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Secret Message Egg

What You Need

Small bowl
Measuring cup
Alum
White vinegar
Q-tips Cotton Swabs
Hard-boiled egg

What to Do
In the bowl, dissolve one part alum in one part vinegar. Mix well. Use the Q-tips Cotton Swab to write or draw something on the eggshell using the alum and vinegar solution as ink. Let dry. Remove the eggshell from the egg.

What Happens
The alum-and-vinegar solution dries invisible, but when the eggshell is removed, the writing is visible on the egg's surface (and the egg is still edible).

Why It Works
The vinegar (acetic acid) dissolves the calcium carbonate in the eggshell, allowing the alum to permeate the shell and discolor the egg white.

Bizarre Facts

In parts of Germany during the 1880s, Easter eggs etched with the recipient's name and birth date were accepted in courts of law as birth certificates.
In the 1880s, Russian czar Alexander III commissioned goldsmith Peter Carl Faberge to craft Easter eggs for his wife, czarina Maria Feodorovna. The Soviet government took over Faberge's business after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Forty-three of the original fifty-three eggs known to have been made by Faberge are in museums and private collections and are collectively valued at over $4 million.
In St. Ives, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, "You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs," inspired by the French proverb, "On ne fait pas d'omelette sans casser des 'ufs."
In Pudd'nhead Wilson, Mark Twain wrote: "Put all your eggs in one basket and—watch that basket."
On September 6, 1981, in Siilinjorvi, Finland, Risto Arntikainen threw a fresh hen's egg 317 feet 10 inches to Jyrki Korhonen, without breaking it.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, as of 1985 there were 8,295,760,000 chickens on the planet. That's 1.6 chickens for every person in the world.
In 1990, British jeweler Paul Kutchinsky unveiled a two-foot-tall jeweled egg made from thirty-seven pounds of gold and stuffed with twenty thousand pink diamonds, now on display in London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
The Hen That Laid the Golden Egg
In 1979, the College of Agriculture at the University of Missouri recorded a hen that laid 371 eggs in 364 days.
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