly followed. Today the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages helium gas reserves, leasing, and storage. According to BLM,
“...heium plays a prominent role in the Government’s space, defense, and energy programs, such as pressurization of liquid propellants used by the space shuttle, weapons development, and nuclear fusion reactor experiments. Liquid helium uses include cooling infrared detectors, space simulations, materials testing, and biological and superconductivity research. Gaseous helium uses include various lighter-than-air activities, helium–neon lasers, detecting gas leaks, helium–oxygen mixture for deep sea diving, and high-speed welding of special metals.”
Helium has also been used for producing extremely high velocities in wind tunnels and in hospitals it serves as a cryogenic liquid for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It is still considered a strategic reserve material.
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