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
Colchester Rubber Co. in 1892, it went on to create the KEDS and PRO-KEDS brands. The Colchester Rubber Company factory was located at the intersection of Lebanon Avenue and Mill Street in the factory buildings which previously belonged to the Hayward Rubber Company which was in operation from 1847 to 1885. The Hayward Rubber Company was founded by Nathaniel Hayward, who co-invented vulcanised rubber with Charles Goodyear in 1838. Some of the original Colchester Rubber Company factory ruins can still be seen at the site today. Many of the workers in the factory originally came from Ireland. The Colchester Rubber Company was founded