Celebrating One Year With Mentos and Diet Soda

If you haven't heard of the Mentos Fountain, you've been locked away on desert island for the last year. This relatively simple science demonstration has become a world wide phenomenon. It has spawned hundreds of viral videos (check out this one), new toys (e.g. the geyser tube), and a new world record (click here). Of course, all this attention is well-deserved. After all, who knew you could have so much fun with a 2-liter bottle of soda and a roll of mints. That being said...it should come as no surprise that I would purchase 20 2-liter bottles of diet cola and a dozen rolls of mentos for my son's first birthday. I set up my little "event" in the backyard. Here's how I set everything up:

1. I removed four mentos from the pack. Using a small drill, I drilled a small hole in the center of each mento. Yes, I didn't have to use a power tool for this, but it made the whole process a lot more fun. If you don't want to follow my lead, you can use a nail and a little elbow greese to put a hole in the center of the mentos.
2. I threaded the five mentos onto a piece of wire (a garbage bag tie works well).
3. I drilled a small hole in the center of the cap of the 2-liter bottle.
4. I pushed the tip of the wire through the hole in the cap, so that the mentos hung beneath the cap.
5. I placed the open 2-liter bottles on a flat surface (e.g. sheets of plywood).

After the cake, ice cream and a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday, I invited everyone out to enjoy the show. Of course, nobody had a clue about what I was about to do. I gave each child a bottle cap with mentos and lined each one up behind a bottle of soda. With the help of a couple of the parents, we screwed the caps onto the two liter bottles while the child held onto the wire sticking out of the top (this kept the mentos hanging beneath the cap from falling into the soda). As a group, we counted down...3...2...1! The children let go of the wire...the mentos dropped into the soda...and...well...just check out the photo up top. Now, here is the really great part. Usually when I do this demonstration with adults, they run for cover when the bottles start spraying. The children, on the other hand, jumped back in surprise when the eruptions started then ran screaming back into the shower of soda. You have to love kids! Needless to say, they wanted to do it again. Imagine their surprise when I pulled out another set of sodas and mentos. What can I say...I'm pretty good at what I do.

For more information on the mentos and soda phenomenon, try these sites:

• Wikipedia Entry on Mentos Eruption
• About.com article
• EepyBird.com