I just went on line and looked on YouTube for some video on it but couldn't find any good ones, though there are a few posted there, this is one of those times you have too be there. Again they really do spark and it's funny to watch the people biting them.
I think I learned this while on the bus to or from a class trip in high school, but as I'm trying to remember right now, I'm having a brain fart! I think it was my friend Barbara S., pretty sure, want to give credit where credit is due, but she told me, and of course I made her prove it...and she did...and then the two of us were then chomping down really hard and fast on Wint-O-Green Life Savers, like angry little rapid animals, while tons of girls surrounded us to keep it dark and watch the spark come out of our mouths! After proving it to that circle of girls, surrounded by the next group, we showed them again. I suggest you don't do it outside during the day, where you have to provide the dark and eat tons of them to prove it to a bus load of people like we did. Go in the bathroom with the lights out really close to a mirror, you'll see the sparks!
"Why do Wint-O-Green Life Savers spark in the dark?" 03 November 2000. HowStuffWorks.com.
Actually, all hard sugar-based candies emit some degree of light when you bite them, but most of the time, that light is very faint. This effect is called triboluminescence, which is similar to the electrical charge build-up that produces lightning, only much less grand. Triboluminescence is the emission of light resulting from something being smashed or torn. When you rip a piece of tape off the roll, it will produce a slight glow for the same reason.
Triboluminescence occurs when molecules, in this case crystalline sugars, are crushed, forcing some electrons out of their atomic fields. These free electrons bump into nitrogen molecules in the air. When they collide, the electrons impart energy to the nitrogen molecules, causing them to vibrate. In this excited state, and in order to get rid of the excess energy, these nitrogen molecules emit light -- mostly ultraviolet (nonvisible) light, but they do emit a small amount of visible light as well. This is why all hard, sugary candies will produce a faint glow when cracked.
But when you bite into a Wint-O-Green Life Saver, a much greater amount of visible light can be seen.
This brighter light is produced by the wintergreen flavoring. Methyl salicylate, or oil of wintergreen, is fluorescent, meaning it absorbs light of a shorter wavelength and then emits it as light of a longer wavelength. Ultraviolet light has a shorter wavelength than visible light. So when a Wint-O-Green Life Saver is crushed between your teeth, the methyl salicylate molecules absorb the ultraviolet, shorter wavelength light produced by the excited nitrogen, and re-emit it as light of the visible spectrum, specifically as blue light -- thus the blue sparks that jump out of your mouth when you crunch on a Wint-O-Green Life Saver.
Here are some interesting links:
How Light Works
How does glow-in-the-dark stuff work?
What is the difference between a fluorescent light and a neon light?
How Lightning Works
How Food Works
These are some Life Saver wrappers I have made. Really easy. I haven't ever used a picture, I'll have to try that, it would just be a small area for the picture so you could see it when looking straight on the rounded Life Saver. These were from years ago and I would print them on different paper than I did then, again using the same I use for the chocolate bar wrappers, it's called brochure paper, kind of glossy but not too much and then wrap around the Life Saver package and use a glue stick. Remember to make the wrapper a little bigger with nothing on it so you can paste over that part to keep it together.
These were for my brother Bob's firehouse Christmas Party 2001.
These for my friend Terence's 21st birthday party, April 2002.
And these for my friend Tommy's retirement party in April, 2002.
2 comments:
Do you remember those Lifesave books you used to be able to buy? They had like 5-6 rolls of Lifesavers (or 8, something like that). It was one of my mother's favorite stand-by gifts to have on hand for little things when you needed a quick gift to grab to give to someone.
I used to HATE them because she made us give them so often, but now I feel some sort of nostalgia about them! Each roll of Lifesavers was different so you got to sample a lot of the flavors. They were kinda fun, in retrospect.
Yes my Jules! I remember those little books! And how funny it is, we hate certain things growing up and then they just become part of us, I understand your feelings of nostalgia.
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