• Question: How was helium found and why does it make our voice squeaky

    Asked by to Anna, Iain, Nick on 20 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Nick Goldman

      Nick Goldman answered on 20 Mar 2014:

      Helium was detected in the sun in 1868, and detected on Earth in 1882. The first time it was actually ‘collected’ was in 1895.

      Helium makes your voice squeaky because the molecules of helium have less mass than the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in air. This means that sound travels faster through helium. The shapes in your throat make air vibrate a certain way when you talk normally, and when you do the same thing but with helium then the vibrations are different and the sound comes out “squeaky”.

    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 20 Mar 2014:

      Helium is not as dense as air and so sound travels fast through it compared to normal air. When you breath helium you increase the speed of sound of your voice and it goes squeaky and higher.

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 21 Mar 2014:

      Good question. The discovery of helium was very important in the history of science, because it was first found in the sun by splitting the light from the sun into a rainbow with a prism, and seeing a special pattern stripes missing from the rainbow. Each element has its own special pattern, like a barcode, and this allows us to work out what our sun, and ever other stars, are made from. This was really revolutionary, because people though that we would never be able to know what stars are made from, and it has really helped us understand the universe. Helium was later discovered on earth, and isolated by distilling it from compressed gas.

      The reason helium gas makes your voice high pitched is because it is a very light gas. Sounds are caused by air vibrating, and different sounds have different pitches depending on how quickly the air vibrates. When we speak, our vocal chords cause the air to vibrate. If you breath a very light gas like helium, when your vocal chords hit it, the helium particles shoot off very quickly. The opposite is true too, and if you breath a very heavy gas like sulfur hexaflouride, then it makes your voice really really deep.

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