The GummiBear Experiment

Photo Journal

Our first major challenge in this project was triggering the camera to take the picture whenever the reaction occurred. Our first attempt was with a device known as “The Time Machine”. This trigger was pre-built and had a light sensitive portion to use. We used matches to test if our trigger would properly activate. The match would trigger the flash to go off, but when we connected the camera to the Time Machine, it would not trigger the camera to go off. Our next attempt was to build our own light sensitive circuit and use a preexisting time delay. Once again, the trigger would set off a flash, but would not trigger the camera to activate. Then we added onto the light sensitive trigger a time delay circuit. After long hours of working on the trigger, we finally had a working circuit that would set off the Nikon D1.

Once our circuit was working, we needed to take some test pictures to work on getting the proper exposure. So, we took lots of pictures with matches. These pictures gave us a good variety of shots and helped us fine tune our circuit. They were, however, very smokey so we had to use a Bic Lighter for some of the pictures.

The Bic Lighter did not have nearly as much variation - good job to the engineers at Bic - and was a bit too fast for us to be able to capture any real sparking action which is what we had hoped we'd be able to do.

These pictures all looked very much the same, even when playing around with the sensitivity and time delay of the trigger. So, we got creative and made a reflective C.D. box to make more interesting match pictures because even though these pictures were not supposed to be aestetically pleasing, we figure that that was a nice touch.

We used a Bunsen burner to heat up the Potassium Chlorate until it was molten. We found the Bunsen Burner flame itself aestetically pleasing. We had the Bunsen Burner at an angle, heating the base of the test tube (which contained the KCl) until it became molten. As you can see, the Burner gave off a nice hot blue flame - necessary because the melting point of KCl is 350 degrees C.

This is what we worked so hard to photograph: the reaction of Potassium-Chlorate and Sucrose. After the sucrose (in this case, a gummibear) is introduced into the molten KCl, a reaction between the two substance is created. This reaction creates an intense burst of light then gives off billowy white smoke while the sucrose is disolved. It all leaves behind a black precipitate that sticks like murder to the walls of the test tube.

Brittany and Blake are now happy. Happy and Photoshy. But these are Happy Feet.