Strombecker Company
Bubbles inspire free-floating fantasy and joy
The Orange County Register
July 14, 1992
Chicago Tribune
The subject is frustrated drips.
Don't get it? Think about it. Take water, add soap. Swoop a loop through the goop. Lift. Blow. Look. See the bubble. See the bulge at the bottom. That's a drip waiting to happen.
The scientists say so. (Yes, over the centuries the mere sphere-on-the-loose has been the subject of great laboratory analysis, as white coats, even the big shots like Sir Isaac Newton, have poofed pipes for hours, studying seriously the multiple properties of the bulbous evanescence gurgling forth.)
Here's how it works: There's something in the soap that does a number on water. Makes it more elastic, if you will. Water molecules, left alone, are quite tight. Like to stick real close together. Scientists call it high surface tension, meaning the molecules try to pull together.
Soap molecules, on the other hand, have a split personality. They've got these long tails that hate water, bolt away from it like a third-grade boy from the girl making eyes at him on the playground. But they've also got these other ends that love water.
It's this push-me-pull-you attitude of the soap that splits the solution into layers elastic, easy-to-expand soap molecules on the outside, clingy water molecules on the inside. When you blow, the soap stops the water from doing its usual thing, lowers the surface tension and lets the bubble be.
Here's where the drip comes in: The water, despite being trapped inside, drains to the bottom of the sphere where, longing to drop, it waits for the bubble to pop.
Got it? All right then, let's blow out of this science class. Before this exercise is over, we want to pack your brain with a veritable froth of facts about bubbles, specifically the sort you blow from a store-bought bottle, or from your very own home brew.
The scene: a cavernous skylighted factory on Chicago's Far West Side, the home of Strombecker Corp., the oldest toy company in the United States and maker of the nation's No. 1 selling toy TootsieToy's Mr. Bubbles and Wonder Bubbles, of which more than 50 million bottles are sold each year.
Shhrr, whoosh and pffffft, the baritone bellow of the bubble-bottling machines deafens as it boomerangs, wall-ceiling-floor in this square-city-block of a building.
Back in the top-secret mixing room, Luis Garcia, night mixer for the past two years, stirs a long-handled spoon in one of three huge metal tanks, each 500 gallons. Garcia, who speaks little English, oversees the mixing of 20 500-gallon batches on his shift, "like a magician, play with bubbles."
An ordinary green garden hose lies serpentlike nearby. It pumps plain old Lake Michigan water into the tanks, the only ingredient not under wraps.
(Myron B. Shure, Strombecker's kidlike 66-year-old chairman and grandson of company founder Nathan Shure, a legendary wholesaler of turn-of-the-century Chicago, says his company is so sold on Chicago water it ships it in huge vats to its factory in China, where it assembles and fills some of its more labor-intensive bubble toys.)
Now through October is high season for bubbles. With most of the inventory already moved out to store shelves across the nation, the lines are rolling a mere 16 hours a day. From January through March, though, they kick into 24-hour-a-day overdrive to stock up for spring.
Over here at Strombecker, which has blown its most famous bubbles to "The Lawrence Welk Show," the Ice Capades and the Delta Queen ("all the Queens on the Mississippi, for that matter," Shure says), as well as sold the solution in 55-gallon drums to utility and pipeline companies nationwide for use in leak diagnosis, the bubbles roll out at a rate of a quarter million bottles a day, the 4-ounce line alone spitting them out at 10,500 bottles an hour.
Shure, the chief cook and bottle watcher, is known around Chicago as the resident expert on the history of bubble blowing. He can't provide documentation, but he swears kids were blowing bubbles BC. And probably never stopped. He points to Sir John Everett Millais' 1886 painting "Bubbles," originally titled "A Child's World," in which a curly-haired lad sits in his Victorian ruffles, bubble pipe in hand, gazing heavenward at one ripe bubble.
He digs into his personal memory bank, when as a kid in the family business in the 1920s, he vividly recalls hoisting the heavy boxes of bubbles that came in little glass jars.
The 1933 catalog of N. Shure Co. ("the world's largest novelty house") lists, on Page 705, the Bubbler, "enameled wood bowl and mouthpiece; will not warp or crack. . . . No end of fun and amusement." For 40 cents, you could have had a dozen.
The company's winter 1952-1953 catalog debuts "Rainbow Colored Wonder Bubbles . . . a really hot number for the children as well as the adults. Each bottle will give thousands and thousands of bubbles." The price: 78 cents per dozen.
The spring 1992 catalog lists no fewer than 11 pages of bubble toys, from the Mr. Bubbles Bubble Sword, a holey sword swished in a solution-filled scabbard, to the Mr. Bubbles Swiss Bubble Blower, a Swiss Army knife like device in which each fold-out "blade" is in fact a bubble wand.