Astronomer. He is remembered for his research on the Sun's atmosphere, which was previously an unknown element. In 1868 he named it “Helium” after Helios, the Greek name for the Sun and the Sun god. This is the second most common element in the solar system. Later, Helium was isolated in the laboratory in 1895 by Sir William Ramsay . Lockyer did not work alone as another English scientist assisted in his research from 1864 to 1865, Sir Edward Frankland. A French astronomer, Jules Janssen, was researching the Sun's atmosphere independently at the same time as Lockyer; the next year, they compared their results and they were the same. The French Academy of Science struck a medal to honor them both with the credit of the discovery of helium. As a sickly child, Joseph Norman Lockyer was born to Joseph Hooley Lockyer, a surgeon-apothecary who gave scientific lectures in local schools, and his wife Ann Norman. His middle name of “Norman” is what he used. The family moved from Rugby to Leicestor in 1840 as his father accepted a better position at a match factory. His education is not well-documented, but after his father's death in 1855, he received a monetary inheritance and traveled to France and Switzerland for a year to study. In 1857 at the age of twenty-one, he was a civil servant at the British War Office with a hobby of astronomy; little did he know this would be his career. The next year he married Winfred James. He purchased his first refracting telescope in 1861 and built an observatory in his home in West London to study Mars. He presented his first paper to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1863. A major step in the study of the Sun happened when in 1864, he started using a spectroscope with his telescope; prior to this, the Sun could only be observed in a solar eclipse. In 1869 Lockyer founded the scientific journal “Nature” and today it is one of the leading professional journals. He was the editor of “Nature” for 50 years. He was publishing the works of the forerunners of science including Thomas H. Huxley's numerous essays. He coined the name “Chromospher,” which is still being used today, for the outer layers of the solar atmosphere. The same year, he became a Fellow in the Royal Society. In 1870, he became the secretary to a five-year project, the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction, which led to the construction of the Solar Physic Laboratory in Kensington. In 1879, at the end of the project, he was knighted. In 1885, he was appointed by Prime Minister Gascoyne-Cecil as the world's first professor of astronomical physics at the Royal College in London. During his tenure there, he served as director of research until 1913 of the Solar Physics Observatory. In 1901 the observatory was relocated to Cambridge against his reasoning that it should be on a hill and far from city lights. The old building became a museum. He retired from his professor position in 1902. Located in a rural setting with dark night skies perfect for stargazing, he founded in 1912 the Norman Lockyer Observatory in Salcombe Hill, near Sidmouth, Devon, England, on land that had belonged to his second wife. In the early 1890s, he became interested in the possibility of astronomical alignments of ancient Greek and Egyptian monuments and temples, and in 1901, he included England's Stonehenge. His formula was to approximate the alignments of a given monument and then assuming the exact alignment at time of construction and interpreting the difference in the terms of the precision of the Earth's orbital axis. For Stonehenge, he derived that this monument was built in 1848 BC. In 1952, his calculations were confirmed with radio carbon dating. Although many of his hypotheses and conclusions were not universally accepted and often did not survive newer scientific findings, he has been giving credit for founding the field of science called Archeoastromony, the investigation of astronomical knowledge of prehistoric cultures. From this research, he published in 1894, “The Dawn of Astronomy,” and in 1906 “Stonehenge and other British Monuments Astronomically Considered.” Frequently, he traveled in expeditions around the world studying solar eclipses, a few would include to Sicily in 1870 and India in 1871 and 1898. He married twice, first to Winifred James; they had seven children before her death in 1879; and in 1903 he married a widow and suffragette, Mary Thomasine Browne Brodhurst. Looking at his notes, it is clear that his first wife, Winifred, acted as his unpaid assistant translating from French to English many documents for her husband. After his death, his son James followed in his father's foot-steps as director at the Norman Lockyer Observatory. There have been two bibliographies written, one by his second wife, along with some more recently written articles in periodicals about him.