It's as easy to write bad poetry as it is to breathe -- Damian

I wrote this up as a (somewhat humorous) bit of homework. I don't think it's very good, but my teacher thought it was brilliant. I thought I'd post it here, and if it gets deleted, it gets deleted.

An Ode to The Discovery of Helium

Helium is both chemically inert and extremely light,
This meant that when researching it, researchers met with plight.
Helium was first noticed looking at the sun,
By Norman Lockyer, a civil servant from Wimbledon.

On the 20th of October, in 1869,
Looking through his spectroscope, Lockyer saw a line.
In the same year, a French man saw the spectral feature,
But he couldn’t reproduce it in the lab, the tragic creature.

Lockyer said the lines could be made by a new element,
But it took many years before the theory could see real consent.
The man who proved him right was a Scotsman called Ramsay,
Who added a whole section to the Periodic Table’s array.

Examining gasses from the Uranium mineral Cleveite,
He spotted an emission, which proved to be Lockyer’s delight.
Lockyer new critics would trouble him no more,
He had proof of what he suggested a quarter of a century before.

Boiling at the lowest temperature of any element,
Helium was found to be an ideal refrigerant.
We consume about 100 million cubic meters,
For uses like superconducting magnets, and cooling other heaters.

Reference:
http://www.spusd.k12.ca.us/chemmybear/helium.html

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