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
English Electric Balloon and grey skirts during May 2017. 707, 709, 720 and 724 have been withdrawn from service. With the tramway's conversion to a modern light rail network in 2012 and using the Flexity 2 trams to provide the core service, a number of the Balloon trams were retained for use as heritage cars within the heritage fleet. Initially only 706 and 717 were due to be retained due to plans to dispose of Rigby Road Depot and to build an expansion of Starr Gate Depot for the heritage cars, which meant that there was only enough room for one example of