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
Thomas Richardson (chemist) with T. W. Miller and R. Taplin's "Report … on Hartley Coal". About 1866 Richardson carried out, with Lavington E. Fletcher at Kirklees, near Wigan, a similar series of experiments, which were published in 1867 as "Experiments … [on] the Steam Coals of Lancashire and Cheshire". Richardson published fifteen independent papers and six in collaboration with E. J. J. Browell (a fellow lecturer at the Newcastle school of medicine, and partner), John Lee, Pelouze, Sopwith, and Robert Dundas Thomson, on chemical questions. Thomas Richardson (chemist) Thomas Richardson FRS FRSE MRIA AICE (1816–1867) was an English industrial chemist, and industrial historian.