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
English Electric Balloon heavy repair work the Balloons were allowed back from Easter 2004. With the arrival of the Flexity 2 trams to operate the main services on the tramway from 2012, nine Balloon cars were further modernised which included fitting them with widened doors and other modifications to enable them to run alongside the new fleet (see below). Some of the Balloon cars were retained as part of the heritage fleet (see below). 716 was sold to a firm for use as an office. 722 was scrapped between 2009-2010 after a collision with 711 in October 2007. All of the other Balloons