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
Thomas Harris (aviator) Thomas Harris (aviator) Thomas Harris (died 25 May 1824) was a pioneering English balloonist who was killed in an accident. There is little information about his early career, but he invented the gas discharge valve, a device to release all the gas in a gas balloon to prevent the balloon from dragging after landing. Thomas Harris was an inventive London scientist and held the military rank of Lieutenant. He exhibited a hydrogen balloon at the Royal Tennis Court in Great Windmill Street, Haymarket, in the spring of 1824. While not a professional aeronaut, he may have planned to become one.