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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.'"
Like a man made rainbow, practical jokes that only last 30 seconds. Truly impressive, though I wonder what the cost of the chemical reagents required is, lactone rings are fairly expensive to synthesize if I recall my organic chemistry correctly.
colored antibubbles?
As Popular Science went to press, Kehoe was looking for a partner with a factory that could keep the formula secret and crank out a million units in six weeks.
Did he patent the formula or is it a trade secret? The article implies the latter, but a trade secret wouldn't make any sense to me (all you'd need is a reasonably competent chemist to reverse-engineer the formula).
I liked the exploding bubble. The article didn't say much about it, but my guess is that it might have been nitric acid reacting with glycerin (producing .. nitroglycerin!). Glycerin is often used for making bubbles, it allows them to grow larger.
I did some experiments trying to create nitroglycerin when I was 17, but later I learned that the nitric acid sold commercially contain chemicals that inhibit the reaction (the bastards!). Maybe the guy found a way to inhibit the inhibitor?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
So, how long before the colour fades while the solution is in the container? I guess it's good for bussiness if you can't save the solution too long. Besides most kids probably are not much into saving fun and playtime for later either. Potentially limited storage life time may be a larger problem with some of the other products mentioned in the article.
How is this different from disappearing ink?
I also remember a toy watergun called "Zap It" that used a richly-colored dye instead of water. You'd spray it on people's clothes, but in a few minutes the "stain" was gone.
The tests I did was with nitric and sulphuric acid mixed together. The sulphuric acid's role was indeed to boost the reaction. But if my understanding is correct, the nitric acid alone can also form nitroglycerin, just less, and it's slower. It could be enough to produce an audible bang.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Here is how you can make exploding bubbles by yourself:
1.Get the bubble toy solution.
2. Get the acetylene/oxygen welding torch to blow them.
3. make these suckerz and ignite with a long twig
(you do not turn the flame on when using the torch, of course).
This explosive gas mixture trick works with hydrogen/oxygen also (and you get lighter-than-air floating bubbles) but acetylene+oxygen gives *much* stronger bang for the volume. Once we filled modest-size thrashbag with the mix and it cracked the window (and our eardrums) - and yes, we were standing on the veranda outside the house.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
The main character in the story, Tim Kehoe, spent years mixing dyes with soap in his kitchen and blowing bubbles with it. Nothing worked.
After ten years of almost entirely unsuccessful tinkering, he got some financial backing and finally employed a guy with a PhD. in dye chemistry to work on the problem - who apparently cracked it by synthesising an unusual molecule called a 'lactone ring' - something Kehoe would never have created in a lifetime of messing about in the kitchen.
The '11-year quest' makes a nice story, but it was an actual scientist who created the bubbles. Props to Kehoe for the idea, but he didn't have the skills to realise it.
#define struct union
Congratulations, you know what detonation is. However, you apparently think that just because something can be detonated that it cannot be burned.
Nitroglycerin may be burned, although the expansion will not be as powerful as if it were detonated. In fact it can explode from the heat generated when creating it (ie: adding the glycerine to the nitric/sulfuric acid mix too quickly).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitroglycerin
And in response to another post: The sulfuric acid is required as a catalyst. Nitric acid alone will not allow for the production of nitroglycerin, gun cotton, TNT, etc (you can nitrate most organic compounds...)