“Expands into a fluffy cloud when microwaved”

In yesterday’s New Yorker crossword puzzle, clue 27 Down was:

Brand-name bath bar that expands into a fluffy cloud when microwaved

I’ve already stated my claim to be the first person to try microwaving bars of soap, or at least the first person to publish the eye-opening results of the process on one well-known brand, in my 1993 book Soap Science.

But I haven’t mentioned that I told that story for a short comic drawn by Dan Mazur in the Boston Comics Roundtable anthology Boundless, edited by Olivia Li, Jordan Stillman, and Neil Johnson in 2016.

That comic includes depictions of me and my dad in the 1970s and 1990s. In fact, the editors told me that the script won them over as soon as it called for pictures of me as a child. 

Thunderstruck Strikes

My science-activity book Soap Science is out of print, but it’s received a dollop of literary immortality in Elizabeth McCracken’s new collection of short stories, Thunderstruck.

In the story “Juliet,” originally published in Esquire, some town librarians look up the record of a kid who’s suddenly in the news for all the wrong reasons. All they find is that two years before he’d borrowed Bell, Soap Science (1993), and never returned it.

I’m pleased to report that the story doesn’t suggest I was a bad influence. Instead, the appearance of Soap Science as what the kid probably borrowed for a school assignment reads as one of many innocuous details—so dutiful, so clean—that don’t add up to an explanation of what’s gone wrong. As in her best-known work, The Giant’s House, Elizabeth McCracken focuses on details of ordinary living in an extraordinary circumstance.

At the time she wrote that story, Elizabeth was working as a librarian outside Boston. We knew each other in high school and crossed paths in local book circles once or twice. Now she’s teaching at the University of Texas and tweeting up a storm.

Elizabeth McCracken is swinging through New England on her book tour this week, including appearances at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on Wednesday and Newtonville Books in Newton Centre on Thursday. Unfortunately, I can’t go to either event since I’m heading across the Atlantic this week. So I’m spreading the word about them instead. Check out Thunderstruck. Especially page 70.

My Gift to the Current Generation of Kids

Around 1993, as I explained in this posting, I was looking for new science activities for kids that involved soap. I tried microwaving a bar of Ivory soap and was, so far as I know, the first person to see the strange results. I published my findings in a book called Soap Science.

Twenty years later, and I’m finding online videos of families doing that very activity (and in some cases wearing eye protection, too!). In fact, those families go further than I dared to tell kids to try on their own; I couldn’t know if parents would be present or would handle the aroma. And those videos are getting tens of thousands of views.

Such a strange thing to take pride in.

Zapping the Ivories

Probably my only contribution to science will be as the first person to deliberately microwave a bar of Ivory soap.

This was back in the early 1990s when I was writing a book called Soap Science: A Science Book Bubbling with 36 Experiments. I wanted to find some new activities using soap, a very old material, rather than simply crib or adapt what previous science-experiment books had done.

I figured that the microwave oven was relatively new as a common household device, and therefore unexplored territory. First I tried zapping other soap brands, and learned that microwaving them made them...a little warmer.

Then I tried Ivory Soap, and got to see... Well, look at the Ivory Soap experiment at Steve Spangler Science, with photographs and a video. And I believe I was the first person ever to see that phenomenon.