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
Samuel Parkes (chemist) 1887), was married, on 25 May 1824, to Joseph Wainwright Hodgetts, who lost his life at an explosion in a chemical works in Manchester, on 14 February 1851. Samuel Parkes (chemist) Samuel Parkes (1761–1825) was a British manufacturing chemist, now remembered for his "Chemical Catechism". He was born at Stourbridge, Worcestershire, on 26 May 1761. He was the eldest son of Samuel Parkes (died 1 April 1811, aged 76), a grocer, by his first wife, Hannah, daughter of William Mence of Stourbridge. He was at a dame's school in Stourbridge with Sarah Kemble, and in 1771 went to a boarding-school