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
Kite balloon the nickname: "rubber cow". Returning from the kite balloon to the ship at the end of a long day was a reverse of the boarding procedure with the added risks of darkness and weariness. The only United States naval kite balloon pilot casualty was an unsuccessful attempted return to a destroyer escorting an eastbound convoy through the Irish Sea on the stormy evening of 14 August 1918. The "rubber cow" began alternately plunging port and starboard as the tether was shortened, dipping the pilot's basket into the water on each dive; and the basket was empty when the kite balloon