The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles

How could this be? He hadn't added any special ingredient. He was just playing around with the variables-heating this a little longer, dumping in this before that-and something worked. How didn't matter. Kehoe wasn't after a theory; he was after a bubble, and that he had, on videotape. As far as he was concerned, the project was finished. All that was left was to collect his license deal. So he started showing his tape to toy companies.

"A guy at Hasbro told me they had tried it for two years, and mine were better than anything they had seen, visually," Kehoe says. Every executive who saw them was stunned by their beauty, and everyone told him they could put clear bubbles out of business.

"The problem," Kehoe says, "was that if the bubbles touched you, they stained your skin for weeks. It ruined everything. Everybody said the same thing: Call me when you get it right. So I went back to work."

Partners in the Bubble Lab

The chemistry behind Kehoe's first colored bubbles, the floating spheres of dye eager to stain the next thing they touched, was altogether basic. He'd found a dye and a process of mixing it with the surfactant that caused the two to bond. That meant that the color would stay uniformly distributed around the bubble as long as the surfactants did-which is to say, as long as the bubble was intact. But the dye was only barely water-soluble, so it was nearly impossible to wash. Kehoe hoped others would just license his proof of concept and perfect the formula themselves, but all the toy companies that rejected him realized something Kehoe didn't: that the chemistry was still a long way from workable.

With his bubbles staining boardrooms across the country and a new baby and house to pay for, Kehoe had to move on. What he did with those next eight years-starting a Web-design business, then moving to another company (where I first met him)-isn't really important but for one key event. In 2003 the software company he was working for was sold, putting him out of a job and making its founders rich. This inspired him to return to toys full-time, and the founders' fond opinion of Kehoe inspired them to launch a new toy company with him, 50-50. Kehoe threw in 219 ideas; they threw in half a million dollars. Only after the deal was secure and Kehoe cashed the check did he tell them about the bubbles.