Words Marvi Torres
Colored bubbles are something you think you yourself could've made. Well, why didn't you? After years and years of crushing gumamela petals, mixing them with Tide powder, and twisting wires in order to fashion them into a bubble wand, colored bubbles are inevitably the next step. And with hundreds of toymakers flooding the stores with bubble-making wands, guns, and Disney princesses (yes, there was a battery-operated Ariel that blows bubbles), why haven't there been bubbles that correspond to each rainbow band? Isn't it just as easy as crushing a gumamela of different colors?
Apparently not, and may I remind the reader that red gumamela produces clear bubbles. Tim Kehoe of St. Paul, Minnesota is just the guy to tell you that - with much conviction. For 11 years he chased his personal Holy Grail: colored bubbles. Ivory soap and Jell-O were his first earnest attempt just because "it's got pretty intense color." Kehoe thought like a passionate toy inventor - driving the realization of the colored bubbles, and extending the waiting time to 11 years. Nevertheless, the process never fell short of amusing.
Next up the list of coloring the bubbles were food color, hair dye, and ink. He dumped Fruit Roll-Ups or Juicy Juices in his pot, but to no avail. To his desperation, he listed nitric acid as one of his variable ingredients. Nitric acid gave off red fumes at room temperature. "I got it making a really cool bubble, but it could've killed somebody. It ate through clothes." Bouncing bubbles, exploding bubbles, bubbles that gave chemical burns - you name it, it floated across his kitchen. The bouncing bubbles of course had some selling value; problem was he couldn't replicate it. Because Kehoe was no chemist, he wasn't after some theory: only a bubble.
He started taping his experiments. He added a little of this, stirred in a little of that, stirred longer, sideways, and did whatever he could think of to vary the procedures in subtle ways. Then came one fateful day when he dipped his wand in the colored solution, blew on the film, and out came the first and most beautiful blue bubble in the world. And he had it on tape.
Kehoe also had bubble stains for weeks. What the impassioned toy inventor overlooked was this: that bubbles are made of water and layers of surfactant molecules that bond them. Dye can't penetrate this tight link, and a bubble solution with dye in it will result in the color dripping down the sides and to the bottom of the bubble. When Kehoe blew a blue one, he succeeded in binding the color to the surfactant and evenly to the water. But bursting this bubble didn't cut bond - hence the stains.
Enter Guy Haddleton who threw in half a million dollars to finance Kehoe's quest. Kehoe repeated everything he did on his video, except make colored bubbles. Armed with bucks he raided grocery stores for every colored product he can dump into his waiting cauldron. He suspected conspiracy. He suspected tyranny. He suspected Proctor & Gamble altering their soap. It was truly a test of devotion to his goal, and only a dedicated toymaker could've waited long enough to find a pigment that acted more like dye. Adding this pigment to his formula made colored bubbles that washed off.
Apparently, and sadly, it still wasn't enough. The year 2004 wasn't the date to mark the invasion of the toy market by Kehoe's colored bubbles. In a focus-group party in Sunfish Lake, mothers freaked as their children caught multicolored stains on their skins. It didn't matter that Kehoe and company were confident that it would wash off; mothers acted their part and didn't want their children turning blue. That meant going back to the drawing boards.
Enter Ram Sabnis, a man whose curriculum vitae would impress even Chuck Norris's mom. Sabnis had a PhD in dye chemistry and held patents for dying silicon and nucleic acids. If his academic achievements were a mouthful to enumerate, so were the things he did to Kehoe's project: he synthesized a dye to bond to the surfactants and to lose color when subjected to friction, water, or air exposure. The dye had an unstable ring base structure that absorbs all light save for one color (the color of the bubble) when open. When washed, rubbed, or left alone, the ring closed and all colors passed through. Thus, colored bubbles that disappeared at will were born.
And all's right in the world.
Scheduled to come out in 2006, Zubbles, the colored bubbles, were Kehoe's holy grail found. Boys and girls could pick their favorite Zubbles character: Zilch is a black bubble and Zilli is hot and pink.
Kehoe, being a person of toymaking passion and chivalry, doesn't end the journey with Zubbles. His disappearing dye is going to revolutionize the way we look at colors. Finger paints will no more leave colored smudges on the couch and carpet but only on special paper. Toothpaste will turn kids' teeth blue until they've brushed for until 30 seconds. Temporary paint will be a must for interior designers. And all will be right in the world.
