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
Two-balloon experiment after exchanging air. The behavior of the balloons in the two-balloon experiment was first explained theoretically by David Merritt and Fred Weinhaus in 1978. The key to understanding the behavior of the balloons is understanding how the pressure inside a balloon varies with the balloon's diameter. The simplest way to do this is to imagine that the balloon is made up of a large number of small rubber patches, and to analyze how the size of a patch is affected by the force acting on it. The Karan-Guth stress-strain relation for a parallelepiped of ideal rubber can be written Here,