Short answers, pulled from the story.
Helium was first observed on the Sun on the 18th of August 1868 by French astronomer Jules Janssen. He detected a bright yellow spectral line with a wavelength of 587.49 nanometers during a total solar eclipse over Guntur, India.
Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay isolated helium on Earth on the 26th of March 1895. He treated the mineral cleveite with mineral acids to release the gas while Swedish chemists Per Teodor Cleve and Nils Abraham Langlet achieved independent isolation in Uppsala that same year.
The observable universe contains helium at about 24% of its total elemental mass. This figure represents more than 12 times the combined mass of all heavier elements.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN uses 96 metric tons of liquid helium to maintain temperatures near absolute zero. Superconductivity requires these extreme cold conditions to function properly for particle accelerators.
Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes first liquefied helium in 1908 by cooling it below four Kelvin. This process created a state where the liquid exhibits unique properties like superfluidity near absolute zero.