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Rubber Balloon Evolution
| quote: | From The Book of Firsts by Patrick Robertson, Bramhall House, NY, 1978:
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 pressing the edges together. The tacky rubber welded automatically, and the inside of the balloon was rubbed with flour to prevent the opposing surfaces joining together.
Toy balloons were introduced by pioneer rubber manufacturer Thomas Hancock the following year in the form of a do-it-yourself kit consisting of a bottle of rubber solution and a condensing syringe.
Vulcanized toy balloons, which unlike the earlier kind were unaffected by changes in temperature, were first manufactured by J.G. Ingram of London in 1847 and can be regarded as the prototype of modern toy balloons."
An old issue of True Inflations said something about latex balloons at, I believe, a worlds fair.
From the Oxford English Dictionary: (note the 1827 reference to Faraday):
caoutchouc ('kaUtSUk), ('ku:-). [a. Fr. caoutchouc pron. (kautSu), ad. Carib cahuchu (Littre).]
1 India-rubber, or Gum Elastic; the milky resinous juice of certain trees in S. America, the E. Indies, and elsewhere, which coagulates on exposure to the air, and becomes highly elastic, and is waterproof; it is now a most important substance in arts and manufactures.
`Introduced to France early in the last century, but its origin was unknown till the visit of the French academicians to South America in 1735. They ascertained that it was the inspissated juice of a Brazilian tree, called by the natives Hhve; and an account of the discovery was sent to the academy by M. de la Condamine in 1736' (Penny Cycl.). Chiefly obtained from the Brazilian Siphonia elastica (Hevea caoutchouc) N.O. Euphorbiaceae, and E. Indian Ficus elastica. But many other tropical plants, Euphorbiaceae, Apocynaceae, Artocarpads, and others, yield it in considerable quantity. Chemically it is composed entirely of carbon and hydrogen, but is not a simple proximate principle, but a mixture of substances.
1775 Phil. Trans. LXVI. 258 An elastic gum bottle, otherwise called boradchio or caout-chouc. 1779 Phil. Trans. LXIX. 384, I take the tube out of the phial, and thrust it..into a small caoutchouck, or elastic gum bottle. 1788-9 HOWARD New Royal Encycl. s.v., Caoutchouc in natural history..a very elastic resin..Very useful for erasing the strokes of black lead pencils, and is popularly called rubber, and lead-eater. 1827 FARADAY Chem. Manip. iv. 122 Cloth is rendered air-tight by caoutchouc. 1870 EMERSON Soc. & Sol., Work & Days Wks. (Bohn) III. 65 What of this dapper caoutchouc and gutta-percha, which makes water-pipes..and rain-proof coats for all climates? 1875 J. H. BENNET Shores Medit. I. i. 25 The secret of the luxuriant verdure [in the Euphorbia]..is the existence of a kind of caoutchu in their white acrid juices. 1863-72 WATTS Dict. Chem. I. 739 Sulphured or vulcanized caoutchouc is an excellent material for tubes for conveying water or gases. |
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