Louis
Pearl
From his website...
Louis Pearl has
been bubbling professionally since 1980, when he started
Tangent Toy Company. He started performing in 1983 with
a show at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He has
written two books about bubbles, made a video called
"Lights, Camera, Bubbles!" and has so far produced 21
fantastic bubble inventions.
I mean, he has brought to market bubble tools that are so simple to use (and fun, and effective) that people actually do use them. I think engineers call product designs such as these, "elegant." When I went strolling along the back alleys of the internet, looking for photos of ordinary people having fun with bubbles, I kept seeing Louis' toys. The bubble siren... The sword... And especially the trumpet and mute.
I've drawn on a few of the best articles about Louis and his career, for this page. I know you'll visit his website to learn more about him there too.
On top of all he's invented, he's also been very nice to me. He's allowed a portion of his video LIGHTS, CAMERA, BUBBLES! to be included here. Also footage from his 2006 promotional dvd. Links to both will be waiting for you at the bottom of this page.
I think it's great that you will get to read about him and the things he's done, and then he'll do a little bubbling just for you, in your own home. I hope it inspires you to head out to the store and pick up a couple of his bubble tools. That way you can make your own bubble fun, in your own home. And that, I think, would complete the circle Louis started etching out in the bubble world, so many years ago. Happy reading.
Wanted: If you have photos, a favorite story or anything to add to enrich this page, please contact me: RIBubbleGuy@yahoo.com & Thanks!
Spend even a few minutes with the curly-haired man who calls himself the Pope of Soap and the conversation turns philosophical. "They're magic," he is saying of the product around which he has built a California company that will gross more than $500,000 this year. "They're not solid, liquid or gas. They're here and they're gone, like life -- they teach you the ephemeral quality of life."
Friday, December 14, 2001 TANGENT TOYS, SAUSALITO
Louis Pearl, 44, calls himself The Amazing Bubble Man, and it's doubtful anyone would quibble with his superhero title. Since founding Tangent Toys in 1980, he has developed 150 bubble- related products, including Starburst Bubble Glasses, Bubble Banana Combo, Ice Cream Bubbles, Bubble Ducky, Super Magic Bubble Set, Lights . . . Camera . . . Bubbles, Big Jar of Bubbles and Extra Big Super Mondo Titanic Bubble Kit and Video. Whew!
He has performed his bubble tricks at birthday parties, schools and libraries around the Bay Area and has even blown soapy orbs for Robin Williams,Don Johnson and the Sultan of Brunei. He blows square bubbles, centipede bubbles, spaceship bubbles and universe bubbles, which are composed of a giant bubble with mini-bubbles orbiting inside. (When it pops, he calls it The Big Bang Bubble.) He can blow bubbles big enough to enclose a person -- and was hired by a chichi New York photographer to blow bubbles around naked women. Tough job, we know, but somebody had to do it. He has made a 50-foot-long bubble and hopes to beat the world record some day: a 104-foot-long bubble blown by a man in New Zealand.
Why the bubble love?
"They usually become perfectly spherical," he said. "There are few things in this world that are perfect that you can make so cheaply. There's a certain magic. Everyone who sees them is delighted --they make people smile."
Pearl's magic no-pop bubbles -- made of a secret ingredient he said is similar to that found in breast implants -- have been incredibly popular for the past two years. They land on fingers, carpet and tables and just, well, stay. (Don't worry, parents, a little water will get rid of 'em in no time.)
While an art student at the University of California at San Diego, a professor urged him to create something no one had ever done before. He brought in the trumpet he'd had since fifth grade and blew bubbles with it. He soon found he could blow bubbles out of anything with a hole in it -- paper towel tubes, tea cup handles, funnels, bagels.
"There were all these people shopping on Telegraph and there were these huge bubbles blowing down the street," he said. "I realized, 'Oh, I'm making money and I'm having a really good time. This is not a bad way to go.' "
He started talking to sales representatives and visiting trade shows, but didn't strike it big until the head of the Nature Company bought 15,000 bubble trumpets.
He has run his business out of a cavernous space in Sausalito for 16 years, kayaking to work from his houseboat. An avid collector, he has shelves full of old bubble toys and a wall full of new bubbles toys. "I want to have every bubble toy there is," he said.
It's not all bubbly fun and games, though. After hiring a staff of eight and running the company into deep debt, Pearl has trimmed to a staff of three and runs a lot of the business side himself. Now, Tangent Toys has an annual budget of $2 million, a factory in China and a partnership with a bubble- making business in Germany.
So what would he tell a kid who longs to run a toy company?
"I'd say, 'Learn accounting,' " he said with a laugh.
Published on June 22, 2005 The Press Democrat
For Louis Pearl, bubbles are serious business.
The 47-year-old Sebastopol man parlayed his fascination with the soapy spheres into a $2 million toy company.
On Tuesday, Pearl performed tricks for kids at Santa Rosa's Doyle Adventure Camp, blowing shimmering six-foot bubbles, square bubbles and bubbles shaped like flying saucers.
Pearl, who calls himself ``The Amazing Bubble Man,'' began his unusual career while he was in college more than 25 years ago. ``Friends and I were playing with bubbles and we came up with interesting shapes,'' he said.
Pearl invented a trumpet-shaped toy for blowing large bubbles. ``Everybody loved them and I started selling them on Telegraph Avenue'' in Berkeley, he said. ``Pretty soon they were in stores all over the country.''
Since then, Pearl added more than 150 bubble toys, including 21 of his own invention, to the product line of Tangent Toy Co., his wholesale business originally based in Berkeley.
Pearl later moved the company from Berkeley to Sausalito, where he lived on a houseboat and paddled a kayak to his waterfront office.
Three years ago, Pearl and Tangent Toy Co. settled in Sebastopol.
Pearl said the bubble business isn't just about toys. He's been doing shows for more than 20 years, mixing bubble tricks with science lessons.
He said scientists have been experimenting with bubbles for years, learning about physics and chemistry. Pearl has performed at The Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, written books on bubble science and made a video with The Nature Co.
Last year, Pearl sold his wholesale business to Toysmith Group, an Auburn, Wash.-based distributor with a catalog of more than 1,400 toys. Pearl wouldn't disclose the price, but he said Tangent Toy Co. had 3,000 retail customers and $2 million in annual sales at the time.
He still sells bubble toys on a retail Web site, Tangenttoy.com. In the past year, he's performed 500 bubble shows, mostly at schools.
``The whole toy industry has gone into a deep freeze,'' he said. His wholesale business also was hurt when foreign toy companies copied his inventions without compensating him.
Pearl said performing bubble shows is more rewarding than running a wholesale toy business. ``It's a whole lot more fun and there's a lot less competition,'' he said.
Discover, Dec, 1996
Bubbles are the ultimate in ephemera. Children invariably want to possess them, and invariably they cannot. They are quite good at destroying them, however, and this act brings its own secondary joy. But even the thrill of obliterating a delicate, gently drifting soap bubble is enhanced if the bubble is enormous, or if the bubble is indeed not one but two or three or more, all linked in a complex airy structure. The joy inherent in bubble complexity is the chief insight of Louis Pearl, who is not only the owner of Tangent Toy Company (and thus the marketer of Euler's Disk) but also the self-proclaimed Bubble Man, aka the Pope of Soap. He has elevated bubble making to an art form.
The sine qua non of the Bubble Man's art, and perhaps his greatest invention, is the bubble trumpet - a cone-shaped piece of plastic with a lip to keep the "bubble solution" (diluted dish detergent, plus some glycerin to make the bubbles last longer) from running off onto the floor. It holds enough soap to produce a very large bubble - two feet in diameter. In fact, two or more people, each with their own trumpet, can collaborate to produce a single gigantic bubble. Back in the early 1980s, when Pearl sold bubble trumpets on the streets of Berkeley, California, mammoth bubbles produced by teams of up to eight passersby regularly caused traffic jams on Telegraph Avenue, or so he claims. Now, however, it is the 1990s, and Pearl, who will soon turn 40, sells $1 million worth of bubble toys a year from his office in Sausalito. "I want to be the Starbucks of bubbles," he says frankly.
Pearl demonstrates these and other concoctions in an 18-minute video, which I watched with my daughter. As soon as it was over, we took our bubble trumpets straight to the basement. I made a two-bubble cluster with ease, and came close to making a spaceship bubble, but my centipede bubble was lame, and a cube-shaped bubble was out of the question, to her utter disappointment. "Daddy, why can't you do it?" she asked. "Because I haven't had as much practice as the Bubble Man," I said. "Daddy," she said, "can we go upstairs and watch the bubble video again?"
Video. Now there's a science toy.
Good clean fun
CARLSBAD ---- Dunno why, but bubbles ---- big bubbles, little bubbles, purple bubbles, wobbly bubbles, double bubbles, all bubbles ---- are just so much fun.
That might help explain the huddles of bubbles that bobbed down State Street on Saturday as dozens of folks had, well, some good clean fun playing with soap.
Back after a five-year hiatus, the Bubble Festival popped up on the scene again at the Children's Discovery Museum of North San Diego County.
Most of the tables set up for the day-long Carlsbad festival offered a hands-on, dabble-in-the-bubbles approach to sudsy pleasures. Among the most popular exhibits: large trays of soap that boasted two-foot bubble wands.
"I forgot how great bubbles are," said Kurt Hartman, 37, of Cardiff, as he waved a giant wand. Hartman and his wife Sandra made sure to attend the sudsy soiree since daughter, Jordyn, 3 next month, simply loves bubbles.
Another exhibit table offered colored bubbles ---- one part water-based tempura paint, two parts soap ---- and kids swarmed around it, eager to blow mounds of round bubbles.
Just as much of a draw was The Bubble Man, Louis Pearl, who put on two shows during the event.
"This show is cool," raved 8-year-old Mia Cassel of Escondido.
Rory Sailcat, a Carlsbad second-grader, was just as impressed.
"I thought it was amazing," Rory, 7, gushed. "I've never seen bubbles that big."
Well, that's what happens when the bubble wand is as big as the soap-filled wading pool it sits in.
The Sonoma-based Pearl takes his soapy show up and down the west coast states, spending about half the year on the road.
His primary school audiences reach from preschool to eighth-graders. When he does shows for older kids, he said, he uses it as an opportunity to slip some science in.
Overwhelming response to the popular Bubble Festival had the once-tiny museum bursting five years ago, so the decision was made to put the show on hold. But a move to a new location in March opened up enough room for the festival to come back.
The annual Bubble Festival only lasts a day, but the children's museum does boast a bubble-based exhibit year round. The popular feature allows visitors to stand inside a sudsy bubble they stretch around themselves.
Bubble tricks and tips mesmerize kids at event
August 22, 2004
Five-year-old Parker Bennett of Vista watched her bubble float away during the bubble festival at the Children's Discovery Museum in Carlsbad yesterday.
CARLSBAD – Bubble blowing can be so much more than tiny soap circles floating from a hand-held wand.
Louis Pearl, a self-styled toy inventor turned "bubbleologist," can build a spaceship out of large bubbles surrounded by a ring of smaller ones spinning around them. He can construct a bubble square inside a bubble circle. He can juggle bubbles, use them to play catch or shape one gargantuan bubble around the body of a large child.
Children were blown away by the myriad bubble tricks and tips at the annual bubble festival yesterday at the Children's Discovery Museum in Carlsbad, where Pearl was invited to share his expertise.
The bubble festival debuted a decade ago, but it soon drew such large crowds that there was no longer enough space for it at the museum. In March, the museum relocated to a larger site on 2787 State St., Suite B, and the event was resumed.
Events coordinator Cherie Johnson said the festival fits in with the museum's mission of being interactive for kids.
parents," she said. "It's not like a normal museum where you aren't able to touch anything." Under the warm sunshine, children traveled from station to station trying out wands in the shapes of butterflies, clowns, circles, stars and squares. They often splashed soapy water on one another and their parents to stay cool.
"This is so fun. I never knew you could use kitchen materials to make bubbles," said Monica Castaneda, 10, as she wandered past a booth where children used spatulas, fly swatters and plastic soda holders to create bubbly works of art. Nearby, children watched in awe as one boy's bubble took on the form of a long, squiggly snake.
Pearl's bubble show mesmerized the children. He discovered his passion for bubbles in a performance art class at the University of California San Diego. He found his calling after he converted a trumpet into a bubble blower for a homework assignment. The Sonoma County resident takes his show to schools and parties all over the state.
Yesterday, Pearl led the kids in a game of "smooch the bubble." Zander Bradley, an active 3-year-old, continued happily jumping up to kiss bubbles long after the game was over. Pearl had to scoop him up and return the giggling youngster to his mother. "That was so cool," Zander said of the performance.
Pearl told parents, "It's a great way to get your kids to wash their face."
What follows is the start of an article that was written for Discover magazine many years ago. I've found it around on the web, but if you want to see the piece in it's entirety you can find it on Louis' website: www.TangentToy.com. I've not been able to verify that it ever made it into Discover, as the article above did, but it's a nice description of Louis, his work and philosophy. Enjoy.
Spend half a day with Louis Pearl in the cluttered dockside headquarters of Tangent Toys in Sausalito and you will emerge with a newfound respect for bubbles. That's right, bubbles, the symbol for everything flimsy and inconsequential, all form and no content, whimsy without weight, the essence of impermanence If you have taken bubbles for granted in a world of technical wizardry and material glut, one afternoon watching a master at work will remind you of the magic they held for you when you were five.
Pearl is a member of the bubbleocracy, a small band of performers, physicists, mathematicians, and amateur connoiseurs who devote themselves to the astonishingly complex and increasingly useful world of bubbles. He is the owner, ceo and chief bubble evangelist of Tangent, a small toy company that manufactures an amazing array of toys designed to turn soapy film into iridescent, evanescent jewels In the manner of certain Northern California software entrepreneurs -- and there is no softer ware than bubbles -- Pearl seems anything but a hard-working executive. With long, not overly-tended hair, a T shirt and sandals, he looks like just what he is, a man who lives on a houseboat about a mile north on Richardson's Bay and kayaks to work every morning.
A spare Marmot Mountain Works kayak hangs from the ceiling of the company's storage warehouse Pearl invents the bubble toys that Tangent manufactures, but it is as a performer at schools and parties that he shows how much more there is to bubbles than the shimmering beauty of the delicate globes he launches into the air from one of his many devices. Though quick to disclaim scientific credentials, Pearl can make the complexity of bubbles ‹ the subject of daunting books and mind-numbing academic treatises ‹ instantly understandable. Why does a soap bubble invariably take the form of a closed globe or a hemisphere? Surface tension.
And how does surface tension work? According to Pearl's wisdom, like this: Water molecules are only happy when surrounded by other water molecules Just as water seeks its own level, water molecules seek their own company. What makes them unhappy is to have one side exposed to the air, and when this happens, say at the top of a glass, the outside molecules try to pull themselves back down among all the rest of the other water molecules, creating a kind of "skin" that allows the water to rise slightly higher than the edge of the glass.
To illustrate, Pearl fills a wax paper cup up to and just above the brim. Then he puts one miniscule drop of oil on the water surface, which "fools" the top layer of molecules into believing they're back in the fold. The surface tension breaks, and instantly water spills over onto the desk. One of life's persistent mysteries, nicely explained. But it's what Pearl does with bubbles that captures the imagination. Dipping one of Tangent's plastic bubble trumpets into a soapy solution (recipe: 1 oz Dawn or Joy, 1/2 oz glycerine or Karo syrup, 2 cups water), he begins producing perfect bubbles that range in size from soccer balls to golf balls His repertory is hypnotic.
First he blows a large bubble, keeps it floating by waving his hand underneath, then, with tiny puffs of air through pursed lips, creates a little solar system of smaller bubbles floating around inside. He forms several baseball sized bubbles and attaches them in such a way that the bubble in the center of the cluster is a cube. He creates a vertical chain of three large bubbles, rings the "waists" where they connect with belts of smaller bubbles, then, using two straws carefully aimed, spins the topmost globe and the bottom globe in opposite directions. And so on through a bag of bubble tricks that makes most television magic shows seem prosaic.
Presumably, no one involved every day in the bubble economy decided as a kid to make bubbles his life Doctor, fire fighter, president, maybe, but bubble wrangler? Pearl's path to founding Tangent, therefore, was a twisty one. Son of an eminent doctor who headed San Francisco's Mt Zion Hospital (a position Pearl's older brother currently holds), Louis opted out of a medical career when his father rather ill-advisedly had him attend an autopsy at the age of 16 -- a classic case of far too much quite a bit too soon.
Years later, while reading a book by Alan Watts on Zen Buddhism, Pearl remembered with a shock that it was the author's autopsy he had seen performed). Instead of the medical arts, Pearl chose the fine arts, and went to the University of California at San Diego to study painting. There he encountered Allan Kaprow, an artist and professor who had invented the sixties phenomenon of "happenings" Kaprow's idea was to get people to make art when they didn't know they were making art.
This, for reasons no longer quite clear, made Louis Pearl think of bubbles, beautiful objects that we're all capable of producing. For an class project, he simply formed a trumpet out of cardboard in such a way that let mere mortals blow sublimely large bubbles -- brief but beautiful artistic happenings.
Some years later, Pearl encountered a plastic version of this trumpet at a failing toy company in Eureka, California, and bought a couple of dozen from their leftover inventory. After college, a sailing trip to the Galapagos Islands with his cousin convinced Pearl, by this time living in Berkeley, that he wanted nothing more than to work a little and sail a lot.
Since cash flow in such a life tends to be more out than in, he found himself one day with an appointment in San Francisco but not enough money for the train ride under the Bay. He decided to stand out on University Avenue and sell his supply of bubble trumpets; an impromptu do-it-yourself demo seemed one way to lure customers. Business was brisk, and what turned out to be a profitable happening made Pearl realize that there might be a future in bubble toys Tangent, a kind of Bubbles 'R' Us, was the result.
Ask Pearl what it is about bubbles that exerted such a powerful hold on him, and he'll hand you a pair of paper framed, light refracting glasses and take you out into the bright Sausalito sunlight to study the bubbles he blows them through a standard circle-on-a-stick bubble toy. Magically, the glasses reveal light beams radiating from the floating spheres at precise 90-degree angles, putting each bubble at the center of a precise cross. "With the light coming off them like that, you can see how perfect bubbles are," Pearl says "I think that's really what's so appealing about them. We're always striving for perfection in life, and we rarely achieve it
But every bubble is perfect every time" As any bubble aficionado --and there are many -- will tell you, the close study of bubbles will yield a lot of big ideas, which is why many schools hire Pearl and other bubble performers. The shows they put on are an intriguing way to get kids to do science without realizing (God forbid) they're doing science... END PART ONE.
And that's pretty much it for the interview of Louis in this article, which goes on much longer and gets into more about the science of bubbles, bubble history and performers, and can be found on SoapBubbler.com's main site...
To see Louis' 2006 promo dvd, Click here. A big 8.5mb movie.
To see clips from Louis' earlier work, LIGHTS, CAMERA, BUBBLES!, Click here. Big, but not as large as the one above.