Today, we're taking a look at the difference between helium,
regular air, and sulfur hexafluoride in balloons.
[Music]
On Twitter, user Monkey Humor said,
"Hey @theKingofRandom, can you inhale helium
then blow up a balloon?"
As I interpret that question,
the goal is to see if we can inhale helium,
sort of straight from the tank, then blow it into a balloon,
and still get a balloon that floats,
and I'm particularly intrigued by this
because I think I've seen this
in cartoons growing up all the time.
People would just blow up a balloon,
and then it would float away,
and once I understood anything about science
and buoyancy, I thought,
"Hey, why is that happening?"
"What is in their lungs that they can blow up a balloon
that floats away?"
Here's the basic idea.
We're going to try breathing in helium,
then breathing it into a balloon to see
if we can blow up a balloon with our breathe
that will float.
Not only are we going to try this with helium,
but we're actually going to try sort of the opposite as well.
We're going to take some sulfur hexafluoride,
which you might remember is the deep voice gas,
and breathe it in,
and our voice comes out sounding like this.
So we want to try the same idea with that,
breathe sulfur hexafluoride in,
breathe that out into a balloon.
See what happens.
We also might see what happens if we mix the two.
I feel like this is a race.
So you're saying we each take a tank.
We each take a balloon.
Yes.
And we see who can breathe into a balloon,
>> and get it to float fastest. >> Fastest.
It's not incredibly safe to breathe directly
from the tank into your lungs and into a balloon.
So I think that we need to fill up a balloon,
breathe from that balloon,
and then into a second balloon.
If we start to feel light-headed,
we have to tap out.
No passing out in this contest.
Guys, helium displaces the air in your lungs.
If you breathe in too much of it,
you will get lightheaded
because you are technically asphyxiating.
You do want to stop if you get lightheaded.
That's not good.
Fortunately, helium does rise,
and so it does kind of try and escape your lungs,
and regular air tries to fill it back in.
But if you're just breathing helium in over and over,
there's a good chance
that the regular air won't have enough time to get in there.
So we'll definitely want to take some breaths
in between moving from one balloon to the other.
Go.
[Music]
Oh, there's light headedness.
I feel it.
>> Ha ha. >> No!
It's floating.
Oh boy.
I'm not floating.
Going down.
See how I stopped and took a breath.
I'm fine.
We breathe a balloon that floats into the air,
like something straight out of a cartoon.
So this is not 100% helium that we've got in these,
because our tanks don't have 100% helium.
These are 80%,
plus the fact that we still had some oxygen,
carbon dioxide in our lungs.
And nitrogen.
The tanks and our lungs also had nitrogen.
So helium, nitrogen,
oxygen, carbon, dioxide and trace other elements.
I'm going to blow up another balloon with helium,
and I'm going to try and match it to the size of this one.
3, 2, 1.
Okay.
Smoked it.
There's our difference right there.
So we've definitely got more helium in this one.
This is less dense,
and you can definitely see that they do not take off
of the same speed as a result.
All right.
I also want to test like the lifting capacity of these.
So what we're going to do
is we're going to tie strings onto the bottom of them,
and then slowly add weights,
and see how much weight each one can take.
Mine is already slowed down with 3.
Just a little.
All right.
Wait, what's yours at?
Mine is currently at 11 paper clips,
and it's just-- Look at this.
It's like almost perfectly even.
It's barely going down.
That's awesome.
And I took one off of mine, so now, I'm at 10,
and mine's going up.
So for me, 10 is the most,
and for you, 4 is the most.
It is,
but mine is also being held up by static electricity right now.
We are able to blow up a balloon with our breath
that then floats.
It doesn't float in the air as much.
We have about half as much weight on it,
and that's just pulling down.
So yes, it does work.
No, it does not work is filling it directly from the tank.
Now, we want to try sort of the opposite direction.
We want to see
if we can make heavier than air balloons
even more than normal.
This balloon is now full of sulfur hexafluoride.
If you haven't seen as using sulfur hexafluoride before,
there's a couple of neat things about it.
The first is
that it's about 6 times more dense than air,
which means that it's heavy for a balloon.
The other thing that it's known for is having an opposite effect
on your voice as helium.
Instead of making your voice high,
it makes your voice low.
Pretty cool.
We're gonna make a helium-sulfur hexafluoride cocktail.
[Music]
[inaudible.]
[Music]
Okay, is it--
Oh, okay.
Sulfut hexafloride's definitely winning here.
This one is sulfur hexafluoride.
This one has just normal breath.
[Music]
It's pulling down pretty hard.
Helium is lighter than air,
but not nearly as much lighter as
sulfur hexafluoride is heavier.
So it overcomes it pretty easily.
I think we need to move on to our next experiment.
To start this experiment off,
we've got a balloon filled with breath
in a container full of just air.
So this is a little bit heavier than the air around it,
just because it has a little bit
higher concentration of carbon dioxide,
and because it has a balloon around it.
The balloon in itself adds weight.
But now, what we're going to do is introduce a gas into the box
that's way heavier than the air,
and even the carbon dioxide in that balloon.
Look at that.
So that is a balloon that was sinking in regular air.
From the box was full of just the normal air around us,
it's going straight to the bottom.
Now, it's floating.
Helium balloon into sulfur hexafluoride.
That's going well.
Wow, that has a lot of resistance on it.
Does it?
Yeah, it's kind of like trying to push a ball down into water.
This is the one
that had sulfur hexafluoride and some helium in it.
Right to the bottom.
Makes sense.
Sinks right through.
Well, this one is still floating.
Can we fill a balloon
with our breath that will sink into the sulfur hexafluoride?
How do you gonna do that?
Same way, fill a balloon with sulfur hexafluoride,
breathe out of that balloon, breathe in to the other balloon.
Maybe take a couple gap breaths to keep from passing out,
and just do the same thing,
blowing up a balloon, see if we can get it to sink.
I'm going to stand behind him in case he blacks out.
Thank you.
[Music]
You're good.
Taking a breather here.
[Music]
Mostly better.
Still in there.
>> Yeah. >> Hang on.
>> You survived. >> Still a little bit lightheaded.
Let me just fill the rest.
All right.
Let's see these two.
This one, I'm gonna label as sulfur hexafluoride breath.
This one is oxygen,
but if anyone was ever wondering how bad my handwriting is.
All right, hang on.
I do want to refill this box.
Toss that in, see how it's doing.
Lovely.
Yes, perfect.
Here is your breath balloon.
Sulfur hexafluoride breath.
Did it work?
It worked.
Sinks right down through.
Sulfur hexafluoride, much heavier than air,
but it's not the only gas that's heavier than air.
Carbon Dioxide is also heavier than air,
and while we breathe out some of it,
still what we breathe out is mostly nitrogen
with a fair amount of oxygen still mixed in there.
But we do have
a good way of getting a concentrated carbon dioxide.
We want to get this carbon dioxide out of the dry ice,
and into this balloon.
So we're going to use a little bit of hot water to do so.
[Music]
That looks pretty good.
Compare it with the SF6, is it--
Which is--
The sulfur hexafluoride is still
much heavier than the carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide versus just breath.
I would say the carbon dioxide feels a little bit heavier.
There you go.
That's a good demonstration right there.
Definitely heavier.
Let's see how it does in our sulfur hexafluoride box.
Yep, floats nicely.
Carbon dioxide balloon.
That's sinks right down through it.
Cool.
Very clear demonstration
that the carbon dioxide is heavier.
You know what else we could do though.
We might be able to actually weigh these.
To start out though,
we're just going to take an uninflated balloon,
and we're going to set that right on the scale.
That is showing up as 3.2 grams.
2.85 for this one.
2.9 for that one.
I'm going back to this yellow one.
Was that really that much heavier?
3.2.
That's a heavier balloon.
I'm going to take this, and I'm going to press tear.
That's going to level it out.
That means that with a balloon on it,
that's what it's going to register as 0.
Now, if I take a balloon off,
that should go down to negative that much.
Now, here we have a balloon that is full of breath.
Now, we were getting a result of about 3.5 grams.
This is a very sensitive scale.
However, if I just push my hand down above this,
it easily registers
on the scale, just the air pushing down on the balloon.
So about 3.5 grams.
It was resting up against the back of this.
But let's try the CO2.
I think that's going to be the next closest result.
That is showing up as about 8.5 grams so...
Holy cow!
3.5 grams for just breath up to...
Well, maybe even 9.5.
That's kind of where it's registering now.
Sulfur hexafluoride.
What is it?
Well, if I can get it to stay on there,
it's up about 30 grams.
Oh my gosh.
Bounce.
Come on balloon.
Almost ten times as heavy as breath.
Yeah.
Really significant difference between the sulfur hexafluoride
and the breath balloon.
[Music]
Apparently, there's something very scratchy inside our box.
3 balloons just spontaneously exploded,
all in a row,
and we don't know what caused it.
There is another thing I do want to test,
because I suspect a lot of you will want to see it
and that is breathing in sulfur hexafluoride,
and then breathing in helium,
and seeing what the result is.
Not mixing them.
I suspect it's going to be like your balloon.
Now, lungs are actually not like balloons.
They're often depicted that way.
They're really more like a sponge material
on the inside.
So it's not just a bag full of air.
I'm just going to try and like hold my breath for a second,
and then I'm going to breathe helium on top of that,
and I'm going to see
if it's possible to get like a layered voice effect,
where I have like helium up first,
and then the voice goes down to here.
[Music]
Where's your voice at?
Right here.
Wow.
[Music]
Okay, what result am I getting?
That's actually kind of strange.
I am getting almost a mix.
Now, it's just sulfur hexafluoride.
And now, I need to breathe.
But it worked for half a second.
That was cool.
This time, I'm going to try it again,
and have just a little bit
of sulfur hexafluoride, and then like the rest of this helium.
Take some deep breaths for a second.
Your lips have gone glue again.
[Music]
Is it--
Okay.
[Music]
Now, starting out, it's actually fairly normal.
I heard a tiny bit of squeak for a second.
I'm just going to keep talking,
and I don't know what's going to happen,
or if there was
enough sulfur hexafluoride to make any difference at all.
I am kind of running out of breath though.
So if there is any sulfur hexafluoride,
I'm going to hit it soon.
I don't think it's gonna happen.
There wasn't enough in there.
The helium went out.
So you can overpower it with helium,
but mostly it just made my voice normal.
Like to me, it didn't sound that weird.
It didn't change that much.
So I think they did mix,
but they mixed in just the right ratio
that they're just like, eh, call it a wash.
Monkey Humor, thank you for your suggestion.
Editors, if we can find a picture of Dr. Doofenshmirtz
with Mr. Balloony,
just flash that image up on the screen at some point.
Guys, that's not all.
You know, we've always got more for you to see.
That box at the top is going to take you to our last video,
you should go check that out.
The other box is going to show you
what YouTube think you should be watching next,
and if you hit this bomb the middle,
you'll be subscribe to our channel,
so you never miss out on a video.
Don't forget to ring that bell,
and we will see you in the next one.
Talk to you then.