- CV Boys

If you're searching for the person who has most inspired the great soap bubblers of the past century, you've found him. Charles Vernon Boys (C.V. Boys) with his book SOAP BUBBLES Their Colors and the Forces Which Mold Them, put into pictures and words many entertaining experiments with bubbles, surface tension, lighter-than-air gases, water jets and numerous other truly important scientific phenomena. He made it all fun, to boot.

Wanted: If you have photos or anything to add to enrich this page, please contact me: RIBubbleGuy@yahoo.com & Thanks!

My well worn copy of this book was published in 1962 by Crowell Company in New York. One nice thing about this particular edition is the introduction by Keith Gordon Irwin. Here's what he writes in his opening comments:

"At three O'Clock in the afternoon of the day after Christmas in the year 1889 the lights went on in the theater of the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. The room was filled with a capacity crowd of teen-age boys and girls. This was the opening day of the Science Lecture Festival for Young People. (In the theater on the Festival days adults would be permitted in the rear row of seats only; they would be expected to slip in quietly, and to take no part whatever in any discussion.) The program in the theater was to ren on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for six days, beginning just after Christmas. This year Charles Vernon Boys was to be the lecturer. There were rumors that he had some magical tricks he would show...
...Promptly at three, the lecturer, Charles Vernon Boys, stepped through the opening in the rear curtain and came forward onto the stage. In his damp hands he had a soap bubble nearly a foot in size; he tossed it from one hand to the other as he walked. "It is possible that some of you may like to know why I have chosen soap bubbles as my subject." That was the beginning."

Boys continues in his introduction, "I do not suppose that there is anyone in this room who has not occasionally blown a common soap bubble and, while admiring the perfection of its form, and the marvelous brilliancy of its colors, wondered how it is that such a magnificent object can be so easily produced.
I hope that none of you are yet tired of playing with bubbles because, as I hope we shall see, there is more in a common bubble than those who have only played with them can generally imagine...
...It is possible that some of you may like to know why I have chosen soap bubbles as my subject; if so, I am glad to tell you. Though there are many subjects which might seem to a beginner to be more wonderful, more brilliant, or more exciting, there are few which so directly bear upon the things we see everyday.. You cannot pour water from a jug or tea from a teapot; you cannot even do anything with a liquid of any kind, without setting into action the forces to which I am about to direct your attention."

Thus, with the attention of the audience snared, he went on with a series of lectures to captivate, entertain and stir the minds of all in attendance. Oh, how I wish I could have been there. C.V. was my kind of bubbler, through and through.

Please, do yourself a favor and get a copy of SOAP BUBBLES Their Colors and the Forces Which Mold Them. There is more food for thought, bubble-wise, in this one volume than in any other book I know of. It's entirely "readable". Beyond that, his conversational style and way with words will have the whole scene playing out in your head. The excellent diagrams help too. K.M.J.

What follows are bits about the author and his influence, written by others. Every bubbler's good friend Sterling Johnson wrote a brief review of this book for Amazon.com (where you can still find the book for sale). He gave it full stars, and titled his review 100 Years Old and Still the Best; "Boys book is about 100 years old and is flat out the best first book on bubbles. It takes you through a lot of interesting experiments that Boys did into areas that are very remote from soap and bubbles. Full of "oh, wows", it is a book that I reread about once a year (I do bubbles professionally, and every rereading contains new insights for me)."

Book Description from the copy of the book you are most likely to find:
Consists of dozens of experiments, explanations of the principles they demonstrate, and detailed discussions of the color and thickness of soap bubbles. Shows how liquid films, surface tension, and related phenomena react to heat, motion, music, more. Unabridged republication of the revised (1911) edition. Introduction. Illustrated throughout.

The book ends with a detailed description of the materials used in the experiments. Included is a recipe for a soap bubble solution (though commercial bubble solutions can be used) which is enhanced by the addition of glycerine. The formula consists of a 2.5% solution of sodium oleate (or home made soap from lye and olive oil) in pure water (distilled preferred or deionized or rain water), dissolved by allowing to stand 5 days. A one-third volume of pure glycerine is added and mixed thoroughly. An oily upper layer forms which is removed (as in a gravy separator) retaining the clear lower layer. Add a few drops of stronger ammonia. If stored in a well stoppered bottle and opened infrequently, the solution is stable for up to two years.

Reviewer: Mark S. Snow (London, UK)
This book serves as an excellent primer to the topic of soap bubbles and films. Using simple experiments the author establishes a practical basis for why surface tension and energy minimization exist, and why they are such a prolific and enigmatic force. Tailored for those without much background in the subject, the beginning of the book is nearly devoid of any serious numbers and the end of the book contains only simple equations, but the underpinnings of a more complex understanding of the bubbles is created by the end of the book. Ideas developed in lucid and concise experiments allow the observant reader to formulate their own practical understanding of soap bubbles, providing a much needed foundation for more serious studies in this field. The experiments are simple and easy, requiring nothing more than some soap, straws, and bits of rubber, yet the ideas they impart are both profound and fundamental to the science of fluids.

In short, this book is the first that should be read by anyone new to fluids and soap films, but contains no serious theoretical jargon.

Click here to link to the UK mathematical site, where this biography of Boys originated.

Sir Charles Vernon Boys
Born: 15 March 1855 in Wing, Rutland, England
Died: 30 March 1944 in St Mary Bourne, Andover, Hampshire, England

Charles Boys' parents were Caroline Goodrich Dobbie and the Rev Charles Boys who was the vicar at Wing. Charles was one of a large family, being his parents' eighth child, and he was brought up in the vicarage at Wing. He was educated at Marlborough, and in the dedication of his book on Soap bubbles he expressed his gratitude to Mr G F Rodwell, the first science master appointed at that school. From there Boys went to the Royal School of Mines where he was taught physics by Frederick Guthrie. He graduated in mining and metallurgy. The school had no mathematics department so Boys learnt mathematics from books including Todhunter's Integral Calculus. He always claimed, perhaps because of this lack of mathematical education, that he was not a mathematician. Others, including his pupils, certainly did not agree with this as he showed a wide knowledge of geometrical methods.

Boys is famed as a physicist and inventor of instruments. While still at the Royal School of Mines he invented an integraph, a machine for drawing the antiderivative of a function. He published a description of this instrument in the Philosophical Magazine in 1881. After graduating in mining it was natural for Boys to seek employment at a colliery, which he did. After a short time in this employment, Guthrie offered him employment as a demonstrator in physics. He accepted this post and began his academic career.

It was his invention of a fused quartz fibre suspension that brought him great fame, and his applications of quartz fibres are described in [3] in the following way:-

One application he made of [quartz fibres] was to the suspension of the moving system of his radiomicrometer for the measurement of radiant heat, an instrument so sensitive that, aided by a reflecting telescope to bring the heat to a focus, it could detect the differences in radiation from different parts of the moon's disc and would respond to the heat of a candle at a distance of more than a mile ... He also made use of quartz fibres in his repetition of Cavendish's famous experiment for the determination of the gravitational constant.

It was by using a quartz fibre suspension in Cavendish type experiments that Boys was able to improve the value obtained for the gravitational constant. He used quartz fibres to suspend a short (less than one inch long) beam with spheres at each end. He was then able to use attracting masses much larger in proportion than Cavendish had been able to use, thus enabling him to make accurate measurements of the small forces involved. His work on gravitation is certainly his most important contribution and shows the precision which he could achieve in his experiments. However there were many problems which he had to overcome, such as the vibrations in the earth caused by traffic. To avoid these problems he conducted his experiments in Oxford, rather than London, but he still had to make his measurements at times when no shunting was going on in the railway yards more than a mile from his laboratory. His remarkably accurate results were published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1895.

Another subject to which he devoted a great deal of attention was the photography of lightning flashes and of rapidly moving objects, such as bullets, and soap films provided him with a study in which his powers of delicate manipulation found full scope, his book on "Soap bubbles, their colours, and the forces which mould them" being a classic in its way.

In 1888 Boys was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The following year he became assistant professor at the Royal College of Science, South Kensington, a post he held until 1897. While holding this post he supplemented his income examining for the University of London. He married Marion Amelia Pollock in 1892, and we comment below about how this marriage ended in divorce. They had one daughter and one son.

In 1887 Boys took up an applied science post of Metropolitan Gas Referee and he held this post until the Referees were abolished in 1939. Even then, his services were retained in an advisory capacity until 1943. It was in this role that he worked for many years to improve the instruments used to measure the calorific value of gas. This enabled gas to be priced in terms of its calorific value rather than in terms of its volume.

His (alleged) ill-treatment of his wife led to her having an affair with Forsyth and a scandal at Cambridge resulted. Boys divorced his wife in 1910 after 18 years of marriage. From 1913 onwards he lived in rooms in Westminster, going every weekend to the country where he had a workshop.

After 1939 he retired permanently to his country house where he became interested in growing weeds. He published Weeds, weeds, weeds in 1937.

Boys received many honours in addition to election to the fellowship of the Royal Society which we mentioned above. He received the Royal Medal from the Royal Society in 1896 and from the same Society he received its Rumford Medal in 1924. He was also awarded the Duddell Medal of the Physical Society in 1925, and the Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia in 1939. He was elected to the New York Academy of Sciences and the Physical Society of Moscow. He was knighted in 1935.

Other honours included election to the presidency of the Röntgen Society in 1906-07, of the Mathematics and Physics Section of the British Association in 1903, and of the Physical Society in 1916-17. The University of Edinburgh awarded Boys an honorary degree in 1932.

SOAP BUBBLES by John H. Lienhard

(Click the image above to hear the following report from Engines of Our Ingenuity, an excellent program which promotes science education. Thanks to John Lienhard, The University of Houston and KUHF-FM.)

Today, we blow bubbles. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

If you go to Amazon.com and type in the title Soap Bubbles, you'll be surprised. I just did, and I got eighteen hits. That's because soap bubbles are being used to teach all kinds of things about the science of applied mechanics.

One of these books has been in print for a century. It is Soap Bubbles and the Forces which Mould Them, published in 1902 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It's based on three lectures given by Victorian science-writer Charles Vernon Boys.

And this book comes out of something much older. C. V. Boys' lectures were part of a series given for children at the London Institution. They were carrying on a London tradition begun by gentle Michael Faraday, the father of modern electrical science, in 1826. Faraday immersed himself deeply in public science-lectures for children.

Once you turn the pages in Boys' book, you see that it's about more than just soap bubbles. He treats everything connected with surface tension and surface forces in liquids. His examples are a marvel. He explains the distillation process behind wine tears -- that pattern you see when fortified spirits climb up the side of a glass and fall back down, making it appear that the cup is weeping. Boys pulls up an exhortation against strong drink from the Book of Proverbs, which, he believes, describes wine tears. "Look not thou upon the wine when ... it moveth itself aright."

He shows how to make what I used to call a water bomb when I was a kid -- flimsy paper folded into a small origami box that you can fill with water and throw at one another on a hot summer's day. He shows how capillary action either raises or lowers the liquid level in a capillary tube, depending on the contact angle. He shows how to shape soap bubbles into every form imaginable.

I like the one where he floats a sieve in a tub of water. With the right surface characteristics of the sieve wire and the mesh size, surface tension can keep water from entering the holes. Then he quotes from one of Edward Lear's Nonsense Songs:

They went to sea in a sieve, they did,
In a sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a sieve they went to sea.

See, Boys says--they really could've done it!

There seems no end. Boys speaks of singing water jets, beaded water jets, and beaded spider webs. He calls all of nature into a microcosmic display of surprise and beauty. He makes water leap and dance. Boys himself did everything -- he worked in a coal mine, he served as president of the Physical Society of London.

We fret about education today -- how to use TV and the Internet. Then we read this nineteenth- century teacher, buoyed by the joy of the magic in it all, reminding us that, whatever we do for students, it must well up out of our own fervor, intelligence, and imagination.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.

February 25, 2003: Space station science officer Don Pettit always looks forward to Saturday mornings.

Like the other members of the International Space Station's 3-person crew, he's busy most of the week doing research and building the ISS, where he's been living for the past three months. "Saturday is when we have a bit of free time," Pettit says. Some of the crew read books, play musical instruments or watch movies. "I prefer to do 'Saturday Morning Science'--fun experiments of my own design."

Right: International Space Station science officer Don Pettit. Don is a member of ISS Expedition 6. He's been in space since Nov. 2002.

A few Saturdays ago, he had his heart set on bubbles. "We have a copy of C. V. Boys' book Soap Bubbles here on the ISS. It was published in 1911 and it's still a wonderful treatise on thin films. Every space station should have a copy," he laughs. "I wanted to see what thin films and bubbles might do in zero-g and felt it was a topic ripe for discovery."

He goes on to experiment with bubbles in space.... Click on the picture of Don above to learn more.

Soap Bubbles and Monkeys.

Prof. C V Boys, F R. S , has been trying the effect of soap bubbles on the orangoutangs, chimpanzees and monkey at the London Zoo. When the first bubble soared into the cage where an orangoutang was confined an inquisitive amazement could be seen in its attitude. But as soon as it noticed that these flying bombs exploded without any disaster it gained courage.

Carefully, nervously, when a bubble entered it stretched its hand nearer and nearer, and suddenly caught it. Then, tremendously pleased at the novel game, it put it's muzzle through the bars, and the professor blew a bubble that it settled on its nose. Thereupon it's tongue was curled up and the bubble was licked in with a real smacking of the lips.

Two of the chimpanzees, meanwhile, who were watching the exhibition, huddled in terror, but intensely curious in a corner of the cage. One Chimpanzee displayed just the same eagerness as the orangoutang. When the lower tribes of monkeys were tested the response to science was less gratifying. They would not take any particular notice, but continued their usual antics after some cursory glances.

Finally, Art Inspired by CV Boys' work.
Artist: Luke Jerram.

Art Inspired by CV Boys' work, Luke Jerram

Boys would have seriously enjoyed the science demonstrations in this movie. In fact, he thought many of them up in the first place. Read his book if you would like to learn more...

Click here to see some typical demonstrations on video.