So here I am amusing my daughter with that age-old pastime called bubble blowing, and I’m wondering: Is it really that old?
I figure soap has been around since some poor woman was forced to wash her clothes at the stream at the bottom of the hill where humans were sacrificed to the gods* and she accidentally found the ashy, fatty mixture left her whites whiter and her colours brighter.
But how did we get from laundry to blowing bubbles? Did the ancient Babylonians carve little holes in crocodile bones? Were Plato and his cronies debating the form of an ideal sphere while refusing to contemplate the kids creating perfect shimmering spheres in the next agora? Who realized that having little ridges in the hole of your stick lets you hold more soapy water? And that you don’t need to blow through a circle to get a circle?
[sub]*It may not be reality, but it’s a good story, eh?[/sub]
But it’s no more specific than that. I don’t know if that’s actually the extent of our knowledge on this subject, or if that’s all the authors felt was necessary to say about it.
Chardin’s painting of a boy blowing soap-bubbles is from the 1730s. And Shakespeare mentions the soldier as “seeking the bubble reputation in even in the cannon’s mouth”. Which puts it back further. That’s as far back as I can get off the top of my head.
a Medieval arabic philosopher (not one of the big names) was reported to have begun his study of optics to try to explain the colors of the soap bubble. (For what it’s worth, he unfortunately didn’t succeed. The first one AFAIK to put it all together was J.M. Pertner in the late 19th century, with his calculations of white light interference in thin films)
I’ll bet there are much older descriptions, but I can’t think of any.
By the way, if you’re interested in bubbles, pick up the Dover reprint of C.V. Boys’ book on Soap Bubbles. The cover of my edition is the painting Bertie mentions
But the history page doesn’t go back farther than the 19th century, and claims the British company Pear Soap did a lot to popularize bubble blowing then.
Interesting - Soap making has been traced back to Egyptrian and Babylonian records as old as 220 BC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap and refeences therein). Anyone who made and used soap must have known its properties, and I’ll bet they made and played with the bubbles. Greeks and Romans weren’t big on soap, so the collision between soap and philosophers didn’t take place, apparently. There are a few references to soap-like stuff, but mainly used by barbarians. There were stories of Pompeiian soap and a legendary “Mt. Sopa”, but these websites say they were debunked. Maybe it was siomething like this that encouraged L. Sprague de Camp to write about Roman soap in his time-travel novel “Lest Darkness Fall”. So al-Kindi seems about the right time for philosophical musings on soap bubbles.
The bubble pages I link to claim that there were no bubble-m,aking toys prior to the 19th century , except for pipes. But if no one was looking for them, how did they know? And a lot of such bubble wands might have been made of perishable materials, like wood, or knotted grasses. The idea in the OP of Babylonian bubble-makers is not unlikely, to my mind, but there doesn’t seem to be any recognized evidence for them.
Isn’t it quite likely that people used their hands to blow bubbles before bubble wands were invented? Run a bowl of water and wet your hands, then rub them with a little soap. Make L shapes with the thumb and forefinger of both hands, then interlock them so that the webs of skin between finger and thumb are touching each other. Pull your hands gently apart to form an aperture, making sure not to break the contact between thumb/thumb and finger/finger, and if you’ve done it right, you’ll have a nice wobbly transparent soap film. Blow gently on it and you can make bubbles.
