World's Largest Jello Pool- Can you swim in Jello? — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00This is the world's first ever actual pool of Jello.
2. 0:05And while it may look simple, it's actually a very difficult engineering challenge to pull off.
3. 0:10As proof, If you Google Jello pool, you will either find bad CGI, or a handful of videos of
4. 0:14people who tried to do this, but it really didn't work out.
5. 0:17So today we're gonna answer possibly the longest standing question from my childhood.
6. 0:21What would it be like to actually belly flop in a pool of Jello?
7. 0:25But before we do that, I want to talk about what we actually had to go through for the past six
8. 0:29months to pull this off.
9. 0:30The idea of a Jello pool has been on my bucket list for over four years.
10. 0:34In fact, when Kevin from The Backyard Scientist and I made the 25 million Orbeez Pool, our first
11. 0:40idea was to do a pool of jello, but it's really hard because if you've ever made Jello, you might
12. 0:45recall, you first have to boil water, then mix in the powder and then you have to refrigerate it for
13. 0:50it to actually get firm.
14. 0:51And that's easy enough to do for a small dish.
15. 0:54But how do you boil and then refrigerate an entire pool?
16. 0:57This seemed like a very worthy engineering challenge.
17. 1:00So last year at Thanksgiving, my brother and I came up with the plan and then in the middle of
18. 1:04winter, we started digging a hole in his backyard.
19. 1:07Then over the course of two months, we set up a bunch of small scale experiments because we needed
20. 1:11to answer questions,
21. 1:11like how much gelatin powder does it actually take to get to the ideal firmness and how hot and then
22. 1:17cold does the mixture actually need to get for the Jello chemical reaction to take place?
23. 1:21So it will actually get firm.
24. 1:23From our experiments, we learned the Jello always got firm as long as the mixture got hotter than 160°F.
25. 1:29So we decided we could scale this up by using six 55 gallon drums with a custom propane burner
26. 1:34underneath and a spigot we welded to the sides, but more on that later.
27. 1:38So now we knew how we were going to heat it up.
28. 1:40But how do you refrigerate an entire pool?
29. 1:42For that we teamed up with Mother Nature and just picked the perfect location and time of year.
30. 1:47We installed a thermometer and starting in January, we tracked the temperature in his
31. 1:51backyard every night.
32. 1:52We needed refrigerator temperatures at night but not freezer temperatures because that would freeze.
33. 1:57The Jello and our experiments showed that totally ruins it. And so if you're looking at our data
34. 2:02plus historical temperature plots, we knew we had about a three week sweet spot window towards the
35. 2:07end of April to pull this off.
36. 2:08Our goal was to have a jello pool party in his backyard that would make even Phineas and Ferb jealous.
37. 2:13So the plan was to start seven days before the party and fill the pool with an average of 10
38. 2:18barrels every day.
39. 2:19That would give each layer a chance to get exposed to the cold night air to more efficiently get rid
40. 2:24of the heat.
41. 2:24And so with that, first thing Saturday, a full week before the party, we got to work.
42. 2:35We didn't want to waste actual food.
43. 2:37So this is just water and gelatin powder and food coloring, but there's no sugar.
44. 3:13We intentionally placed our barrels much higher than the pool.
45. 3:15So when we were ready, we could use the potential energy to move the Jello from the barrels to the pool.
46. 3:22We had to tackle about 1000 other issues that came up that I won't bore you with.
47. 3:26But day by day and layer by layer, the pool began to fill up because the jelly went in with so much
48. 3:32heat energy we needed to remove before it could get firm.
49. 3:35In addition to using the cold night air.
50. 3:37My brother's neighbor, Nick happened to have a spare swamp cooler in his shop.
51. 3:41So we kept that running over the top of the pool pretty much the whole week.
52. 3:44This gave us convection cooling.
53. 3:46It's the equivalent of rolling down a car window for pool or like when you blow on the top of a hot
54. 3:51cup of soup, this constantly replaces the boundary layer of air right at the surface with fresh cold
55. 3:56air that will suck out the heat more efficiently.
56. 3:58And so as we put in the final batch Friday night with ominous weather threatening to ruin the whole effort.
57. 4:03At this point, we had done all we could.
58. 4:05We were exhausted after a week and I wasn't feeling super confident because my specialty is
59. 4:10more with mechanical things.
60. 4:11And this project was more about chemistry and thermodynamics.
61. 4:14And I didn't want that lame Jellybob stuff people try and pass off as Jello.
62. 4:18And so even if it didn't last long in the sun, I wanted to at least have the experience of seeing
63. 4:23even a single belly flop on a smooth pool of actual jello.
64. 4:26If this is gonna be a total failure, it wouldn't be from lack of effort.
65. 4:30And so we woke up Saturday morning with a forecast for a warm sunny day and we pulled off the tarp to
66. 4:36find a pool filled with actual freaking jello.
67. 4:45By this point.
68. 4:46Word in the neighborhood had definitely spread around as to what we were up to.
69. 4:50And my brother asked if some of their friend's kids could have first dibs.
70. 4:54And so with that I'm happy to report this is what it looks like to belly flop in a pool of Jello.
71. 5:18- Not yet.
72. 5:20Careful
73. 6:56- When I first got in myself, it was closer to the middle of the day.
74. 6:59And one of the things we discovered was that direct sunlight over time had the effect of
75. 7:04undoing some of the solidness of the lower layers.
76. 7:10- When you go in It just fills your nose and ears.
77. 7:15It's a very surreal feeling of just being like, it's kind of hard to move, but it's just slimy and slippery.
78. 7:23It actually feels really cool.
79. 7:25We have some pool toys hidden underneath.
80. 7:31Got it.
81. 7:33Wow.
82. 7:34It's unlike anything.
83. 7:35It's, I mean, it's like swimming in snot if that makes any sense, but like a good snot.
84. 7:40- To keep it solid for even longer,
85. 7:42if we were to do it again, we might put in a heat exchanger pipe system beneath the surface.
86. 7:46Sort of like how they freeze indoor ice skating rinks and maybe use a little sugar.
87. 7:51That's disgusting.
88. 7:52Now, at this point, you might be thinking, why would anyone spend the effort of six months of
89. 7:56planning and then a solid week of backbreaking effort just to make a stupid pool of Jello?
90. 8:01And to that, I say, why do people go through the effort of climbing Mount Everest?
91. 8:05Why did Neil Armstrong go through the effort of stepping on the moon?
92. 8:10And why did Pam and Jim go through the effort of convincing Dwight that Jim had always been Asian.
93. 8:15This is Jim.
94. 8:17Sometimes you don't do a thing because you should.
95. 8:19But simply to prove that you can.
96. 8:22Now that my curiosity was fully satiated,
97. 8:24and in my ongoing quest to be the favorite uncle, I told my nephews they can invite some of their
98. 8:28friends over and my brother's family set up a neighborhood barbecue.
99. 8:31And at this point after a lot of hours of belly flops and bowling balls and direct sunlight, the
100. 8:36jello was pretty broken down, but that didn't stop us from setting up a jello pool Slip 'n' Slide.
101. 8:55And I love their sense of adventure, but it was a bit of an Uncle fail moment because apparently
102. 9:00none of them have ever used a Slip 'n' Slide.
103. 9:45We didn't actually put any sugar in here.
104. 9:47So it's kind of disgusting.
105. 9:48So we've got some real...