Mad Scientist Invents Colored Bubbles

Anonymous Custard writes "Popular Science has a fascinating article up about toy inventor Tim Kehoe's quest to create colored bubbles. 'Chemical burns, ruined clothes, 11 years, half a million dollars--it's not easy to improve the world's most popular toy. ... It turns out that coloring a bubble is an exceptionally difficult bit of chemistry.'"

Comments

Not a dupe.

[technoextreme]

Yeah. The two articles are not the same despite being from the same magazine. The one that you just mentioned was a one paragraph blurb. This article is a full fledged story.

Whole article

[Toothpick]

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/printerfriendly/scien ce/0a03b5108e097010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

Printer (and user) friendly!

Easy to read link without pagination

[Anonymous Coward]

"printer friendly" link... http://www.popsci.com/popsci/printerfriendly/scien ce/0a03b5108e097010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

Re:Huh?? There are five paragraphs on each page

[interiot]

Yes, "one paragraph" was an exageration. But it's spread over 11 pages, and most of the paragraphs are simply gush with no content. For those who just want the meat, the whole story can basically be boiled down to:

Kehoe made a bubble like that when he was 26, after only two years of trashed countertops and chemical fires. He showed it to toy-company executives, who called it a "holy grail." And then it broke, as bubbles always do. And when it did, the dye inside escaped onto clothes and carpets and walls and skin, staining everything it touched. The execs told him to come back with a bubble they could wash off their boardroom table.

The breakthrough finally happened in an empty lab in Minneapolis on a Sunday this past February. As with Kehoe's first bubble, it arose from the slow, subtle refinement of a process over thousands of experiments. But Sabnis could re-create it. He synthesized a dye that would bond to the surfactants in a bubble to give it bright, vivid color but would also lose its color with friction, water or exposure to air--not fade, not transfer to something else, but go away completely, as though it had never been there. When one of these bubbles breaks on your hand, rub your hands together a few times and look: Poof. Magic. No more color. If the bubble breaks on your shirt or the carpet or the dog, you have two choices: Dab it with a touch of plain water to remove it immediately, or forget about it for half an hour. Either way, the color will soon be gone.

Sabnis's solution was to build a dye molecule from an unstable base structure called a lactone ring that functions much like a box. When the ring is open, the molecule absorbs all visible light save for one color--the color of the bubble. But add air, water or pressure, and the box closes, changing the molecule's structure so that it lets visible light pass straight through. Sabnis builds each hue by adding different chemical groups onto this base.

Video

[Mard]

There is video of children playing with the bubbles on the company's website:
http://www.zubbles.com/gallery/index.asp

Screw Hurricane Katrina, somebody make this guy Person of the Year.

Company website

[Scutter]

Allegedly due out in February (not Real Soon Now) according to the article. Check out the awesome video on their website. (coral cached. Actual site is http://www.zubbles.com/

FOR HOW HE DOES IT...

[MLopat]

...Goto page 10 of 11 to save yourself from the extensive history of bubbles and toy manufacturing.

Re:I actually..

[fliplap]

Ok, apparently you didn't read the entire article then. Turn to page 130 and the last 2 paragraphs of the article.

Other things they're thinking of:
Finger paints that fade from everything but a special paper.
Vanishing hair dye
Disappearing graffiti spray paint
Toothpaste that turns a kids mouth pink until he's brushed for 30 seconds and soap that does the same
A swiffer type mop that dyes where you've already mopped
A wall paint that lets you test paint colors

Zillions of other uses...

[IdahoEv]

... some of them very much non-entertainment.

Um, from TFA:

"When Kehoe isn't blowing bubbles for businessmen, he's at home inventing again, coming up with new uses for the disappearing dye, the importance of which is hard to overstate. For decades, the color industry has been focused entirely on color fastness. No one has really thought about the potential of temporary color. That the dye was created for children's bubbles may turn out to be just a footnote, a funny story Sabnis tells at color-chemist conventions.

Among the ideas Kehoe has already mocked up are a finger paint that fades from every surface except a special paper, a hair dye that vanishes in a few hours, and disappearing-graffiti spray paint. There's a toothpaste that would turn kids' mouths a bright color until they had brushed for the requisite 30 seconds, and a soap that would do the same for hand washing.

He's also thinking outside the toy chest, mucking around in the lab on weekends making things like a Swiffer that leaves a momentary trace showing where you've Swiffered and a temporary wall paint that would let you spend a few hours with a color before committing to it. The dye's reach is so great that there are even biotech and industrial uses being discussed. "We've got stuff in the works I can't talk about that'll blow bubbles away," he says excitedly. It might take years, but, knowing Tim Kehoe, we'll see them eventually. After all, it's only a little extra work."

But anyone who thinks entertainment and fun are not important and/or not business-worthy is living a lonely, sad life on a different planet from this one.

Re:Patent or trade secret?

[jimmytango829]

Here is the link to the page that says the dyes are patent pending.

Re:He's not a Mad Scientist!

[Silentnite]

It would need another catalyst, not to mention you can make your own Nitric acid. W/O inhibiters.

Re:Coloured bubbles aren't the breakthrough

[CaptainCarrot]

If you'll RTFA, you'll discover that Kehoe had a breakthrough of his own some time earler: he found how to bind the dye to the surficant layer so that it didn't pool in the bottom of the bubble. Without that it wouldn't matter what dye you used; you couldn't have colored bubbles.

Re:Um what about the chemist

[merikari]

Well, that "nut job" got the funding for the project. Remember the half a mil?

Of course, Mr. Sabnis was the person who actually made the stuff, but he probably would not have even dreamt of coloured bubbles.