Young children who do this experiment should have an adult present. Caution: Chew carefully to avoid choking, and don’t laugh or joke with friends. Each piece should flash many times as the chewing and crushing continues. With your lips open, chew one Life Saver and watch for the flashes. Allow about 15 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark. One way to demonstrate triboluminescence is to chew a WintOGreen Lifesaver in a room in front of a mirror that can be made very dark. Then wintergreen molecules absorb the ultraviolet, and fluoresce, emitting a flash of visible light. Breaking crystals of sugar in the candy first produces ultraviolet light. No other flavor does it, including peppermint. That’s the mechanical generation of light, which occurs when certain chemical bonds are broken by mechanical crushing. The flavoring in wintergreen Life Savers contains molecules that exhibit triboluminescence. Company makes Life Savors today and sells them around the world. One, Edward Noble, added the familiar foil wrapper to preserve freshness. Life Savers didn’t become a big hit until 1913, when Crane sold rights to the product to two New York businessmen for $2,900. The candy, however, got stale within a week and lost its flavor. "For That Stormy Breath," the label declared. So Crane’s label showed an old seaman throwing a life preserver to a pretty female swimmer. People often bought peppermint candy to hide bad breath, or the odor of alcoholic beverages. For the label, he seized on another marketing ploy. Crane also packed the candies into a distinctive cardboard tube, which sold for 5 cents. The candies looked like mini-life savers, flotation devices used to keep people from drowning. Almost every candy shop carried pillow-shaped peppermint candies imported from Europe.Ĭrane wanted his candy to stand out, and chose the hold-in-the-center shape as a marketing gimmick. So Crane decided to add a hard, non-melting candy to his product line to boost summer sales. Sales always slowed during the hot summer months, when chocolate melted quickly. That's a myth, however, and Life Savers' shape had a much different origin.Ĭrane had been selling handmade chocolate candy in the Cleveland area since 1891. Hoping to spare other parents from the same tragedy, Crane put a hole in the new candy so that people who aspirated it would still be able to breathe through the hole. Urban legend claims the hole resulted from a horrible accident in the Crane household: His young daughter supposedly choked to death on a piece of candy that blocked her windpipe. The candy-with-a-hole-in its center became a nationwide hit, and remains popular a century later. Clarence Crane, a Cleveland chocolate maker, invented Life Savers candy in 1912.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |