It took Tim Kehoe 14 years to develop Zubbles. Along the way he has had many failed experiments involving Jell-o and ink and has spent many thousands of dollars in chemistry and dye research.
They have yet to hit the market.
The following is an excerpt from an interview conduced by The Believer in the fall of 2006.
"Ten years into it, we came up with a washable bubble formula. We thought, This is it. We decided to run a focus group test, so we brought out twenty-four of my nieces and nephews and my kids. I went down to the local magic shop and rented one of these huge theatre quality bubble machines. They're great big bubble machines that are controlled by computers.
I remember that morning I was mixing them - I was mixing them in my garage, all this stuff had always been done in my kitchen, and now we were trying to make big batches of it - so I'm out in my garage and a whole bunch of chemicals splash up in my face and I end up throwing up and I stain my eyes blue and my skin was all blue. I wish I had taken a picture.
So we dumped this stuff into these bubble machines and we fired it up and one of the mothers starts crying. She says it's the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen; all these bubbles are filling the air like little balloons going up into the sky. The kids are standing in front of the bubble machine, and even though it's washable - it'd wash off your skin - there was a bunch of stuff it wouldn't wash off of. It wouldn't wash off concrete; it wasn't coming off of leather shoes. The mothers were just horrified so we realized we couldn't go to market with the product. . .
Along the way I invented all kinds of bubbles and lost a lot of them because I didn't know what I did. I blew ten thousand bubbles over the years; I'd blow them in the bathtub to see if they were colored. One day I blew these bubbles and they bounced, like super-balls, in the bathtub. I could never re-create them. I never took notes. I'm really bad at that. I was just, a little more of this, a little more of that. They were bouncing, but I couldn't repeat it."
Other inventions Tim has invented include the Flatball, which is basically a frisbee that pops into a ball, and the Aquaradio, a device that allows children to talk underwater. He has also invented sand that when heated would harden (so kids could make sand sculptures) and footballs that instead of being caught would bite onto you (called "Bitin' Balls"). He has also developed a glow-in-the-dark bubble that he is planning on releasing in a few years, after an interfering patent expires.
Ever since I read about Tim and his many marvelous inventions I've been wanting to write a play about him. . .
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