- This is the brand new Guinness World Record,
largest ever elephant toothpaste foam experiment.
In today's video, which is partially sponsored by LastPass,
I'm gonna walk you through everything
we have to go through to get to this point,
as well as some really cool side discoveries
we made in our hundreds of hours of testing along the way.
The main ingredient for elephant's toothpaste
is hydrogen peroxide.
It's the same stuff you pour on a scrape to disinfect it.
The thing is, the bonds that hold the hydrogen
and oxygen together are pretty weak.
So if we poured some of this in here,
and just left it for a while,
it would keep releasing oxygen and eventually,
you'd be left with just water.
However, if you add a catalyst like potassium iodide,
you could make that slow process happen almost instantly.
(concoction hisses)
So that's cool, but we can make it way more impressive
if we add one key ingredient, soap.
So if we pour this in and then do everything else the same,
now when the oxygen is released,
the soap captures it, creating bubbles and foam.
And then finally, if you do all that again,
only now you add food coloring and use a flask
that tapers like this,
you can focus the expansion of foam
so it looks maximum awesome.
(bright music)
So in order to fill a pool with this stuff,
I first got together with some friends,
and we spent literally hundreds of hours for a few weeks
running experiments to calculate
the best raw ingredient combinations
in addition to brainstorming other cool things
we might do with it.
And so before we attempted to shatter
the current world record,
we had an end-of-summer party with my son
and a bunch of family friends
where we wanted to share with them
the coolest side discoveries from our research.
But first, in true end-of-summer fashion,
we had to knock out some slip and slide kickball.
(upbeat music)
I planned to kick things off by attacking them
with an elephant toothpaste gun we made
as revenge for when a bunch of these same kids ambushed me
on a recent beach trip,
and then offered me some cookies
which were just six massive cockroaches.
And I hate cockroaches.
Shamoo! Get it off me!
However, as part of our testing,
we discover the reaction is highly exothermic,
which means it generates heat as a byproduct.
If you watch it infrared,
you'll see the temperature of the foam right
after the reaction can reach almost 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, because I'm nice, I shelved my revenge plans
and just demonstrated what would've been their fate,
and told them to sit and watch at a safe distance.
And they listened, sort of.
And so now that we have their attention, it was showtime.
- [Everyone] Three, two, one!
- Go!
(bright music)
This one is called the melted unicorn.
(bright music)
You might recognize Bob Pflugfelder here, AKA, Science Bob.
He's been on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" 11 more times than I have,
and I invited him out to join me for a very specific reason,
which I will address in a bit.
(bright music)
And so with the success of the science show behind us,
it was now time for phase two.
So we are here, standing in an empty swimming pool,
about to try and break the world record
for elephant's toothpaste.
You wanna tell the good people
who owns the current world record, Bob?
- I do.
- You wanna tell the good people
who's about to not own the world record, Bob?
- Pretty confident, aren't you?
- (laughs) No, I'm not. - Mr. Engineer.
- But if everything goes well,
we're hoping to quadruple the amount
of the current record which you hold.
I'm not sure how much of like the trees
and neighborhood we're gonna cover in the process.
(bell dings)
Only time will tell,
and chemistry, which I don't understand,
but we'll see what we can come up with.
(bright music)
We wanted the foam to be safe to play in afterwards,
so we used ordinary baking yeast as our catalyst.
We could have bought yeast in big buckets,
but it turned out it was cheaper to get them
in one pound bags.
The only downside to that
is then you have to cut open 181 pound bags of yeast,
but that's why we have Science Bob.
- "Come on out," they said.
"It'll be fun," they said.
(bright music)
- This is an emergency tarp system.
So if we did our math right, it shouldn't overflow.
In the case that it does, we have these tarps here
to contain all of the foam
from not going everywhere in the yard.
We hope for the best,
plan for the worst.
(bright music)
We built these three frames for the tarps
that would contain the catalyst yeast solution.
So when it was time to fill the pool,
we could just cut the tarps and it would pour out.
The same way we cut the tarp
when we added the bigger Orbeez.
- I'm alive!
- And Kevin.
(motor whirring)
It's go time, baby.
We're probably like seven minutes out.
Got a bunch of kids inside are just rearing to get out.
The challenge here is this water's warm.
We didn't build these containers big enough,
so this will start rising.
So it's sort of a race against the clock
before it starts overflowing.
We still have to add the soap,
and then we have to add the food coloring.
(bright music)
Oh, this looks terrifying as I stab this bloody thing.
I think I'm about to get demonetized.
(bright music)
Okay, now we're adding the soap.
- This is what will actually make the bubbles.
Soap isn't part of the reaction.
(motors whirring)
Two more soap buckets.
Oh, as you can see, that bucket's filling up real quick.
(bright music)
So after a few final touches, we were ready to go.
Three, two, one!
Now before we cut the tarps,
I wanna point out I'm not a chemist.
With the physics and engineering problem,
I'm way more comfortable understanding the parameters
and getting closer to the final solution off the bat,
but chemistry is just little molecules I can't see.
And it feels a lot like trial and error
without any guarantee it will actually scale up predictably.
This was feeling like the nightmare of the jello pool
all over again.
To get to this point, we had ran over 150 tests,
sometimes, at great peril to that which we hold dear.
And so once again, if this was a total failure,
it wouldn't be from lack of effort.
Having said all that, here she is.
Two, one, go.
(liquid whooshing)
(children laughing)
So the good news is we broke the record.
The bad news is we're kind of overachievers.
Uh oh.
It's coming up.
The great tsunami!
Hey, hold this.
- [Child] Nope, goodbye camera.
- [Mark] Okay, stand back off the tarp.
- [Child] Goodbye camera!
- We need to grab 'em, stand back.
Hold this up, Bob.
Okay.
♪ Whew ♪
(upbeat music)
So while we pushed all the foam back into the pool,
that gave it some time to cool down
so we could actually touch it.
(upbeat music)
♪ Whew ♪
(upbeat music)
The drone was super cool
because not only did it make the foam
look like an alien cocoon,
but you could see it travel in infrared
because it would expose the much hotter, lower layers
of foam as it flew around.
What do you guys think?
Do you think this is gonna float?
- [Children] No!
- No? All right, here we go.
(upbeat music)
After all our tests,
we perfected the chemistry for this stuff.
So if you wanna make a home version you can play with,
check out Science Bob's website.
I'll leave a link in the video description.
- Oh my gosh! That's so fun!
(upbeat music)
♪ Whew ♪
- All right, Bob.
Sorry you're looking at an obsolete piece of material there.
- I had it for over a year.
- You did have it for over a year,
but all good things must come to an end.
- Say I was mad, but darn, that was a lot of fun.
- That was a lot of fun.
And I have good news because you
are still the world record holder.
I'm putting you on there with me, buddy.
Oh yeah, nerd hug.
(bright music)
(people yelling)
(snowballs striking)