  We compute the helicity of a vector field preserving a regular contact form
on a closed three-dimensional manifold, and improve results by J.-M. Gambaudo
and \'E. Ghys [GG97] relating the helicity of the suspension of a surface
isotopy to the Calabi invariant of the latter. Based on these results, we
provide positive answers to two questions posed by V. I. Arnold [Arn86]. In the
presence of a regular contact form that is also preserved, the helicity extends
to an invariant of an isotopy of volume preserving homeomorphisms, and is
invariant under conjugation by volume preserving homeomorphisms. A similar
statement also holds for suspensions of surface isotopies and surface
diffeomorphisms. This requires the techniques of topological Hamiltonian and
contact dynamics developed in [MO07, M\"ul08b, Vit06, BS11b, BS11a, MS11].
Moreover, we generalize an example of H. Furstenberg [Fur61] of topologically
conjugate but not C^1-conjugate area preserving diffeomorphisms of the
two-torus to trivial T^2-bundles, and construct examples of Hamiltonian and
contact vector fields that are topologically conjugate but not C^1-conjugate.
Higher-dimensional helicities are considered briefly at the end of the paper.
