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
Robert Hare (chemist) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1824. Hare died in Philadelphia on May 15, 1858. In 1853, Hare conducted experiments with mediums. A year later Hare had converted to Spiritualism and wrote several books that made him very famous in the United States as a Spiritualist. He published a book entitled "Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations" (1855). His work was criticized by scientists but was welcomed with enthusiasm by Spiritualists. One of his experiments utilized a board and spring balance, the other involved the movement of a table at which a medium sat caused a pointer