[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today, we have a mystery that is ...

ROBERT: Vanishingly tiny ...

JAD: Shockingly hot ...

ROBERT: ... and manages to combine submarines ...

JAD: Keanu Reeves ...

ROBERT: Red Lobster ...

JAD: ... and Game of Thrones.

ROBERT: And of course our producer Molly Webster and many members of her family.

MOLLY WEBSTER: Hello, hello, hello, hello? Where are the children?

ROBERT: So now you want to begin in the beautiful state of South Carolina?

MOLLY: South Carolina.

JAD: It's on a pier.

MOLLY: Yeah.

MOLLY: Is my radio gear waterproof?

CHILD: Yeah.

MOLLY: No.

MOLLY: On a dock.

MOLLY: Oh, okay, so we're gonna walk down to the dock.

CHILD: Pfft, pfft, pfft!

MOLLY: Which is just like this place where they all put boats in the water.

CHILD: I—I love boats!

MOLLY: And that's where we always ...

CHILD: Oh chicka-lacka-lacka-boom-boom.

MOLLY: Shut up! I'm gonna explain what a dock is. [laughs]

MOLLY: Okay. My parents recently moved to this marshy swampy area near the Intracoastal Waterway, which is like a connecting series of salty channels. And we grew up in Ohio and so this is like a totally different landscape than what we grew up in.

CHILD: Okay.

MOLLY: And those little people would be my nieces and nephews.

CHILD: I'm riding my bike so we can ride it back.

CHRISSY WEBSTER: Hear that America? Those are my children getting along and compromising.

MOLLY: That would be Chrissy Webster, one of my sisters.

CHRISSY WEBSTER: And we sound a lot alike.

MOLLY: Anyway. So—okay, so this is the story. The story is so when my parents first moved there, I remember going out on the docks with my dad, and we were sort of looking at the beautiful marsh, right? And there was this really weird sound, like, coming off the water.

CHILD: Water.

MOLLY: I recently took my nieces and nephew out to see if they could hear it.

MOLLY: [whispers] Okay, we're gonna be ...

CHILD: [whispers] I'm in position.

MOLLY: Okay, so we're not gonna move, and we're not gonna squeak.

CHILD: We're not gonna talk.

MOLLY: We're not gonna talk.

CHILD: Okay.

MOLLY: So we lean down off the dock ...

MOLLY: Okay, ready? Now we're gonna see if we can hear it.

CHILD: Huh! [crackling]

MOLLY: Oh my gosh, I hear some crackles!

JAD: That crackling sound?

MOLLY: Yeah.

JAD: What is that?

MOLLY: That was the question.

MOLLY: What does it sound like?

CHILD: It sounds—it sounds like Rice Krispies. Yeah!

MOLLY: Most of the scientists you talk to say it sounds like bacon frying or twigs crackling in a fire.

JAD: Huh.

ROBERT: Maybe you have a large Perrier factory just up the hall.

MOLLY: Yeah, I would say that except there's no bubbles popping, like, on the water.

ROBERT: Oh! so it's not a gaseous emission. It's a clickety clack

MOLLY: Let me just play you a better recording.

JAD: Yeah, pull it up.

MOLLY: Wait, do I have to put it through the producer PC? Wait, uh ...

JAD: Oh wait, here we go.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [crackling]]

MOLLY: This is actually an underwater recording.

ROBERT: Oh my God! Oh! Gosh, in a teeny world, that would be like the Fourth of July.

MOLLY: Yeah!

ROBERT: Wow.

MOLLY: Yeah.

ROBERT: It's bigger than bacon ...

JAD: Bigger than bacon ...

ROBERT: Bigger than bacon.

MOLLY: I don't—it depends on how much bacon you're frying.

JAD: So what—all right, what is the sound? What is it?

MOLLY: This sound is a very tiny ...

CHILD: No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!

MOLLY: Let me just back it up a second.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Well, the story started in the '40s.

MOLLY: That's Michel Versluis.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Professor of physical acoustics and medical acoustics at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands.

MOLLY: Basically, what he said is World War II is the first war where we're, like, really using submarines and sonar. And so you've got all of these US Navy submarines down deep in the ocean and they're, like, listening out for the enemy. But what happens is all they hear is this, like, crazy crackling sound.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: The sound levels that were measured—so this loud—this sound is very, very intense.

MOLLY: He says in some instances, it was actually interfering with the sonar.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: That—that was a bit of a problem.

MOLLY: Yeah, so I found a—I found a classified document that was declassified right after the war, where the Navy, they actually hired—they actually hired this scientist, this guy named Martin Johnson. This is in California.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: I believe it was in San Diego at Scripps.

MOLLY: They hired this guy to figure out, what is the sound? Like, what is the sound we're hearing, like, all over the ocean?

JAD: What is it already?

MOLLY: Jad's like, just tell me what the damn sound is?

JAD: Yes!

MOLLY: Well, it turns out—I don't want to go too fast here.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: It was noted in those years that that sound originated from ...

CHILD: The shrimpy, shrimpies.

CHILD: Shrimpies!

MOLLY: It was a shrimp.

CHILD: Oh yeah!

MOLLY: The shrimp is called a snapping shrimp or a pistol shrimp.

ROBERT: Ooooh. [laughs] Pistol shrimp.

JAD: Oooh. I like that.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Pistol. Pew-pew-pew!

MOLLY: And interestingly, I found these, like, old Navy recordings ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They explored about one foot in length.]

MOLLY: ... that they would give to the Navy guys where they had to learn the sounds they were hearing coming in through the ship and through the sonar.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: In your work with the expendable radio sonobuoy, you will probably hear many sounds other than submarine sounds.]

MOLLY: It was like, "This is the sound of a snapping shrimp."

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Snapping shrimp. It produces a harsh clicking noise. [clicking]]

MOLLY: And I was like okay, shrimp, sonar. Cool. I get it. Meh? Thought maybe it would end there. And then I found what felt to me to be a crazy article, which was this newspaper clipping from 1946. Basically says, shrimps helped win the war.

JAD: What?

MOLLY: And I was like, what? And it's about how the American Navy admitted that one of their tactical things during, like, World War II was that they would hide their submarines in the beds of these shrimp so, like, the Japanese submarines couldn't detect our ships.

JAD: Oh my goodness!

ROBERT: So it was like a marine invisibility cloak?

MOLLY: Yes. And according to Michel, the US would also ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Put speakers on the hull of the ships to simulate snapping shrimp.

MOLLY: Wait, what? [laughs]

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Yes.

ROBERT: It was sound camo.

MOLLY: Yeah.

JAD: So wait, wait, wait. Are these shrimp, are they like normal—normal shrimp-cocktail types shrimp?

MOLLY: Well ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: They're about five centimeters, two inches.

MOLLY: So like smaller than a shrimp I might eat?

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Well it depends what sort of shrimp you eat.

MOLLY: I don't know, whatever ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: There is ...

MOLLY: ... whatever Red Lobster serves. No, I don't know. [laughs]

JAD: Wait a second. If they're that small, how are they making that sound?

MOLLY: That is an excellent question.

MOLLY: Wait. Where do you think the sound comes from?

CHILD: I'm thinking it's—the shrimpies are eating their food. And the noise is their little teeth.

MOLLY: Oooh, shrimpy teeth!

CHILD: I think it—for me, I think it comes from they're, like, snappy claw thingies.

MOLLY: And that's what you would think, right? Like, especially if you look at these things up close.

NANCY KNOWLTON: They have two front claws, and the claws aren't the same on each side.

MOLLY: That's Nancy Knowlton, a marine biologist, snapping shrimp expert.

NANCY KNOWLTON: There's a claw that's specialized for pinching.

MOLLY: And that claw's tiny.

NANCY KNOWLTON: And a claw that's specialized for snapping.

MOLLY: And that claw is, like, exponentially bigger. It's, like, 10 times, or 20—maybe three times bigger. [laughs]

NANCY KNOWLTON: It's quite a bit bigger. And so they use it to defend themselves against potential predators or competitors. They're very territorial.

MOLLY: She says when one shrimp runs into another shrimp ...

NANCY KNOWLTON: They can get into these prolonged snapping matches where they snap at each other to show ...

MOLLY: Me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!

NANCY KNOWLTON: ... who's bigger and stronger.

MOLLY: Meeee! Okay, fine.

NANCY KNOWLTON: And they can pretty much judge how big they are by the power of the snap.

MOLLY: All of which is to say, my niece Sophie's guess ...

CHILD: I think it comes from their, like, snappy claw thingies.

MOLLY: ... is, like, yeah, of course, it's like the two sides of the claw just, like, snapping together.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: It's just like you snap your fingers like this. [snaps fingers]

JAD: Just a snap.

MOLLY: Snap.

NANCY KNOWLTON: But that turns out not to be true.

MOLLY: So not true.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Two things were wrong, basically, with that picture. I don't know if you've ever tried to clap your hands in a swimming pool underwater ...

MOLLY: [laughs] Yes.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: ... but it's very difficult.

MOLLY: Yeah. You don't feel very smart when you try it. Doesn't work.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: But there's not a lot of sound. And that is because there's a lubrication layer of water in between that prevents direct mechanical contact, or ...

MOLLY: Yes, there's this lubricating layer between the two claw halves, and it makes snapping hard.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: And the second problem was that ...

MOLLY: The sound just seemed way too loud. Like, when they measured the decibel level of a single snap ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: That's about 220 decibels of sound that can be produced by a single snap.

MOLLY: To put that in context, that is basically equivalent to a jet plane.

ROBERT: Whoa!

MOLLY: From just one snap.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: But it's very impulsive. So it's in a very, very short duration.

MOLLY: But still, it's like one of the loudest sounds in the ocean. So Michel was like, there's probably more than snapping going on here.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Yeah, so—so ...

MOLLY: Okay, so it was 1999.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: We got the new high speed camera in our lab.

MOLLY: And so they're like, okay, we're gonna point this camera at the shrimp ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: ... and see what happens when this shrimp snaps its claw.

MOLLY: So they take the little shrimps and they glue screws on their butts.

ROBERT: [laughs] They glue screws on their butts.

MOLLY: Yeah, they screw them into tiny platforms in, like, a little aquarium.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: So that they were fixed in space. And that was important.

MOLLY: Because it happens in, like, a microsecond. And they need to keep it still so the camera can just focus right on the claw.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: And to do the experiment, what we needed to do was to tickle them a little bit with the paintbrush.

MOLLY: [laughs] You tickled them with a paintbrush?

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Yeah, exactly. Then they cock their claws, and then they ...

MOLLY: Snap. And then it—kssht—fires. And the camera captures the entire thing with, like, thousands of frames per second.

JAD: And did they see anything?

MOLLY: They did see something.

ROBERT: What happened?

JAD: What is it?

MOLLY: When they looked at the footage of the moment just after it snaps in super slow-mo ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: We saw a very blurry object in front of the shrimp.

MOLLY: What—what—blurry? It was just like bloppy, blurry something?

MICHEL VERSLUIS: It was bloppy blurry, yes. [laughs] I mean, it turned out that we were sort of out of focus.

MOLLY: So they refocus the camera, they do the same thing. They tickle the shrimp, the claw snaps. And they see that when the claws snaps ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Ah!

MOLLY: They see this, like, bubble ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Bubble.

ROBERT: Ohhh!

JAD: Ohhh!

MOLLY: In front of the shrimp claw. And it turns out that it's that bubble that's causing the noise and so much undersea turmoil. [laughs] The bubble is at the root of everything.

JAD: Okay.

MOLLY: And with the high speed camera, they were sort of able to see how it all breaks down. And it sort of unfolds like this ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: What actually happens when this claw closes is that the water that's in between these claws is squeezed out at high speed. The typical speed can be up to 60 miles per hour.

MOLLY: Like as fast as a car goes?

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Oh, yes, yes.

MOLLY: So this jet of water shoots out at, like, 60 miles per hour. And what happens is, like, behind the jet is that this, like, empty space is created, like a little void in the ocean. And all the water molecules in that space, because they're like "Ooh, look at all this room," they start to expand outwards. And essentially, they just become like a little gas bubble.

JAD: They actually change from liquid to gas?

MOLLY: Yeah, they actually go from, like, liquid is like tightly-packed molecules. And then as they spread out, they become, like, gaseous. And they create this, like, little gas bubble pocket in the middle of the huge ocean. And as they have all this space they, like, get bigger and bigger and bigger until the ocean is like, no! Like, microseconds later, the ocean starts pushing back in on this bubble. And the—all the little—the little air molecules in this bubble have nowhere to go and they're getting forced closer and closer together. And so they really want to get away from each other, all those air molecules. But you're pushing them together really hard. And since they can't get away from each other, like, the energy builds up super, super huge.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: And the pressure rises and the temperature rises.

MOLLY: Really rises.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: 5,000 degrees.

JAD: What?

MICHEL VERSLUIS: The surface of the sun is also 5,000 degrees.

MOLLY: And the gas that's inside the bubble turns to plasma. [laughs]

MICHEL VERSLUIS: And that plasma emits very short intense flash of light.

MOLLY: And then the bubble implodes.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: And then ...

MOLLY: Like a microsecond later ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: ... it generates a shockwave. And that shockwave will basically kill or stun any prey that is nearby.

MOLLY: What?

ROBERT: Somebody from the college of exaggeration graduated this particular explanation because you—God! A teeny little animal with an enormous bubble as hot as the sun. [laughs]

JAD: Wait ...

ROBERT: And then I think "Oh, yeah. okay.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: It's fairly crazy. But it's amazing how evolution has created this kind of sonic weapon.

CHILD: So basically ...

MOLLY: Yes?

CHILD: Shrimps are, like, super awesome, because they have this claw that generates huge bubbles of heat. And it's like, don't mess with the shrimp because it's a black belt.

JAD: Wow, so it's spitting out light. And hot, hot, hot temperatures.

MOLLY: Yeah.

JAD: Does that mean that—God ...

MOLLY: I know, the sun thing is crazy.

JAD: That's crazy!

MOLLY: I feel like it should be like a Marvel character.

JAD: Totally.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Yeah, 'cause if you scaled this up, the bubble would be the size of a basketball in human scale.

MOLLY: Mm-hmm.

JAD: What could I do with a basketball of sun heat and light? I could rule the world with that. [laughs]

ROBERT: Oh my God, you could probably do a lot.

JAD: Can you imagine?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'll be having that cab.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Hey, hey, hey, hey. That last piece of cake is mine!]

MOLLY: That was—well, when my sister was hanging off the dock, she asked, like, "Can we use this to power, like, the world or something?" No. The answer was no. But the same physical processes that are involved in the shrimp bubbles, right? So like the temperature and the heat that bubbles can create, researchers became really excited about. Is there a way to harness this bubble power?

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Yes, there's also a Hollywood movie.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Chain Reaction: I think I did it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Chain Reaction: Is it stable?]

MICHEL VERSLUIS: On powerful bubbles with Keanu Reeves, I believe.

MOLLY: Really? Really?

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Yes. Yes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Chain Reaction: There is enough energy in this glass of water to power the city of Chicago for weeks.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Chain Reaction: They went too far.]

CHILD: Boom! Pwwschtwwt! Pew pew pew!

CHILD: It's like boom! [laughs]

JAD: Taken with the weap—with the weapon possibilities.

MOLLY: Yeah, my nephew got excited about this, too.

CHILD: My name's Oliver. Hi.

MOLLY: But I hate to tell you, but I don't think there are any.

JAD: You mean you can't, like, make a bigger claw?

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Uh ...

JAD: Put it on a sub?

MICHEL VERSLUIS: No. [laughs]

MOLLY: Sorry, guys.

JAD: Hmm.

ROBERT: Hmm.

MOLLY: Well, there is one thing where researchers are thinking about using bubbles—and this goes beyond the shrimp bubbles—in a way that could save lives. So when I was talking to Michel Versluis ...

MICHEL VERSLUIS: Applications ...

MOLLY: ... we're talking on the phone, and he explains all the crazy bubbly stuff. And somehow, like, in the middle of the conversation he just said, "If you think the shrimp bubbles are cool, everything we know about the shrimp bubbles, like, can also be, like, adapted to use bubbles in the body."

JAD: Oh!

MOLLY: And I was like, "What?"

JAD: Wait, wait. Bubbles in the body? Isn't that ...

ROBERT: Isn't that an embolism though?

JAD: Yeah.

MOLLY: Totally. I had the same thought. Like, when divers get the bends or when they, like, tap bubbles out of IV lines and stuff.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: But these are very, very small bubbles, smaller than red blood cells.

MOLLY: According to Versluis, they're like 1/20 the size of human hair.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: And they are completely harmless.

MOLLY: And he told me about how in Toronto—and they actually just did this for the first time in November on a patient—they're using bubbles to get across the blood-brain barrier.

JAD: Huh. What is—what exactly is the brain—blood-brain barrier? Is it cells or is it tissue?

MOLLY: Yeah, it's super, super tightly-packed cells. It sort of sits between the bloodstream and the brain. It's like this protective wall, and it keeps out all of, like, the nasty stuff, so it keeps out any, like, bacteria or viruses that would be in your bloodstream can't get past the wall to get into your brain. I kind of keep thinking of it as, like, I've never actually watched Game of Thrones except for, like, one episode, and in it there was this giant wall.

JAD: Yeah.

MOLLY: To protect civilization from sort of all the bad things, the wild things. And it was made of ice and it went up forever.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Game of Thrones: I've never fallen before!]

MOLLY: I kind of feel like that wall in Game of Thrones is like the barrier between the rest of the body and the brain.

JAD: But—but you said it's there to protect the brain. So why would you want to punch a hole in it?

TODD MAINPRIZE: Well, you can imagine that if somebody has a brain tumor, and we want to deliver chemicals in there that we think can help fight the tumor, those chemicals the brain does not want in there.

MOLLY: So the blood-brain barrier can create problems, according to Todd Mainprize.

TODD MAINPRIZE: I'm a neurosurgeon at Sunnybrook.

MOLLY: He's part of the team in Toronto that's using this new bubble technique, and here's how it works. Okay, so say you've got a tumor on the right side of your brain right above your ear. So Mainprize and his team will stick you in a chair, and then they'll put a helmet on you.

TODD MAINPRIZE: Special helmet. This helmet has 1,024 ultrasound transducers. And we aim the 1,024 all to the same spot.

MOLLY: Right on the spot at the wall where the tumor sits just on the other side, just out of reach.

TODD MAINPRIZE: Okay, so all the ultrasound waves kind of focus at that one area. And then we inject the bubbles.

JAD: How many bubbles are in a dose?

MOLLY: Like, hundreds of thousands. So they just put an IV in your arm, and the bubbles go in, and they'll go, like, into your arm, like, over your shoulder, into your heart to your lungs back to your heart. Eventually, some of them will get up to the brain.

TODD MAINPRIZE: We know it takes approximately 28 seconds from the time we inject the bubble into an arm vein to by the time they start going into a brain.

MOLLY: And eventually, some of those bubbles get up to the blood-brain barrier, that wall, to the spot where that laser beam is focused, that specific spot that the tumor is sitting on the other side of. And when they cross paths with that beam ...

TODD MAINPRIZE: The ultrasound waves causes the micro bubbles to oscillate in size. They'll go big and small, big and small.

MOLLY: Big, small, big, small, big, small, big small.

TODD MAINPRIZE: Oscillate in size.

MOLLY: I think of it as like a—like a bubble dance party. So at this really specific part in the brain, and it can be smaller than, like, one millimeter by one millimeter square, all of these bubbles are dancing. And what that does is it causes the wall, that specific spot, to almost loosen. And so, like, a little, like, window of space, or a little hole is created in that wall. And if you happen to have chemotherapy in your blood—which you will, because they'll give it to you ahead of time—the minute that hole is open, the idea is the chemotherapy in your bloodstream would be able to just sort of flow through that opening and get straight to that brain tumor tissue.

JAD: So they're using sound to turn the bubbles into little dancing drill bits.

MOLLY: Yeah.

JAD: And drill through the wall.

MOLLY: Yeah.

JAD: Wow!

TODD MAINPRIZE: Now the body's a living organism. So over the next six to twelve hours, it will close those gaps. It's transient, meaning it heals itself in about six to twelve hours.

JAD: And you're saying they tried this on someone already?

MOLLY: Yeah, last November. And they think it went well. One of the things these researchers said was once you're able to open these passageways to the brain, it's not just chemo that can get in there but, like, suddenly, any type of drug you might want to send through can get through. And we've just never had access to the brain before in that way. And there's this question of, like, how will drugs interact with the brain? We kind of don't know. They've never been there before. It's like a whole new frontier.

MOLLY: You think shrimping time is done?

CHILD: Yeah.

MICHEL VERSLUIS: So I mean, it basically all boils down to the same sort of physics of bubbles that we have learned from this shrimp and that we can apply to many other applications.

MOLLY: Come on! It's dinner time.

CHILD: We're gonna put it on the radio, so you'll hear it, the people that like shrimp.

MOLLY: What if people don't like shrimp?

CHILD: Then they'll just skip it.

CHILD: I can't believe Molly's putting this on the radio.

MOLLY: Oh, I make no promises that this is going on the radio.

CHILD: Oh, yeah it is!

JAD: Molly Webster. This piece was produced by Molly and Annie McEwen.

ROBERT: With help from our guest sound designer, Jeremy Bloom. Special thanks to Kullervo Hynynen, James Bird ...

JAD: Lawrence Crum ...

ROBERT: And Elliot, Sophie, Oliver and Chrissy, all of them Websters.

JAD: Next up, a story from our producer Simon Adler who—who got interested in bubbles, after Molly found her shrimp piece. Got interested in bubbles, and he managed to find a guy named Dave Stein who has taken bubbling to a whole new level.

SIMON ADLER: Why is a bigger bubble better?

DAVE STEIN: I think trying to make things bigger is a function of growing. I don't know. I always thought that this was kind of inherent in the human psyche is to want to do something bigger and better. And so we might even make this a Stein's Law, okay? [laughs]

SIMON: Wait, wait. Stein's Law of Bubbling?

DAVE STEIN: No, Stein's Law of Size. That's kind of off the top of my head here, but for any given object there is a larger size such that the nature of the object is transformed.

SIMON: And in simple English, what would that be, in that as something gets bigger it gets what?

DAVE STEIN: Okay. Take Jupiter, okay? Gaseous planets.

SIMON: Okay.

DAVE STEIN: [laughs] All right. If you make Jupiter bigger and bigger, bigger and bigger, there is a size at which it becomes a star. It ignites. It becomes a sun. It transcends what it was.

SIMON: Then can a bubble get so big that it's no longer even a bubble?

DAVE STEIN: Well, before the invention of the Bubble Thing, 1984, bubbles we always thought of as being relatively small and relatively round. But as soon as you get up to a certain size, say five-foot diameter, kind of in that range, now suddenly they're not round anymore and they don't pop in the same way. People who would think of bubbles as popping instantaneously because they're thinking of the little round bubbles from the dime store. And what really happens in very large bubbles like the ones I and my friends make, the bubble doesn't pop instantaneously. It gets punctured at a certain point, and then it rips open like a zipper. And there's a sound to it. It kind of goes "sssss." Like that.

SIMON: So it's not—so it's not "pop?"

DAVE STEIN: No, it's "sssss." From one end of this long bubble to the other.

SIMON: Can we back to—tell me the story of how you—like, why—who were you in 1984 when you were like, "I'm gonna make this bubble thing?" What—what motivated all of this?

DAVE STEIN: Well, what motivated all of this was I was an architect at the time. I was working for Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, a very fashionable firm downtown here.

SIMON: And he says he spent his days designing these really intricate buildings where, like, glass staircases ...

DAVE STEIN: Meets the stonework of the building at a 45-degree angle, and the roof is going up at another angle.

SIMON: And it all has to work down to the 1/16th of an inch.

DAVE STEIN: I wasn't very happy at it, actually. In fact, I used to worry about structural collapse all the time.

SIMON: He says he'd be walking down the streets of Manhattan imagining some building he was building in his mind ...

DAVE STEIN: Say the addition to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

SIMON: So he's imagining this building, and then all of a sudden his mind would shift, to worry about that building collapsing. And he says this just kept happening with every project.

DAVE STEIN: All these buildings kept just crashing to the ground.

SIMON: Like, did this keep you up at night? Did you wake up?

DAVE STEIN: Yeah, I had to—I felt that as an architect it's my responsibility to imagine all the possible disasters.

SIMON: He says it became this not-so-healthy occupational obsession.

DAVE STEIN: And why—why? All right, that's a good question. Let me tell you something. I'm probably getting some of these details wrong, but my grandfather, Clarence Balke, was a metallurgist who had something to do with building the atomic bomb. And so did my uncle. And my mother was quite traumatized by being a daughter of the bomb, so to speak.

SIMON: Dave says it became part of the family legacy, and maybe wormed its way into his psyche and poisoned his work.

DAVE STEIN: Well, that's just the way I registered it. What I'm basically trying to say was that I was not really happy as an architect. Anyway, that summer, 1984, my little daughter Kayla who was one and a half saw a man blowing bubbles with one of those little dime store wands and she was just transfixed. [laughs] She was transported to another realm, you know, like any kid. And so ...

SIMON: Dave says from that point on ...

DAVE STEIN: We were always blowing bubbles, all kinds of small bubbles, medium ones, large ones.

SIMON: And he says pretty quick he started to wonder how can we make these bubbles bigger?

DAVE STEIN: And we used—you know, we cut out the ends of coffee cans.

SIMON: You know, dipped one end in the soap, blew through the other, got ...

DAVE STEIN: Get maybe a bubble that might be a foot—foot in diameter.

SIMON: Then he tried getting a coat hanger and bending it into a circle, dipping that into a frying pan full of soap.

DAVE STEIN: With that you can make a bubble maybe a two-footer or something.

SIMON: And is your daughter getting more and more excited as the bubbles get bigger or is this about you?

DAVE STEIN: She was getting kind of bored with it, actually. [laughs]

SIMON: But Dave started to get a little obsessed.

DAVE STEIN: Yes, that's definitely true. And I was thinking, you know, this is an interesting design problem: maximizing the size of bubbles and how you go about that.

SIMON: And initially, his thought was—and this is kind of everyone's thought when they start thinking about this—you just need a bigger circle, a bigger hoop through which to blow the bubble.

DAVE STEIN: Like a hula hoop with a handle on it. And you would need a little—one of those little plastic swimming pools full of bubble soap, which starts to seem kind of like a lot of soap.

SIMON: And from a design perspective, like, how do you scale that up? You can't just keep making the hoop and bucket bigger. Like, that seems crazy.

DAVE STEIN: So at that point I was sort of stuck.

SIMON: But whatever, he was going on with his life, designing buildings. But then he says one day in the summer of 1984 ...

DAVE STEIN: I was lying in bed one morning. I can still remember the—the pattern cracks in the ceiling. [laughs]

SIMON: The idea hit him like a ton of bubble-shaped bricks: why not have a collapsible hoop?

DAVE STEIN: I sort of instantly saw this thing in my mind, which was ...

SIMON: What we now know as ...

DAVE STEIN: ... the Bubble Thing.

SIMON: ... the Bubble Thing.

DAVE STEIN: And so ...

SIMON: Dave leaps out of bed, heads to the hardware store, buys his stuff ...

DAVE STEIN: ... and I bought the doll and the chain and the fastenings, and ...

SIMON: ... hurries home, starts assembling the device.

SIMON: Were you in your kitchen? Where were you when you were doing this?

DAVE STEIN: [laughs] Oh, you don't do this indoors.

SIMON: Ultimately, he stepped outside. And what he had in his hands was really nothing more than, like, a stick with a loop of chain attached to it. And one end of the loop, you could kind of slide up and down on the stick so that you could expand and collapse the loop.

DAVE STEIN: That's the beauty of this design, to have that control and be able to close it.

SIMON: Anyway, back in the backyard ...

DAVE STEIN: I closed the loop.

SIMON: So it was just like a cord, like a straight cord.

DAVE STEIN: I dumped it in the bucket of soap. I raised it up, I opened the loop. Right away, this huge bubble tube starts coming out.

SIMON: The tube stretches for seven, eight feet, he's not sure. But at a certain point, he closes the loop to pinch it off.

DAVE STEIN: And now it's a free-floating bubble, and it's sailing away over the—over the housetop.

SIMON: And through the fog.

DAVE STEIN: Suddenly there's this gigantic bubble floating away, the biggest bubble ever blown, I believe.

SIMON: He says it was somewhere between the size of a refrigerator and a car, iridescent and wobbly. And then suddenly it popped.

SIMON: [laughs] What did you feel in that moment? Were you—were you Dr. Frankenstein who had just let this monster out into the world? Or who ...?

DAVE STEIN: I got this cold thrill going down my spine. I will never forget that.

SIMON: And as he sent more and more of these into the air ...

DAVE STEIN: Pretty soon, people started arriving in their cars and trucks. [laughs] Everybody was totally astonished. And I thought, "This might be my ticket out of architecture.

SIMON: So Dave was able to patent the bubble thing and made enough money to get out of architecture. And in the process, he transformed bubble blowing from a thing that just, like, kids do to this, I don't know, kind of sport where you have, like, bubble athletes ...

GARY PEARLMAN: My name's Gary Pearlman.

MEGAN PARKER: Megan Parker.

RICK FINDLEY: Rick Findley.

SIMON: ... all over the world.

RICK FINDLEY: In Mexico they call me El Burbrujo.

GARY PEARLMAN:I currently am the champion, the heavyweight, the big boy.

SIMON: And people are blowing, like, really big bubbles.

GARY PEARLMAN:You could picture, say, two 18-wheelers stacked on top of one another. That's about how big the bubble was.

SIMON: That's a slight exaggeration. But anyways, there are debates going on about what kind of soap to use, which is the polymer to add to that soap and what kind of fabric to use for the loop. But despite all this experimentation, pretty much everyone uses a variation of Dave's original idea.

DAVE STEIN: I believe these people are sort of my followers, you see.

SIMON: I find it very interesting that you had this fear of your buildings collapsing, and here you go into this world where all of the things you're making are meant to collapse.

DAVE STEIN: Well, here's the thing: it's true that every bubble will collapse, but there's no blame. [laughs] You see? And nobody got hurt.

DAVE STEIN: I think we might be able to get some here.

SIMON: So that night, Dave took me out bubbling.

DAVE STEIN: We got baking powder, we have thermometers, we have test strips for measuring Ph.

SIMON: He'd been watching the humidity, said it was okay. But the wind?

DAVE STEIN: This amount of wind is usually very difficult.

SIMON: Not so good.

DAVE STEIN: So we'll go down and try to find some shelter.

SIMON: Okay, so we're on the corner of what, West End and 106th here?

SIMON: Midnight in Manhattan. Pretty much empty, couple cars, almost no one walking.

DAVE STEIN: So now I'm gonna dunk it in the soap. And I'm gonna raise it up and I'm going to open the loop and I'm gonna see if I can make a bubble here.

SIMON: There it goes! There we go. Okay, that one's pretty good. Okay. [laughs]

DAVE STEIN: It is sailing along into the intersection and ...

SIMON: That one is now chasing—the bubble is now chasing the taxi. How—how big is that one?

DAVE STEIN: That's about the size of a killer whale, I'd say.

SIMON: Maybe 20 feet long.

SIMON: [laughs]

DAVE STEIN: When you get these giant bubbles sailing around among these buildings, it activates the space.

SIMON: He says it seems to transform the architecture. And it definitely did. Like, it made the city look suddenly beautiful and like a lava lamp, an alien.

SIMON: And we got some people walking by that are now taking videos of them.

DAVE STEIN: Gee, look at that one.

SIMON: Oh, that's a great one.

DAVE STEIN: That's—that's the size of a smallish baby elephant maybe.

SIMON: Okay, and the taxi has now just done a u-turn to watch us and see us. We got—we got a bike messenger who's—who's rubbernecking as he goes by.

SIMON: Even at midnight, an audience just materializes.

SIMON: It's just incredible. It's like, everybody—okay, New Yorkers are assholes. And people are stopping.

DAVE STEIN: You can't say that on the air.

SIMON: [laughs] Stopping with smiles. And they're—like, the taxi has just stopped in the middle of the road to watch you do this. So do you often stop your taxi to look at a—to look at things? Or ...

TAXI DRIVER: Well, different things. So big. I see the small ones before, but this is totally different. Like this. [laughs]

SIMON: It's so silly, right? It's very silly.

TAXI DRIVER: It's not silly. It's very wonderful. Very wonderful. [laughs] It's very creative.

DAVE STEIN: Oh-ho! There, that's the size of a killer whale, for sure.

SIMON: Do you ever feel silly out here?

DAVE STEIN: I sometimes do, but I also sometimes compare myself to my grandfather and I'm much happier to have invented the giant bubble thing than having invented the bomb. [laughs] I also think, you know, in a way I feel like I have started an art form, and that it's going to go on and evolve.

JAD: Thanks to producer Simon Adler. We also want to thank all the Radiolab listeners who came out recently and blew bubbles with us in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

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