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 behavior. To capture the extremely fast retraction dynamics , they utilized a clever experimental method devised by Exner and Stefan in 1874, well before high-speed electronic measuring devices were invented. Their method consisted of a rapidly rotating glass cylinder which, after being coated with lamp black, was placed next to the stretched rubber sample. Styli, attached to the mid-point and free end of the rubber sample, were held in contact with the glass cylinder. Then, as the free end of the rubber snapped back, the styli traced out helical paths in the lamp black coating of the rotating cylinder. By