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
Peter Mason (physicist) Peter Mason (physicist) Peter Mason (25 February 1922 – 27 March 1987) was an English-born Australian physicist, educator and science communicator. He was born at St Pancras in London to chemist Alfred George Mason and Winnie, "née" Wheeldon. He attended Eriva Deene School, St Clement's Mixed School and Bournemouth School before attending the University of London (Bachelor of Science 1943, Master of Science 1946), winning first-class honours in mathematics and physics. From 1943 to 1946 he was employed at the Ministry of Supply studying the military applications of quartz crystals, and in 1945 he became an associate member of the