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
National Balloon Facility contains a complete balloon manufacturing facility. The institute conducts balloon-based scientific experiments in X-ray and Infrared Astronomy, and in Aeronomy. Balloons from this facility are launched twice in a year, i.e. in summer and winter. NBF also regularly monitors and analyses local weather at tropospheric and stratospheric altitudes, required for making decisions about balloon launches. Under the High Altitude Balloon Development Project, a 61,000m³ indigenously developed balloon penetrated into the Mesosphere on 7 January 2014, for the first time in India. Until that time, only balloons from USA and Japan had accomplished this feat. National Balloon Facility The National Balloon