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

Whole article

[Toothpick]

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

Printer (and user) friendly!

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.

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