Toy balloon in "Swiss Family Robinson" (1813) and in "Moby Dick" (1851). The first rubber balloons were made by Professor Michael Faraday in 1824 for use in his experiments with hydrogen at the Royal Institution in London. "The caoutchouc is exceedingly elastic", he wrote in the Quarterly Journal of Science the same year. "Bags made of it...have been expanded by having air forced into them, until the caoutchouc was quite transparent, and when expanded by hydrogen they were so light as to form balloons with considerable ascending power..." Faraday made his balloons by cutting round two sheets of rubber laid together and
Kite balloon equipped with a kite balloon; but there was a limited number of balloons, and even fewer pilots qualified to fly in them. The United States Navy established an emergency balloon pilot training program in October, 1917, at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company's Wingfoot Field in Akron, Ohio. The kite balloon pilot had a parachute in a flat container attached to the observation basket suspended from the kite balloon, with the pilot only wearing a simple body harness around his waist, with shroud lines from the harness attached to the main parachute in the container. When the balloonist jumped, the main