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
Alan Martin (physicist) Alan Martin (physicist) Alan Douglas Martin FRS (born 4 December 1937) is a British physicist, currently Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Durham. Martin was educated at the Eltham College. He received his BSc (1958) and PhD (1962) degrees from the University College London. Martin is known for his research in the theory of elementary particles, which includes studies of mesic atoms, kaon physics, pi–pi scattering, hadron spectroscopy and the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. His work on the W boson and top quark was used in early collider experiments. His ongoing projects include the determination of