The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles

What had been a simple, ingenious idea was becoming an obsession. The idea that colored bubbles might make a few children happy had been a great reason to start the project, and that it could make him a millionaire was a good line for his very patient wife (the only other person who knew what he was up to). But those ambitions were not what kept Kehoe up nights. What drove him crazy was a single question, one that taunted him with every clear bubble that came off his wand: Why can't it be done?

A Burst of Color

One year and 115 prototypes after Young and Kehoe met, money was getting tight at Young's. Not enough of their toys were hits, and Young couldn't afford to keep Kehoe around. So Kehoe pitched himself to Bruce Lund, who ran a 12-man invention studio in Chicago that was high on recent successes like Vac-Man, the archenemy of the Stretch Armstrong elastic doll. Lund ran his shop like a factory. A bell told inventors when to be at their desks and when to take breaks. New ideas were expected every Monday morning and were expected to be good. "I saw grown men cry on a regular basis," Kehoe says.

Bubbles took a backseat while Kehoe spent his nights and weekends trying to come up with enough new dolls not to get fired. Within a year, he'd had it with sweatshop life, and he and Sherri moved back to Minnesota. He launched his own toy company, Kick Design, mostly to get back to bubbles full-time.

Color remained elusive, but his try-anything approach kept plenty of other strange bubbles floating across his kitchen. One exploded with a loud bang. Another gave him chemical burns when it popped. The best one bounced, just like a Super Ball. He thought he could have sold that one, but he couldn't re-create it. He could rarely re-create any of his experiments. "I never wrote anything down," he says. "I'd get too excited as I was doing it. But once I lost that bouncing bubble, I was crushed. I started videotaping myself so that next time I'd know more than â€It was something on that side of the kitchen.' "

Ask Kehoe now to describe the day the first colored bubble appeared, and the details are fuzzy. He remembers dipping his wand into a pot of blue solution (although they produced clear bubbles, most of his solutions were colored by then) and looking at the quivering film, thinking that this one seemed different. He blew, and a bubble floated across the room. It was blue. He tried again. The next bubbles were blue too. He called Sherri in to make sure he wasn't hallucinating. No, she agreed, it was a blue bubble. As far as they knew, the world's first blue bubble. In his kitchen.