Egg in a Bottle

What You Need

• Water
• Teakettle
• Oven mitt
• Funnel
• Clean, empty salad dressing bottle
• Hard-boiled egg, peeled

What to Do
With adult supervision, boil water in the teakettle. Wearing the oven mitt and using the funnel, carefully fill the empty salad dressing bottle with the boiling water from the teakettle. Remove the funnel. Swirl the water around inside the bottle, then pour the water into the sink. Quickly place the egg over the mouth of the bottle.

What Happens
The egg is sucked into the bottle, making a very unusual sound. (To get the egg out of the bottle, hold the bottle upside down and blow into the bottle for thirty seconds. When you remove your mouth, the increased air pressure in the bottle forces the egg out of the bottle.)

Why It Works
The heat from the boiling water causes the air inside the bottle to expand, forcing some of it out. As the air begins to cool inside the bottle, it contracts, reducing the air pressure inside the bottle. The greater air pressure outside the bottle forces the egg into the bottle.

Bizarre Facts

• The tradition of exchanging colored eggs in the springtime predates Easter by several centuries.
• The ancient Egyptians buried eggs, a symbol of resurrection and birth, in their tombs.
• The ancient Greeks placed eggs atop graves. When the Greeks took over ancient Israel, many Jews adopted Hellenistic practices. To this day, Jews place rocks atop gravestones to signal that the grave has been visited and the loved one remembered (perhaps as a substitute for eggs).
• Legend holds that Simon of Cyrene, the egg merchant who helped carry Christ's crucifix to Calvary, returned to his farm to discover that all of his hens' eggs had turned to a rainbow of colors.
• Raw eggs harden when boiled in water because the water's intense heat causes the egg's protein strands to unravel, exposing their ends, which then bond together with other unraveled protein strands.
• Since the protein structure of egg white and egg yolk vary slightly, the egg white hardens at 176 degrees Fahrenheit, while the egg yolk hardens at 185 degrees Fahrenheit.
• According to The Guiness Book of Records, White Horse Scotch Whiskey makes the smallest bottles of liquor now sold in the world. The bottles are two inches high and contain 1.184 milliliters (less than one-eighth teaspoon).

Hoax in a Bottle
A note found in a bottle on the coast of Denmark in 1946, written on a page torn from the logbook of the German U-boat Naueclus, and dated one year earlier, claimed that Adolf Hitler did not die in the Berlin bunker but aboard the Naueclus, which sank on November 15, 1945, while sailing from Finland to Spain.

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