Where do balloons originate?

[Luk3112]

Seems like a bit of a dumb question but somebody asked me this yesterday.

Are balloons simply just a marketing idea for celebration or did they have a use at some point in time?

[Johnny_L.A]

Balloon HQ presents: The History of Balloons

Long before there was something so stretchy as rubber, balloons were a fact. In the pre-rubber era, balloons came from animal bladders. A pig’s bladder was inflated by Galileo in an experiment to measure the weight of air. Inflated animal bladders were used in play by Indian and Eskimo children. Most of the bladders were from sea animals.

A balloon was first made from rubber in 1824. Professor Michael Faraday, in his work at the Royal Institution in London, was experimenting with gases and raw rubber, called caoutchouc. In the Quarterly Journal of Science in 1824 he wrote, “The caoutchouc is exceedingly elastic. Bags made of it … have been expanded by having air forced into them, until the caoutchouc was quite transparent.”

His work was also probably the first joining of balloons with hydrogen. His journal article continued, “When expanded by hydrogen, they (the rubber bags) were so light as to form balloons with considerable ascending power.”

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[DrFidelius]

Also very useful for carrying incendiary pigs over your enemy’s lines to panic their war elephants.