The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles

The long years of desk jobs and desperate late-night experiments were finally over. He had done what the toy companies had told him to, and now it didn't matter what they thought. He had his own well-financed company and a washable bubble. It was time to tell the world.

Play Date

In July 2004 Kehoe and his partners invited dozens of kids and their parents to Haddleton's estate on Sunfish Lake, near St. Paul, for a bubble unveiling and focus-group party. They hired a film crew and rented massive bubble machines to fill the air with the washable solution that, they figured, would be on store shelves in a matter of months.

The first five minutes of the party were stunning. Mothers gasped, and a few were even moved to tears, at the initial sight of the strangely vivid orbs almost glowing in the sunlight. Kids shrieked and chased after them. It was the moment Kehoe had pictured all those years-not big checks or fame, just seeing this project reach its end in a single joyous afternoon.

And then the bubbles broke-on the kids, on the parents, on cars, on Haddleton's prized German shepherds. It looked like there had been a paint fight. Kehoe had told the parents that the color would wash out, but it didn't matter. Not when their children were covered head to toe in blue and pink splotches, when the color was getting into their shoes and hair and soaking into the concrete. In the faces of the horrified mothers, Kehoe immediately grasped the lesson. "You can't go to market with something that leaves that much color, even if it is washable," he says. "It freaks people out."

Just when he thought he'd succeeded, he'd failed again. Washable wasn't good enough. He needed color that disappeared on its own, that would never stain any surface it touched. But in the history of organic chemistry, no one had ever created a water-soluble dye that disappeared on its own. And Kehoe, despite his years of tinkering, was no chemist.