In a three-minute video on the Internet, two performers wearing goggles and lab coats have taught the world how to create geysers by dropping Mentos candies into 2 liter bottles of Diet Coke.
The 6m blasts have captured the imagination of millions of people who've visited the pair's Web site.
"We told friends we thought it would take a few weeks to catch on," said Fritz Grobe, who appears on the video with Stephen Voltz. "Literally, within hours we were seeing thousands of hits, and it has just ballooned from there."
The two began experimenting eight weeks ago after Voltz learned that cola plus candy equals a frothy mess. It's an old trick, but the pair took it to new extremes. The result is their video, which features 523 Mentos causing 101 bottles of Diet Coke to erupt.
The video, set to toe-tapping techno music, has had 4 million hits on the Web to date. That, in turn, led to media exposure including the Late Show with David Letterman on CBS on Thursday night and NBC's Today show on Friday.
Grobe, a juggler, and Voltz, a trial lawyer, met in Maine and perform at the Oddfellows Theater in Buckfield. For their video, they enlisted the theater's owner, Mike Miclon, to operate the camera and a friend to create the soundtrack.
"What a crazy thing!" Miclon said. "My wife held an umbrella next to the camera -- just in case -- so it worked out pretty good."
The pair posted the video on June 3. By 10pm, it had generated 10,000 hits, and they knew they were on to something, Miclon said.
The dancing geysers created by Voltz and Grobe have been compared to the dancing fountain at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.
The two have done plenty of experiments, and they all end the same -- with the pair covered in soda. Any kind of soft drink will work, Grobe said, but using diet soda means you don't end up sticky.
"We get completely soaked from head to toe," Grobe said. "So it's important not to have it gum up the works."
Both Coke and Mentos have embraced the phenomenon.
"We're happy people are having fun with this," said Susan McDermott, spokeswoman for the Coca-Cola Co in Atlanta. "You never can tell what's going to capture people's imagination. This one certainly did."
For the record, she noted, people won't suffer harm from chomping Mentos and washing it down with Diet Coke.
Mentos, a subsidiary of Italy's Perfetti Van Melle, is featuring the video on its home page.
Grobe says he and Voltz see a bright future in being madcap scientists: "The next crazy project is bigger and better and will pack a lot of surprise."
The two have generated more than US$25,000 through their Internet efforts thus far. But they're not quitting their day jobs.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
RSS