Helium........... What the hell is it anyway????

How Helium Balloons Work

There is something incredibly neat about helium balloons! If you buy one at the circus or fair, you can hold its string and it will ride along above you. If you let go of the string, it will fly away until you can't see it anymore.

If you have ever wondered why it flies away, then read on.

Floating in General

Most of us feel comfortable with the idea of something floating in water. We see that happen every day. In fact, people themselves float in water, so we have a way of directly experiencing water flotation. The reason why things float in water applies to air as well, so let's start by understanding water flotation.

Let's say that you take a plastic 1-litre soda bottle, empty out the soft drink it contains, put the cap back on it (so you have a sealed bottle full of air), tie a string around it like you would a balloon, and dive down to the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool with it. Since the bottle is full of air, you can imagine it will have a strong desire to rise to the surface. You can sit on the bottom of the pool with it, holding the string, and it will act just like a helium balloon does in air. If you let go of the string the bottle will quickly rise to the surface of the water.

The reason that this soda bottle "balloon" wants to rise in the water is because water is a fluid and the 1-litre bottle is displacing one litre of that fluid. The bottle and the air in it weigh perhaps an ounce at most (1 litre of air weighs about a gram, and the bottle is very light as well). The litre of water it displaces, however, weights about 1,000 grams (2.2 pounds or so). Because the weight of the bottle and its air is less than the weight of the water it displaces, the bottle floats. This is the law of buoyancy.

Helium Flotation

Helium balloons work by the same law of buoyancy. In this case, the helium balloon that you hold by a string is floating in a "pool" of air (when you stand underwater at the bottom of a swimming pool, you are standing in a "pool of water" maybe 10 feet deep -- when you stand in an open field you are standing at the bottom of a "pool of air" that is many miles deep). The helium balloon displaces an amount of air (just like the empty bottle displaces an amount of water). As long as the helium plus the balloon is lighter than the air it displaces, the balloon will float in the air.

It turns out that helium is a lot lighter than air. The difference is not as great as it is between water and air (a litre of water weighs about 1,000 grams, while a litre of air weighs about 1 gram), but it is significant. Helium weighs 0.1785 grams per litre. Nitrogen weighs 1.2506 grams per litre, and since nitrogen makes up about 80 percent of the air we breathe, 1.25 grams is a good approximation for the weight of a litre of air.

Therefore, if you were to fill a 1-litre soda bottle full of helium, the bottle would weigh about 1 gram less than the same bottle filled with air. That doesn't sound like much -- the bottle itself weighs more than a gram, so it won't float. However, in large volumes, the 1-gram-per-litre difference between air and helium can really add up. This explains why blimps and balloons are generally quite large - they have to displace a lot of air to float.

A 100-foot-diameter balloon can lift 33,000 pounds! Here is how you can figure out the lifting capacity of the helium in a spherical helium balloon:

So why are helium and hydrogen so much lighter than air? It's because the hydrogen and helium atoms are lighter than a nitrogen atom. They have fewer electrons, protons and neutrons than nitrogen atoms do, and that makes them lighter (the approximate atomic weight of hydrogen is 1, helium is 4 and nitrogen is 14). Approximately the same number of atoms of each of these elements fills approximately the same amount of space. Therefore, the gases made of lighter atoms are lighter.

Where Helium Comes From

If you put helium in a balloon and let go of the balloon, the balloon rises until it pops. When it pops, the helium that escapes has no reason to stop -- it just keeps going and leaks out into space.

Therefore, in the atmosphere there is very little helium at any given time. The helium that is there comes from alpha particles emitted by radioactive decay (don't ask me how how that works). In places that have a lot of uranium ore, natural gas tends to contain high concentrations of helium (up to 7 percent). This makes sense, since the decay of uranium emits lots of alpha particles and a natural gas pocket tends to be a sealed container underground. Helium is cryogenically distilled out of natural gas to produce the helium we put in balloons.

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