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
Berlin scientific balloon flights the balloon "Herder" with him, there was thereafter no other suitable balloon available in Berlin. The tests were moved to Munich from 1889. Aßmann had to confine himself to a few experiments with the tethered balloon "Meteor". At the beginning of 1891, a free-flying balloon, "M. W.," was finally available. Although it was heavy and therefore could never fly above 2000 meters, with its help the tests were successfully completed. Once the psychrometer was ready in its mature form in 1892, systematically-arranged flights could be started. There were 36 principal flights in 1893 and 1894, of which 23 were on