1906 Tom Tit's Amusing Experiments

A collection of soap bubble tricks and experiments from the world of Tom Tit.

Tom Tit was the pseudonym of Arthur Good.

Good's work as a science popularist included the publication of a number of books, magazine and newspaper articles c1880-1910. These were filled with experiments, encouraging families to play with scientific phenomena at home in a way that was entertaining and educational.

SCIENCE AMUSANTE, the third book in the series, included a fantastic chapter dedicated to soap films and bubbles. His previous books contained a few bubble effects which I've also included below.

The illustrations are so well done and instructive that I think they fill in any gaps left behind by Google's sometimes awkward translation of the (usually) French language text.

Fantastic soap bubbles.

Ordinary soap bubbles are blown with the pipe, a straw, or a small tube of some sort. But if you wish to obtain bubbles as large as your head, you must have recourse to objects of quite a different nature period

Place around the body of a bottle of piece of common wire, and twist the ends together in order to form the handle of the ring which is thus obtained.

Steep this ring in soapy water, throwing in a little sugar to make it stronger. Take it out carefully, and you will perceive that the ring is furnished, on the inside, with a thin covering or skin of soapy water.

You will perceive the latter begin to swell on the side opposite, and gradually transform itself into a pocket, which grows longer and longer, until it finally detaches itself from the ring in the form of an enormous bubble, Tinted with the colors of the rainbow.

When you are quite familiar with this method of bubble blowing, you may try the following method.

This time you must operate without any instruments whatever; neither pipe, nor tube, nor ring of wire being required. This experiment may be literally termed “sleight of hand."

Steep your closed fist in soapy water; Open your hand slowly in the water, while rounding your fingers, causing the end of the phone and that of the index finger to touch in such a way as to form a ring; now lift your hands gently him out of the water, and you will perceive in the ring the thin, silky skin or covering which we have just spoken of.

Bring your hand up to your mouth, Palm upward, with the little finger turned toward your body, and blow into the hand that is shaped like a funnel, as shown in the engraving.

The spectators will be surprised to see coming out of your hand a mini colored balloon, whose diameter cannot be less than eight or 10 inches.

The Gantry or Portico. - The Wire Ring.

Take two rods 15 cm in length (we took two knitting needles fairly thin, as can be seen in our design, but rather should choose light wood rods of 4 mm thickness).

These two horizontal rods are joined at their ends by two vertical threads of silk, to form a rectangular frame. A top thread will allow you to hold the suspended system without touching the stem from the top.

Immerse all in a bowl containing soap water bowl and slowly lift from the bowl; you see a frame covered with a thin soap film.

We attached a loose silk thread one third up from the bottom side, and a fourth vertical thread attached in the middle of it, and that hangs freely. (Fig. 1).

If now you puncture the film, using a small piece of blotting paper between the transverse thread and the lower wire, suddenly the center thread is pulled up to take the form of a semicircle. You will see the curious appearance of a door arch, as shown in dotted line in Figure 2 of the drawing.

If you then pull the thread hanging freely in the middle, you get half the figure of two circular arches juxtaposed. Let go of the middle wire, and both arches disappear to be transformed again in a semicircle.

Here are some other things simpler things to try. Round up a wire around a bottle and twist-in ends meet; you will have a ring with a handle for holding it with your hand. Soak the ring in the soap water; out comes topped with a film, on which you place a silk thread, previously wet with the liquid and forming a closed loop with a knot. This loop has any shape, as indicated in our Figure No. 3.

Puncture the film within the loop; it immediately takes the form of a circle, as indicated in dotted our drawing.

The Helix

Take a cardboard tube (like those that newspapers are delivered in) or any other tube length and an arbitrary diameter. Slide a thin wire down the center of the tube. Then ask someone to keep the wire centered within the cylinder (the axis), then fold the wire over at the top of the tube and wrap it around the pipe, as you would wind string on a reel, by spacing or juxtaposing the coils of wire.

After eight or ten rounds, remove the tube, bend the end of the wire after the final turn and wrap it once or twice around central wire adjacent to the end of the final coil. Fold the remaining length of wire to run parallel along the handle of the device and wrap the wire again, once or twice, to secure it to the central rod. BUT avoid over tightening these twists to the central rod so the coil wire will slide up and down along the center wire.

Our drawing will tell you the rest of the manufacturing process better than too long explanations.

Finish with a small ring the second rod is the movable rod, hold the ring of the axis in the left hand and the ring of the movable rod of the right hand.

I assume that the device is in the position shown in the figure at the top of our design. By pulling the movable rod, you force the helix to open, and the individual windings differ increasingly from each other.

If before this maneuver of the moving rod, you have plunged all the coil turns in a bowl containing water and soap and then gently spread the coil by pulling the moving rod, you will see each of these coils is topped with a thin soap film, exactly reproducing the shape of a helical surface, on which the play of light produce admirable iridescence.

You can change the pitch of the propeller by sliding the coils closer to and further away from each other before the soap film breaks. The effect is most curious.

Race liquid films in a lamp glass.

Liquid films are subjected to an elastic force that tends to make them as small as possible.

Take a conical lamp glass, that is to say whose one end is narrower than the other. Immerse the glass in soapy water, drain it, then dip the big end in soap water, holding the glass vertically.

Remove it carefully and you will see that a liquid film has formed near the end you just dipped.

Hold the glass horizontally, and watch your soap film shrink in size as it travels to the small end of the glass.

Make successive films by re-dipping the wide end of the glass tube and you will see a series of films travel to the narrow end, as if on a march to catch one another.

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Electric Dance of the Bubbles

We know that wool fabrics such as fleece, flannel, cloth, etc. may be used, if they are dry, to support a soap bubble without bursting it. You can even, in winter with knitted wool gloves on your hands, play ball with another person, gloved like you, and toss a soap bubble between yourselves, with open hands covered with the gloves serving as a racket.

Try putting more bubbles on a blanket on the table, and then take a dry piece of heavy paper, rub it vigorously with a slightly rough brush to electrify.

Place the paper thus electrified over a bubble; you will see the bubble lengthen and take the form of an egg, then electrical attraction is increasing as you approach the paper, finally lifting from the table to climb toward the paper, like a balloon filled with gas.

Try placing the paper successively over other bubbles, so you can put more in motion after each other, and organize a dance of the most curious soap bubbles.

Newton’s Colored Rings

To perform this experiment, you only have to blow a bubble on a glycerine moistened rim of a glass to examine its colors and the rather wonderful changes of color to which it lends.

Light, by polarizing on the film of a bubble, forms colored areas already studied by Newton, but it is very difficult to observe if one does not have a good method.

Here's how you'll get there easily. Place to one side of your bubble, about 80 centimeters distant, a lighted candle; on the other side, 10 centimeters distant, place a white cardboard screen.

You will see immediately on the screen the image of the bubble, and after a while as if painted by a magic paintbrush, the colored rings we want to study will appear with great clarity.

For a number of people to enjoy this experiment, replace the opaque screen with a thin sheet of paper stretched over a frame, or a piece of tracing paper. The image of the bubble will be well observed by transparency, as indicated by our drawing.

Note that the colored rings are not fixed, but endowed with a high translational and downward movement, that is to say the upper pole of the image at lower pole. A color replaces another color, but the chance is nothing to do with the phenomenon. The succession takes place in a constant order and is especially apparent at the top of the bubble.

Soap Bubble Chandelier

Cut a potato into a washer or round shape, the thickness of two fingers, and hollow out-in the middle so as to form a solid ring.

Three pins, stuck into the outside of the ring, will hold the threads used to suspend the device from the ceiling; these pins will also hold three threads supporting a cardboard disc, below the device, on which you will put a candle.

This framework will be transformed into a chandelier in which we will see more flames instead of one.

Blow onto a short neck pipe, a medium size soap bubble in which you ask a smoker to inject tobacco smoke; the bubble will take the appearance of a milky globe globes similar to frosted glass gaslights.

Then press the tip of the pipe stem in the thickness of the ring in order to plug the hole in the pipe and prevent deflation of the bubble.

Do this for five or six pipes spaced equally around the chandelier improvised; You will then see the flame of the candle reflecting in each of these globes, producing a most graceful effec.

Frozen Bubbles are Snow Flowers

When a cloud forms in a very cold area, water vapor, instead of turning into rain, is condensed in the solid state, giving rise to small icicles that hang together other, falling slowly to the ground as snow.

Snowflakes are made up of small crystals in the shape of stars, with a regularity and a variety of wonderful shapes. They have three, six or twelve parts arranged symmetrically around an axis or point, and forming between them angles equal.

To observe this, look at snowflakes on a day of cold and dry weather, on black cloth, the sleeve of your coat, for example, or you will distinguish with the naked eye or with a magnifying glass, several hundred different forms.

Without getting into a cloud or going to Lapland, we can give ourselves a nice show of star formation in snow.

Blow a soap bubble outside in very cold weather; soon you will see small needles form in the thin film of water, and locate each other in taking the various positions I mentioned earlier.

Three Concentric Bubbles

There are a number of formulas to produce a liquid for obtaining large-size soap bubbles that live a long time. I refer the reader to the very simple formula that I have indicated in the Hundred Experiences in Science Fun, 1st series. - This liquid can moreover do everything. As for the instrument required for blowing bubbles, I use a thin copper tube from a curtain rod; This tube provides small bubbles.

If we place after a flexible stopper washer, pierced by a hole, onto the end of this small tube, the bubbles may be larger, as they will have the base of support for the bubble to grow; any flat cap pierced by a hole will do.

For large bubbles, take a child’s small trumpet as shown on our drawing. It will allow you to blow bubbles of up to 30 centimeters in diameter and containing more than 13 liters of air!

If I do not mention the clay pipe it is because it is too fragile and more importantly the hole in the stem of the pipe is very narrow, blowing a large bubble is a bit too slow. These observations apply not only to our experience here described, but other experiments on soap bubbles.

And now, here's how you can blow up three concentric bubbles:

Take a small porcelain doll, like the ones you put in the cakes of kings; have it stand in the middle of a 5 franc coin, on which you'll stick his feet with some sealing wax; with a drop of this wax you will also stick onto his head a small cardboard disk 1 centimeter in diameter.

This done, place the coin with the little guy upon a cork in the center of a saucer, after having wet all with soap liquid. You will place the dish on a stemmed glass, so that viewers can see better experience.

Soak the bell of the trumpet well in soap water, hold it above the man (the pipe of the trumpet being vertical) to blow your first bubble. It does not burst on contact with objects in the saucer, which are wet with the same liquid as that which the bubble is made, and so the bubble shall go down along the man until the 5-franc piece, then along the cap up in the saucer, and will stop at the edges of the saucer. Stop blowing when it reaches 15 to 20 centimeters in diameter.

The first bubble, the outer bubble, has been blown. Now take the copper tube, dip it well into the liquid from the bottle to wet almost its entire length, and boldly push the tube’s end through the wall of the outside bubble, which does not will burst. Blow the second bubble above the head of the doll and keep blowing until the bubble grows larger than the doll and comes to rest on the 5 franc coin. The second bubble will reach about 8 centimeters in diameter.

The small figure now appears within a double glass ball. Gently remove your tube, wet it again in the bottle, push the tube tip through both bubbles, and blow a tiny bubble, 2 to 3 cm, which will remain on the washer on top of the head of the doll, if your assembly is perfectly level.

Extinguish a candle with a soap bubble

I indicated as utensils for blowing soap bubbles, a copper tube from a curtain rod and a child’s small toy trumpet which has the noise maker removed. But there is another utensil that will allow us to blow even more beautiful, monstrous bubbles, with 30 to 40 centimeters in diameter and containing 12 to 30 liters of air!

This utensil is none other than the ordinary tin funnel that is found in every household.

Pour your soap water in a broad bowl so the edges of the funnel plunge well into the liquid; Gently lift the funnel so as not to puncture the slippery film that has formed at its opening, and holding the funnel vertically blow a large bubble only stopping just to catch your breath.

To keep the bubble dimensions, the funnel’s small hole must be plugged with the finger; otherwise, owing to its elasticity, the bubble deflates by driving, through the small open hole, the air contained therein.

It is easy for you to see the force with which the soap film drives the air from the swelled bubble; hold the small hole of the funnel close to a candle flame. You will see the flame wobble, turn pale, then extinguish.

A flower that opens and closes

Use the saucer and the cork which served for the experiment of three concentric soap bubbles.

Now take a sheet of tinfoil, taken from a chocolate bar, and rub it with a fingernail on the table in order to remove all wrinkles.

Now draw on the tinfoil a rosette with six petals, reserving at the center a small circle having the same diameter as the cap.

The rose will be in a circle of 8 to 10 cm in diameter; then cut out the flower shape with scissors. Wet the foil flower in soapy liquid in the saucer. Place the center of the foil flower on the upright cork, the petals of the rosette falling all around, as shown in figure placed on the anterior part of our design.

Now blow a bubble, starting at the center of the rosette. It attaches at once, and, as it grows, it will slide along the branches of the rosette, which will rise appearing like the petals of a flower (right figure), lifting due to the pull effected by the elastic membrane of the soap film.

They will dance upon a round tin dance floor (tin can lid or similar), which is nailed near one of its edges onto the top of the bridge (upright post), as shown in our drawing.

Wet the metal disk and dancers, place the dancers onto the disk, and blow a bubble to encase the dancers. This bubble will be the ballroom, for a wonderful show. Pluck the wire like a violin string; this transmits the vibrations to the plate on which the dancers wiggle most wildly in their world and you will have, at little cost, the spectacle of a ball for which you provided the room, dancers and violins.

A Ball Dance in a Bubble aka: A Bubble Quadrille

We saw earlier that it is possible to imprison in a soap bubble, different objects like a porcelain doll or a bouquet of flowers of the same substance. But these objects were fixed and motionless; I'm going to show we can make little figures dance inside the soap bubble in which they are placed.

Take a wooden school ruler, cut a piece of about 3 centimeters long. Twist rings onto both ends of a thin wire that is a little longer than the larger piece of the rule.

Nail the two rings at each end of the large piece, then vertically stand the small segment of the rule under the wire, pushing it along the rule until the wire is taut as a violin string on an easel.

Pluck the wire with one hand, changing notes by pressing the finger along various points of the wire. That's the music.

Carve dancers from corks; color them with oil colors if you wish, and support the corks with three short wire “legs” placed into the underside of the cork. These wire legs will make the dancers very mobile.

They will dance upon a round tin dance floor (tin can lid or similar), which is nailed near one of its edges onto the top of the bridge (upright post), as shown in our drawing.

The Apple in a Bag. aka: Bubble in a bubble.

Here is a new formula for soap water, which gave me great results. Dissolve 20 grams of pure oleate and fresh soda (20 cents at all druggists) in half a liter of water at about 50°. Add 30 grams of pure glycerin, pour into a bottle of one liter and complete filling with distilled water or, in its absence, rainwater.

Seal the container well and keep in a cool place. After eight days, the liquid is ready to serve. Pour into the bowl only the amount needed and do not reintroduce the used liquid into the bottle because the solution deteriorates on contact with air.

You can put the used liquid into another bottle, it will still make the joy of youth.

Oleate of soda can be replaced with an equal weight of white soap but no soap, no matter how famous, would work so well.

Now for the experiment:

Hang upon a wire ring, well wetted with soapy liquid, an ordinary bubble; remove the water droplet which collects at the bottom of the bubble with your finger; insert the tip of the bubble blowing tube through the film of the ring and blow a second bubble inside of the first. It will fall to the bottom of the first and will stay as an apple at the bottom of a bag.

Ensure the inner bubble will not burst through the outer bubble by removing the droplet of liquid at the base of the outer bubble. Otherwise the second bubble would join with the first and cause the bubble to burst like the apple falling through a bag.

Sphere in the cylinder.

Around a tube or bottle wind a wire and twist the ends where they meet in order to have a handle that allows you to hold the ring in your hand.

Make a second ring of the same diameter, wet them both with soap water (oleate of soda and glycerin) that has already helped us in our previous experiments, and blow a bubble so that it comes into contact with two rings held in parallel, as shown in our illustration above.

Transform the bubble cylinder, gently separating the rings to each other, stop when the cylinder surface starts to become concave, and ask someone to rewet the tube that was used to blow the first bubble, and insert the tip of the tube through the soap film contained within the top ring, and blow gently, very slowly, a second bubble within the first which has been transformed into a cylinder.

See the cylinder bulge gradually as the bubble inside grows. When the bubble touches the cylinder’s interior walls, free it with a little shake of the tube, remove the tube gently, and your bubble will remain suspended between the two rings, compressed by the cylindrical surface.

Pull the rings farther apart and the bubble inside will be squeezed into the shape of an egg.

On the contrary, the closer the rings are to each other, the cylinder expands and the interior bubble, not being supported will descend touching the membrane of the lower ring; bursting the bubble and the cylinder too soon.

Soap bubbles rolling one within the other.

I just showed you how to blow a bubble in a spherical bubble transformed into another cylinder; the cylinder walls sufficiently pressed against the surface of the spherical bubble to keep it from falling under the action of gravity, if pressed against each other as are the two bubbles, so too are the membranes, since the eye does not perceive every available space, the two bubbles do not touch.

As my readers are not forced to take my word, I will give you an experience to prove to yourself that two bubbles, leaning against each other, are not really touching.

Make a vertical cylinder using two rings, as in the previous experience, and hold both rings with help from someone from the audience, but ask him to hold his vertically, which gives the cylinder a horizontal position. If the distance of the rings does not exceed three times their diameter, the cylinder will maintain its shape.

Push the end of the tube into the cylindrical surface film, and blow a little bubble. Detach it with a quick shake given to the pipe; it will fall down. Look to see a small bubble rolling inside the cylinder, along the slope, as it would have in a lamp glass, showing that it offers, with the cylindrical surface, no point an actual contact, although the two services are placed one against the other.

The metamorphosis of the soap bubble.

Make a strong solution of soap and water, with white Castile soap and tepid water, That is, at about 15°C. Passed this water will filter to retain the unresolved particles of soap, now pour in some glycerin in the proportion of 2/5 to to 3/5 fifths of soap water. Shake it too well to complete the mixture, and place the vessel in a quiet place, when you will shortly see a kind of film form on the surface. Skim off this film, and decant the liquor. It will retain its qualities for an indefinite period.

Here are a few simple experiments we can make with the fluid thus obtained. To blow a soap bubble the best advantage, you may either employ a clay pipe or a sound, strong straw, which you will have slipped into four for a couple of inches at the end, and to turn the wings back carefully at right angles on themselves, as in the drawing. You can also operate with a larger tube of paper, say half an inch in diameter, whose ends are slit a little way, and to turned back in the same manner. With this monster pipe, you can sometimes obtain soap bubbles as big as your head, and of the most dazzling brilliancy of color.

You may with great advantage prepare a special seat for your soap bubble. FirsNow plunge your cube completely in the prepared soap liquid. On drawing it gently out, a surprise awaits you. In its center you will see a sheet of water, very thin, each side of which is united to the corresponding edge of the cube by a liquid film, as shown in our upper drawing on the right.

Again, if you plunge only the lower phase of your cube frame into the liquid, you will behold a novel transformation; the frame will have in its interior a little cubic bubble, whose edges are united with the iron wire in the correctest way. The figure is composed of six truncated pyramids of absolute regularity, And the whole is vividly illuminated with every intent of the rainbow. Now, with a slip of blotting paper, breakaway one of the surfaces of the cubic bubble, and low! The original square reappears.