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
Rubber elasticity This phenomenon caught the attention of the English physicist John Gough. In 1805 he published some qualitative observations on this characteristic and also described the dependence of the tensile stress on temperature. By the mid nineteenth century, the theory of thermodynamics was being developed and within this framework, the English mathematician and physicist Lord Kelvin showed that the change in mechanical energy required to stretch a rubber sample should be proportional to the increase in temperature. Later, this would be associated with a change in entropy. The connection to thermodynamics was firmly established in 1859 when the English physicist James