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
Heinrich Debus (chemist) Heinrich Debus (chemist) Heinrich Debus (13 July 1824 – 9 December 1915) was a German chemist. In 1838, he attended a trade school in Kassel, where he was taught by Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. He studied chemistry from 1845 to 1848 in Marburg, and served as Bunsen's assistant from 1847. In 1848, he earned his doctorate by investigating a red madder dye. He completed his habilitation in 1851 after Bunsen left for Breslau. At the suggestion of Frederick Augustus Genth, Debus was named Bunsen's successor at Marburg. Later in 1851 he left for England to be a chemistry teacher at Queenwood