The subject is frustrated drips.
Don`t get it? Think about it. Take water, add soap. Swoop a loop through the goop. Lift. Blow. Look. See the bubble. See the bulge at the bottom. That`s a drip waiting to happen.
The scientists say so. (Yes, it is true, over the centuries the mere sphere-on-the-loose has been the subject of great laboratory analysis, as white coats, even the big shots like Newton-Sir Isaac, that is-have poofed pipes for hours, studying seriously the multiple properties of the bulbous evanescence gurgling forth.)
Here`s how it works: There`s something in the soap that does a number on water. Makes it more elastic, if you will. Water molecules, left alone, are quite tight. Like to stick real close together. Scientists-and 3rd-grade teachers-call it high surface tension, meaning the molecules try to pull together.
Soap molecules, on the other hand, have a split personality. They`ve got these long tails that hate water, bolt away from it like a 3rd-grade boy from the girl making eyes at him on the playground. But they`ve also got these other ends that love H2O, shimmy right into the water clique.
It`s this push-me-pull-you attitude of the soap that splits the solution into layers-elastic, easy-to-expand soap molecules on the outside, clingy water molecules on the inside. When you blow, the soap stops the water from doing its usual thing, lowers the surface tension and lets the bubble be.
Here`s where the drip comes in: the water, despite being trapped inside, drains to the bottom of the sphere where, longing to drop, it waits for the bubble to pop.
Got it? All right then, let`s blow out of this science class. Before this exercise is over, we want to pack your brain with a veritable froth of facts about bubbles, specifically the sort you blow from a store-bought bottle, or from your very own home brew.
The scene: A cavernous skylit factory on Chicago`s Far West Side, the home of Strombecker Corp., the oldest toy company in America, and maker of the No. 1 selling toy in America: TootsieToy`s Mr. Bubbles and Wonder Bubbles, of which more than 50 million bottles are sold each year.
Shhrr, whoosh and pffffft, the baritone bellow of the bubble-bottling machines deafens as it boomerangs wall-ceiling-floor in this square-city-block of a building.
Back in the top-secret mixing room, Luis Garcia, night mixer for the last two years, stirs a long-handled spoon in one of three huge metal tanks, each 500 gallons. Garcia, who speaks little English, oversees the mixing of 20 500- gallon batches on his shift, ”like a magician, play with bubbles.”
An ordinary green garden hose lays serpentlike nearby. It pumps plain old Lake Michigan water into the tanks, the only ingredient not under wraps.
(Myron B. Shure, Strombecker`s kidlike 66-year-old chairman and grandson of company founder Nathan Shure, a legendary wholesaler of turn-of-the-century Chicago, says his company is so sold on Chicago water it ships it in huge vats to its factory in China, where it assembles and fills some of its more labor- intensive bubble toys.)
Once mixed, the secret-formula solution is pumped at a rate of 100 gallons per minute into a 3,500-gallon holding tank that towers over Garcia and his metal-tank flock. It`s then gravity-fed to the three production lines that sputter and chug on the other side of the mixing-room wall.
Soldiers on a conveyor belt
The starting gate for the bubbles-in-a-bottle is The Scrambler, which looks like one of those carnival rides that spins and spins while the bottom falls out and so does your stomach. The big blue metal bin tumbles a potage of plastic bottles into a multicolored parade as it spills them onto the assembly line.
Once on the line, the single-file soldiers, uniformed in grape-, berry-, tomato- or fuchsia-colored plastic tubes, rumble down the conveyor belt, under the machine that slaps a label on their chests, beneath the contraption that looks like a modern-day milking station with metal tubes clamped on every teat as it fills 12 bottles at once with the prescribed amount of bubble solution, past the woman who sticks purple wands in their wide-open maws, and onto the carousel that seals each bottle before spinning on the cap and rolling the army to the counting, boxing and taping stations. There, the bubbles-in-waiting wait to be rolled to the warehouse and the loading dock, where each day dozens of semitrailers pull into the bays, fill their bellies with pallets of bottled bubbles, and shove off to points distant (Searcy, Ark., and Douglas, Ga., are among this day`s destinations).
Now through October is high season for bubbles. With most of the inventory already moved out to store shelves across America, the lines are rolling a mere 16 hours a day. From January through March, though, they kick into 24-hour-a-day overdrive to stock up for spring.
Over here at Strombecker, which has blown its most famous bubbles to
”The Lawrence Welk Show,” the Ice Capades and the Delta Queen (”all the Queens on the Mississippi, for that matter,” says Shure), as well as sold the solution in 55-gallon drums to utility and pipeline companies nationwide for use in leak diagnosis, the bubbles roll out at a rate of a quarter million bottles a day, the 4-ounce line alone spitting them out at 10,500 bottles an hour.
Shure, the chief cook and bottle watcher, is known around Chicago as the resident expert on the history of bubble blowing. He can`t provide
documentation, but he swears kids were blowing bubbles B.C. And probably never stopped. He points to Sir John Everett Millais` 1886 painting ”Bubbles,”
originally titled ”A Child`s World,” in which a curly-haired lad sits in his Victorian ruffles, bubble pipe in hand, gazing heavenward at one ripe bubble. He digs into his personal memory bank, when as a kid in the family business in the 1920s, he vividly recalls hoisting the heavy boxes of bubbles that came in little glass jars. The 1933 catalog of N. Shure Co. (”the world`s largest novelty house”) lists, on Page 705, the Bubbler, ”enameled wood bowl and mouthpiece; will not warp or crack. … No end of fun and amusement.” For 40 cents, you could have had a dozen. The company`s winter 1952-1953 catalog debuts ”Rainbow Colored Wonder Bubbles . . . a really hot number for the children as well as the adults. Each bottle will give thousands and thousands of bubbles.” The price: 78 cents per dozen.
The spring 1992 catalog lists no fewer than 11 pages of bubble toys, from the Mr. Bubbles Bubble Sword, a holey sword swished in a solution-filled scabbard, to the Mr. Bubbles Swiss Bubble Blower, a Swiss Army knife-like device in which each fold-out ”blade” is in fact a bubble wand.
Who comes up with this stuff?
Meet Professor Bubbles. Yes, he`s a real live grownup. Pays real estate taxes in Wilmette. Not quite where you`d expect to find a man who makes his living blowing bubbles on stages in Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Las Vegas and beyond. A few years ago, he and his bubbles toured China with a throng of female bodybuilders.
Richard Faverty is his name. Forty-seven is his age. He backed into the bubble business in 1980, after a decade as a free-lance photographer, shooting for such respectable rags as Time and Newsweek, and for those checkout-line distractors, the National Enquirer and the Star, where he says he developed a specialty as the ”freak” photographer, eschewing the mainstay Elvis, JFK or UFO assignments. He was busy shooting his usual corporate chiefs, newsmakers and FIVE-OUNCE BABY LIVES! when a call came from his photo agency in New York, which wanted him to shoot pictures of Americans blowing bubbles. The motivation was strictly mercenary: The agency figured the pictures would sell well worldwide.
So Faverty, an ex-hippie who spent his college days at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, obliged. He started blowing bubbles. He started throwing bubble parties. Every night after work he`d invite his friends and lab assistants to bring their bathing suits to his studio. He cranked the music. He blew bubbles, big bubbles. Then he worked his cameras. By the end of the summer, he figured out how to put a baby in a bubble. The baby was his 3-year- old daughter, Sandi. This caught the attention of the National Enquirer, which ran Faverty`s photo of the baby-swallowing bubble with the screamer:
”Dad Wraps Daughter in Amazing Superbubble.”
That was just the beginning. ”Within months, I became an international bubble expert,” says Faverty, who keeps a toy-filled photo studio in a loft just west of the Cabrini-Green Homes. ”Say what you want about the Enquirer, but I got 30 calls after that story ran, calls from Hollywood, New York, they wanted me on `What`s My Line?` ” Faverty turned them all down.
Five years later, he was still taking those pictures. The phone rang with one more offer. This time, Faverty accepted. He was off to Tokyo to appear on a TV show whose name translates to ”The World Amazing People 85,” a Japanese cross between ”Late Night With David Letterman” and a freak show, Faverty explains. He packed his bags with 300 pounds of bubble goop, toys and tricks. He donned a Dr. Seuss-like stovetop hat, from which bubbles often blew. He put on a bow tie and tails. He took the stage name Professor Bubbles, inspired by his father, whom he says was a ”real professor” of Victorian literature at Northwestern University.
Once in the Orient, he ventured to a prebroadcast banquet to meet the rest of the show`s guests: the tallest woman in the world, the oldest woman with tattoos in the world, the man with the longest mustache, the woman with the longest nails, the woman with the strongest head of hair.
He looked up and down the banquet table and realized: ”I became what I beheld.”
Besides writing a book on bubbles and inventing a spate of bubble toys
(yes, the Swiss Bubble Knife is his), Faverty has mastered a breathless list of bubble tricks.
He has blown bubbles inside bubbles, chains o` bubbles, frozen bubbles, fishbowl-size bubbles, bubble houses, bubble trampolines, merry-go-round bubbles, dancing bubbles, bubble storms, Romeo & Juliet bubbles, volcano bubbles, tightrope bubbles, tango bubbles (a k a hula bubbles when he`s in Hawaii), and a few weeks ago on Argentinian TV he blew a babe in a bubble, in which a tangerine-clad woman named Monica suddenly dropped her dress and, right there on live, uncensored TV, revealed she was not wearing the bathing suit as rehearsed but rather some black lace strings that stood up quite well under the bubble. Faverty`s biggest-ever bubble: 18 feet in diameter, 60 to 70 feet long.
The professor doesn`t need to be adrift in another land to get lost in his bubbles. Why, it`s right there in his Wilmette back yard that he blows some of his best. ”It`s very relaxing. On a summer evening, I put on a little classical music, go outside and start blowing.
”The old neighbors complained, the bubbles would drift over, and every time they popped they left a clean round circle on the side of the house. And when it rains, the neighbors laugh. The patio starts foaming.”
One solution
If you froth at the thought of getting into bubble trouble of your very own, but care not to turn your kitchen into a sudsy, sloppy mess, here`s a solution: Grab your kids and head straight to the Chicago Children`s Museum, 435 E. Illinois St.
There, making a return appearance after much badgering of the museum staff, is the very wet and very slippery bubble station, officially known as
”The Art and Science of Bubbles” exhibit.
The nice museum folks have left out plenty of playthings for the kiddies to splash around in, jump in and otherwise wreak havoc in, on and under. Missing, however, is this warning: Enter at Your Own Risk.
One recent afternoon:
Stephen Hager, 4 1/2, sports thigh-soaked jeans. His compatriot, William Thompson, 4, wears one squeaky Nike, so wet it bubbles when he walks.
William is trying to convince a grownup that his bubble is ”alive,”
when Stephen spots temptation across the room. Patrick McLafferty, a lad of 5, visiting from Vicenza, Italy, has launched a blimp of a bubble. Patrick stands in awe of his masterwork.
Stephen makes a run for it. ”Ha! I popped it. That`s the best part. Neh- neh-neh-neh-neh,” he sings, rubbing it in.
Shouts Patrick: ”Stop it! Whoa!” Then, taking justice into his own chubby hand, he pumps a fist and pops him. Down goes Stephen.
Staring up from his supine position, the fallen one asks, ”Did you push me down?”
So it goes, young man, when life`s bubbles burst.
