Liquid helium of liquid water. Helium was first liquefied on July 10, 1908, by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. At that time, helium-3 was unknown because the mass spectrometer had not yet been invented. In more recent decades, liquid helium has been used as a cryogenic refrigerant, and liquid helium is produced commercially for use in superconducting magnets such as those used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Magnetoencephalography (MEG), and experiments in physics, such as low temperature Mössbauer spectroscopy. The temperature required to produce liquid helium is low because
Lowest temperature recorded on Earth 1960, held the record until a temperature of was measured at the Soviet Vostok Station, on the Antarctic Plateau, on July 21, 1983. This remains the record for a directly recorded temperature. In 1904 Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes created a special lab in Leiden with the aim of producing liquid helium. In 1908 he managed to lower the temperature to less than −269 °C (-452.2 F, 4 K), which is less than four degrees above absolute zero. Only in this exceptionally cold state will helium liquefy, the boiling point of helium being at −268.94 °C (-452.092 F). Kamerlingh Onnes