Look What You Can Do With Bubbles!

Bubbles are the little elves of nature, but I'll bet you have never considered what all you can do with them. Most people when they think of bubbles, think of soap. And it's true, playing around with bubbles hardly existed before soap. It began in the 19th century when the Pear Soap Company of England made playing with bubbles popular, but the trick didn't fully catch on until mid-20th century, when people started experimenting with implements other than bubble pipes to make truly bizarre bubbles.

You are at this very moment, surrounded with bubble toys! Bubbles can be made with string, cookie sheets, plastic bowls, jar lids, milk containers, kitchen utensils, branches and twigs and even with your two hands. I'm not talking about the simple round little bubbles children make with a circle wand, but huge big bubbles surrounding your entire family, hung from your ceiling, frightening the cat into bringing up the latest hair ball.

A bubble is simply a stretchy skin enclosing some air, like a balloon. If you blow up a balloon and then let it go, the skin shrinks, the air goes whooshing out amid amusing aerial flippancy, and the empty balloon falls to the floor. But a bubble - well, that's another story! If you start to blow a bubble with a circle wand, and then stop, the bubble shrinks down to a flat circle to fit the wand. The tension that kept the balloon a sphere is lost when the balloon falls to the floor, but with a bubble the tension is always there, just waiting for you to expand it again. If you blow up the bubble and then interrupt the process by turning the wand quickly over, the tension inside tries to squeeze the bubble into the most economical shape possible - one that has the smallest surface area possible, for the volume of air it contains: a sphere.

Soap-skinned bubbles must have boundaries all around, or the surface tension will scatter them in tiny drops. A bubble is a clever container which has no boundaries. It's like "A sheet folded to meet itself along all its sides. The air inside keeps the bubble from exploding into droplets.