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
Sergey Lebedev (chemist) Sergey Lebedev (chemist) Sergei Vasiljevich Lebedev (; 25 July 1874 – 1 May 1934) was a Russian/Soviet chemist and the inventor of polybutadiene synthetic rubber, the first commercially viable and mass-produced type of synthetic rubber. Lebedev was born in 1874 in Lublin and went to school in Warsaw. In 1900, he graduated from St. Petersburg University and found work at the Petersburg Margarine Factory. Starting in 1902, Lebedev moved from university to university in Russia, starting at the Saint-Petersburg Institute for Railroad Engineering. In 1904, he returned to St. Petersburg University to work under Alexei Yevgrafovich Favorskii (Stalin Prize, 1941,