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
Enrico Costa (physicist) Enrico Costa (physicist) Enrico Costa (born 1944 in Sassari, Sardinia) is an Italian astrophysicist, known for studies of gamma ray bursts (GRBs). Costa's family moved in 1954 to Rome, where he spent the remainder of his childhood and adolescence and studied physics. For his PhD with Giulio Auriemma, he participated in rocket experiments with X-ray detectors at the IAS (Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale) in Rome. In 1976, he joined the IAS and worked on balloon experiments. Later he was involved in BeppoSAX, the Italian X-ray astronomy satellite (with Dutch participation, and ESA support), which operated from 1996 to 2003. Costa