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
John G. King (physicist) John G. King (physicist) John Gordon King (1925–2014) was an English-born American physicist who was the Francis Friedman Professor of Physics (emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the former director of MIT’s Molecular Beam Laboratory, and the former associate director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. Best known for his work on null experiments, King was also involved in the Physical Sciences Study Committee (PSSC) with his doctoral advisor Jerrold Zacharias. Additionally, he is the inventor of the molecular microscope. He has received the Alfred P. Sloan Award (1956), the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) Apparatus Competition prize