Eiffel Plasterer & Alice Plasterer
Stickler
VIDEO LINK! CLICK
HERE!
In my mind, Eiffel was the sturdy bridge between the
(1800s) scientific work of C.V. Boys and the bubbling era
we're in now ~ which was kicked off in the 1970s by Tom
Noddy.
Note: On this page, when a photo caption is credited to
the Exploratorium (San Francisco), I'm talking
about their digital archives which can be reached
with this link.
Wanted:
If you have photos, a favorite story or anything to add
to enrich this page, please contact me:
RIBubbleGuy@yahoo.com
& Thanks!
C.V. Boys used bubbles to snare the
attention of audiences and readers, bringing them closer
to the science he loved. Tom Noddy is a natural entertainer who
has had his craft enriched through dealings with
scientists and mathematicians. Eiffel seemed just as
comfortable in both worlds.
Far beyond a mere placeholder, Eiffel Plasterer had talent-a-plenty. As you will read, he was a gifted high school science teacher and vaudeville-style showman. Everyone I've talked to about the man, comments on the "twinkle in his eyes". Whether on stage or in a classroom, it's evident that Eiffel delighted in play and discovery. His Christian living and passionate pursuits led him to joy, which he willingly shared with others. And his soap solutions were as astounding as they were secret. I'm truly sorry I never met the man.
As a bubbler, it wasn't enough for him to concoct a batch of juice capable of making a bubble live for 364 days or near to it (that's a number which is hard to pin down, though Tom Noddy has written to say that Eiffel told him it was 340 days, which is also reflected in Eiffel's literature that Tom has read and I've yet to see). He also invented performance techniques we still think of as fresh today. His method for encasing an audience assistant in a bubble garnered him notoriety. When on Letterman's Late-Night show, he encased David in a bubble ~ just as he encased his daughter (see film by clicking here, I think that's Alice) half a century before. Near as I can tell, that trick's Eiffel's invention. His work with lighter than air gasses and unique bubble tools was astounding. He built free standing "bubble chains" and had a trick that Alice (his daughter) still does in her act where the bubble appears to climb against gravity, up a wire frame.
As you read through the information below, I hope the work of Eiffel and Alice will inspire you to find what about bubbles delights you the most. And then I hope you'll follow their example and get out there and share what you love with an audience, the best you can, every time. Felix carries on in this way, Tom too, as do the Band of Bubblers, Sterling and many others.
Click here to see video of Eiffel and Alice in Action ~ the large movie will open in it's own page, giving you the chance to come back to it when it's ready.
Plasterer became popular nationwide being featured in a Paramount pictures short subject film ~ most of which you'll see in Quicktime by clicking here. He also appeared on numerous television shows and appeared at the Exploratorium Bubble Festivals in San Francisco. That's where, as John Cassidy writes in THE UNBELIEVABLE BUBBLE BOOK, "...he was able to talk shop with most of the other serious bubble practitioners–a small but dedicated fraternity for whom Eiffel Plasterer is the elder statesman, resident wizard and spiritual grandfather."
Before his death in June 1989 he was honored by the community, and a street at Hier's Park now bears his name. He was called a national treasure, a billboard bore his likeness as testament to Huntington's appreciation. As Alice says later in a press clip, Eiffel put Huntington on the map - long before Dan Quayle did.
BUBBLE MASTER GETTING A STREET
Charlotte Observer, The (NC)
April 8, 1986
This northeast Indiana city is bursting with pride over a resident who can blow bubbles big enough to surround people.
So the town fathers will honor Eiffel Plasterer by naming a street after him. The next major thoroughfare built will be called "Plasterer Avenue" after the 86-year-old bubble master, according to City Council President Iris Clark.
Plasterer, who taught physics and chemistry at Huntington High School and at Huntington College, has spent 45 years researching soap film phenomena, better known as bubbles.
Among his tricks are to make bubbles that climb, bounce and form inside each other. He has kept bubbles intact for more than a year at a time, and once carried one across the country in his car to perform at a show on the West Coast.
(1899-1989)
From: http://www.huntingtoncounty.org.
Eiffel Gray Plasterer was born September 23, 1899, in Huntington County, the sixth child of William Leonidas and Elizabeth Rebecca Dill Plasterer. Eiffel's great grandparents and grandparents came from Shipensburg, Pennsylvania in 1837 via Richland, Ohio and in 1853 to Union Township.
Special childhood memories included harvest time when the old steam traction engine pulling a threshing machine would come to the farms and all the family neighbors would gather to help. Eiffel loved going in town to church and remembered the revival meeting when he was nine, when he committed his life to being on God's side. The Chautauqua were special and exciting to him; he especially loved the magicians and the bands. He told of seeing and hearing Helen Keller and of shaking hands with Booker T. Washington. He wanted to be a preacher, magician and thresherman all at one time.
He taught physics and mathematics at Huntington Township High School for four years, and chemistry and physics at Huntington High School for 21 years and served as a critic teacher for Huntington College science students.
He married Inez Marie Burgett on July 8, 1925 and they became the parents of Alice Marie and William Eiffel.
It was while a student at DePauw that his physics professor used soap films to show sound vibrations. This spark of interest in soap films was followed by several years of research to produce a solution for his demonstrations. In 1932, he gave the first bubble show for fellow teachers and eight years later he took "Bubbles Concerto" on the road of Chautauqua and for schools, service clubs, convention banquets, and church vespers services.
Eiffel used soap bubbles in the classroom and on stage to prove that hydrogen burns, mixed with oxygen will explode and that there is lifter in hot air, how light is reflected, how surface tension works and how various shapes are formed by soap films. He gave a bubble show on the "Hobby Lobby" radio program, perfected several inventions, held patent letters and wrote numerous scientific articles like: "Soap Bubbles in the School" and "Long Life Soap Bubbles."
He was a musician, playing bass horn and sousaphone in local orchestras and bands, and a 60-year member of the Erie Band. His first TV appearance was on "You Asked For It," with Art Baker. In the 1980's, he was featured on Real People, The Tomorrow Show, Late Night with David Letterman, and the Dick Cavett Show.
He was featured bubbleologist at the San Francisco Exploratorium Bubble Festivals, and at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. In May of 1982, the Huntington Exchange Clubs awarded Eiffel the clubs' Book of Golden Deeds.
Eiffel loved the land and farmed organically and continued to raise and process sorghum cane molasses annually.
The next spring, billboards bearing his likeness mysteriously appeared around Huntington, proclaiming him "Huntington's National Treasure." The street through Hier's Park was named Plasterer Lane in his honor.
His final bubble performance (the 1,501st recorded show) was given June 15, 1989; the evening he received the third annual Union Church Christian Heritage Award. Eiffel died June 27, 1989, and was buried in Union Cemetery.
"Life is like blowing of bubbles, our hopes and dreams are the bubbles of life we are blowing; they do not all have to break." "A bubble is how a child's breath can make something beautiful from nothing - just like God made the universe."
http://www.huntingtoncounty.org
............................................................
...This kind of public fascination inspired a certain Eiffel Plasterer, one of bubble history's near-mythic figures, the American equivalent of C V Boys, but a showman rather than a scientist. Plasterer lived all his life on a farm in Indiana, and spent much of his time as an adult inventing bubble tricks to be performed for Midwestern audiences in the days when radio was an imperfect entertainment medium at best and television wasn't even a gleam in Philo Farnsworth's (or CBS's) eye. Eiffel -- born in 1899, of course, on the day Alexander Gustave Eiffel presented France with his tower at the Paris Exposition -- grew famous with his repertory of bubble tricks. At the same time other, more sensation forms of entertainment pushed vaudeville and carnivals to the edges of audience interest, the vogue for bubble performance dwindled, and with it Plasterer's fame. Then, late in his life, a television station in DeMoines, Iowa [??] revived his celebrity. To the bubble adepts who built their acts on the foundation of Plasterer's inventiveness, he was a combination Harry Houdini and Charlie Chaplin.
Those who made trips to Indiana to see him when he was in his nineties - as did Louis Pearl - have the extra aura of Medieval pilgrims who beheld the bones of St Mark in Venice. "He was an incredibly sweet old man," recalls Pearl, "Very willing to share his knowledge. Except for his recipe for bubble solution, which seems to have died with him."...
United Press International
OBITUARIES: Eiffel Plasterer
June 29, 1989
Dateline: Huntington, Ind.
Eiffel Plasterer, known as "The Bubble Man," died Tuesday. He was 89.
Plasterer gave bubble-blowing exhibitions across the United States for the past 50 years. He fascinated audiences by creating bubbles in geometric forms, bubbles that exploded and bubbles that enclosed a member of the audience, usually a youngster.
He attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., where he discovered his knack for bubble art. Plasterer polished his show as a physics teacher at Huntington High School.
He appeared most recently on national television on "Late Night With David Letterman" and Dick Cavett's show.
Family legacy educates, entertains children
Journal Gazette, The (Fort Wayne, IN)
June 3, 2004
Alice Stickler of Huntington possesses an unusual legacy. It's not a family farm or business, not an heirloom or other treasured family property.
Her legacy is fragile and ephemeral. It appears and disappears. If she tried to hold onto it, it would dissolve in her hands
Stickler makes bubbles. And, like her father before her, she does it to entertain and to educate.
Her father, Eiffel Gray Plasterer, was known as "The Bubble Wizard" and "Huntington's National Treasure." He turned his interest in physics and chemistry into a bubble show that fascinated children and adults from coast to coast for 60 years. He appeared on national TV shows; big-city newspapers wrote articles about him.
"He was a showman, as well as a teacher," Stickler says. "He put Huntington on the map long before Dan Quayle."
He created bubble "tricks" using soap film to demonstrate the laws of physics, such as how light is reflected, how surface tension works and how hot air can cause a thing - in this case, bubbles - to rise. He developed his own bubble solution, hoping to achieve an unbreakable bubble, or at least one that would last for a long time. He kept one bubble in a glass jar for almost a year.
He also created his own bubble-making equipment, some of which Stickler uses in her bubble shows. She also duplicates some of his tricks, but she got a much later start than her father did.
"I didn't start doing this until I was 65," she says.
She had assisted her father from 1977 to 1989, when he died at age 89, but it was a few years before she decided to do it on her own.
Stickler, who turns 78 this month, grew up with the bubbles. When she and her brother, William, were children, they toured with their parents.
"Before (World War II), he did chautauquas with the International Platform Association and took the family along."
As a youngster, Alice says she was more interested in the farm than the bubbles. She enjoyed the outdoors and firing up the old steam engine her father used.
But when she returned to Huntington in 1976 as a widow, after living 18 years in Wisconsin and Michigan, where her first husband was a Methodist minister, she welcomed the chance to become her father's assistant.
"I loved the bubbles and my brother Bill, who had been doing it for 25 years, said, `It's all yours, Alice.' And I said, `Good.' After that, I helped dad for all his shows and did all the booking, from 1977 until 1989, when he died."
A video of his Letterman show appearance at age 83 shows a distinguished, dapper man with white hair and beard, blowing bubbles that defied gravity and confounded his host, who soon realized that Plasterer, very busy blowing bubbles, wasn't going to be able to answer his questions. So Letterman turned to Alice, who had been asked to stay in the background, for the answers.
As a finale, her father encased Letterman in a bubble, a feat Stickler uses to end her show, too.
It wasn't until the winter of 1991-92 that Stickler put together her own bubble show. Vacationing in Texas and Mexico with her second husband, Delvia Stickler, she did a show for a church group and it grew from there.
"Delvia helped me. He was my carrier and my encourager, and he would run the records and tapes for me. I like to work with music."
Naturally, the first tune played is the 1918 song "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles." She also likes peppy march music.
"We did 180 shows until he died in December 2002."
Since then, she has done only a few shows, but has three private shows scheduled this month and hopes to do more in the future.
She says children are the best audience, but adults are bubble fans, too.
Tricks include making a bubble blow out a candle, getting a bubble to go back into a bottle and - the one her father had the most fun with - making a bubble "climb" up an incline on a straightened-out coat hanger, thus appearing to defy gravity.
"You never know if it's going to go or not," she says. "I try a couple of times and I may go on (to something else) or I'll talk to the bubbles. `Come on, you can do it. Get up there.'
"It can be nerve-wracking, especially when you're fighting the air conditioning," which moves the air and the bubbles around.
"A big crowd can make a difference, too. Because of all the carbon dioxide in the room, the bubbles won't last as long."
Wind, dust, temperature and smoke also affect the bubbles.
Like snowflakes, no two bubbles are alike, but there are some predictable things about bubbles. Even swooshed out of a square bubble wand, they will be round.
"And," Stickler says, "the smaller the hole, the smaller the bubble. You can't get enough air in to make a big bubble."
And when you're blowing bubbles, breath control is paramount.
A devoted Christian, Stickler likes to make the point that the Lord gave her breath and, because of that, she can use her breath to create something, too - "beautiful bubbles."
"I'm not dramatic like my dad was. He'd say `I'm going to put a bubble completely through a bubble - a bubble inside a bubble.'
"I just do it," she says.
One bubble formation she does as a tribute to her father is aptly named the Eiffel Tower. Larger bubbles on the bottom are stacked with gradually smaller bubbles to form a shape like that of the world-famous tower in Paris. Stickler got to see the real Eiffel Tower some years ago and says she was thrilled at the sight, knowing her father was named after Gustave Eiffel, the engineer whose firm designed the 1889 World's Fair tower.
"My grandpa was a farmer but he was well-read," Stickler says. "He liked unusual names, and my father was born on the 10-year anniversary of the Eiffel Tower, so it would have been in the news."
Her father, who once said, "You never grow too old to blow bubbles," gave his last bubble show on June 15, 1989, 12 days before he died. He had done more than 1,500 recorded shows and an unknown number of other performances.
Stickler doesn't aspire to that number. She's just happy to keep the family legacy alive, to offer some entertainment and - true to her father's goal - to make bubbles a learning experience for children.
THE NEWS-SENTINEL
July 29, 1994
Alice Stickler's bubbles always burst. But that's OK - they're not supposed to last long, four or five minutes at best.
That's enough time to see the transparent spheres float through the air, surround a small bouquet of flowers or envelop a woman.
Stickler, known as "the bubble lady," performed an hourlong bubble art show at the Allen County 4-H Fair yesterday.
About 60 people watched as she blew through an instrument made of slender rubber and copper tubing and bubbles, big and small, formed at the instrument's bell-shaped end.
''This is about teaching kids how to have fun with bubbles," Stickler said. She made bubbles with plastic juice bottles, mesh strawberry containers, straws, cookie boxes and the cardboard tubes inside rolls of toilet paper and gift wrapping paper.
Using scientific principles, Stickler manipulated one bubble called "the intelligent bubble" to cause a small flame to go out. The "sensitive bubble" floated in the opposite direction when she introduced a piece of cloth laden with ammonia. Another bubble formed a dome around a small bouquet of flowers and lasted for several minutes.
For the grand finale, Stickler asked a tall woman and young girl from the audience to stand on a round tin pan, outlined by a duct filled with Stickler's bubble solution. Using a large bubble ring, Stickler surrounded the girl, then the woman, with a bubble.
When he started touring with his bubble show, Stickler went along to help. When he died in 1989, he had performed about 1,500 shows, including appearances on "The Garry Moore Show" in the 1950s, the "Tomorrow" show with Tom Snyder in 1980, "Late Night with David Letterman" in 1984, "Real People" and a Dick Cavett Disney special.
Stickler hasn't known such fame, yet. She's only been performing for about two years. Her husband, Delvia, convinced her to pursue bubble fame after the Huntington woman retired from her job as bookkeeper for Trinity Methodist Church in Huntington.
In the past two years the 68-year-old has performed about 40 shows, one as far away as Mexico where she blew bubbles for a group of children in a church. Usually she performs at schools, for birthday parties and other events in the area.
''I'm not in it for the money," Stickler said. "But you have to have something for your time."
It's not very hard to do, she said. She mixes about one cup of Joy dish detergent with seven or eight cups of water and a dab of glycerine to make the solution. She advises youngsters to use Palmolive or Dawn soap because they're milder.
The touch of glycerine makes the bubbles last longer. A few times, she's blown bubbles that lasted one or two hours, "but that was sheerly luck," she said.
She learned some of the tricks, such as the trick of enclosing people in a bubble, from her father. Others she picked up over the years reading books. Her father devised the instrument she uses to blow bubbles. He also taught her to wrap string around the bubble rings, so the rings can hold more of the soap solution and make bigger bubbles.
Watch a movie about Eiffel and Alice by clicking here.
I tracked down Eiffel on his farm in Indiana. I telephoned him and then went to visit him. Afterwards, we both admitted that we looked forward to meeting but that we were both a bit chagrined to find that this special thing that we had invented independently was something that someone else had also found.
Those reservations melted away when we found that the differences in formula and inclination resulted in only the slightest overlap (my caterpillar was his chain, my Love Bubble was his Marriage of Two Bubbles).
I tried to blow a bubble inside of a bubble (without inserting a straw or other device, just blowing at the wall) and found that it was close to impossible with any of his nine formulas (I could do it with great difficulty on occasion but it was not something that one would stumble upon with those stiff, strong, long lasting, colorful solutions of his).
I couldn't do what he was doing and he couldn't do what I was doing. We were delighted and let go of our reservations. We talked for hours on end with the only person either of us had ever met who understood what we were talking about.
Eiffel Plasterer is a retired high school physics teacher
who lives on a farm near Huntington, Indiana. He raises
sorghum, brews his own brand of anti-arthritis molasses,
collects old steam engines and claims to be "the craziest
man you will ever see."
For proof, Mr. Plasterer will lead you to his barn. There,
Eiffel Plasterer, the mild-mannered 82 year old farmer with
the friendly white goatee turns into... the one and only...
"Professor Bubbles, creator of the world famous Bubble
Concerto."
Just like it's creator, the Bubble Concerto is a
one-of-a-kind, a combination of science, soapsuds and show
business, starring Eiffel Plasterer and his amazing mastery
of the ordinary soap bubble.
Mr. Plasterer is the Beethoven of soap bubbles. he builds
four foot bubble chains, multi-colored bubble castles,
hydrogen bubbles that explode into mid-air puffs of flame.
He can put bubbles inside of bubbles, or ships inside of
bubbles. He can even put you inside of a bubble, if you
care to step forward..."
He is also the owner of a geriatric bubble, a 340 day old
specimen preserved inside a bell jar on the shelf of his
barn-cum-bubble-laboratory. "The really old ones are like
soldiers," Eiffel explains, "the don't die, they just
eventually fade away."
Eiffel Plasterer has performed his Bubble Concerto 1,400
times over more than 50 years, in venues ranging from the
Huntington Rotary Club to the Dick Cavett show. He's even
performed what has to be the world's only radio bubble
show.
