Joey Green's Mad Scientist

Seesawing Candle

What You Need

Knife
Candle
Needle
Wax paper
Two drinking glasses
Matches

What to Do
With adult supervision, carve away the tallow or wax at the bottom end of the candle to expose the wick. Carefully push the needle through the center of the candle.
Place a piece of wax paper on the tabletop, set the drinking glasses on the wax paper, and rest the needle across the rims of each glass so the candle is between the glasses.
Light both ends of the candle, and give one end a slight push so the candle teeters like a seesaw.

What Happens
The candle starts rocking like a seesaw and continues as long as both ends stay lit.

Why It Works
As Sir Isaac Newton's third law states, "For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction." When the tallow or wax drips off each end of the candle, it delivers a slight upward recoil.

Bizarre Facts

During Roman times, starving soldiers ate their candle rations, which were made from tallow—a colorless, tasteless extract of animal or vegetable fat.
British lighthouse keepers, isolated for months, often ate their tallow candles.
The charred end of the wick of a tallow candle had to be "snuffed"—snipped off without extinguishing the flame—every half hour, otherwise the candle provided only a fraction of its potential light and the low-burning flame burned only 5 percent of the tallow, melting the remaining tallow.
Because snuffing a tallow candle was difficult to do without extinguishing the flame, the word snuff came to mean "extinguish."
Beeswax oozes from small pores in the abdomen of a worker bee and forms tiny white flakes on the outside of its abdomen. Using its legs, the bee picks off these flakes and moves them to its jaws. The bee then chews the wax to the proper consistency to build the honeycomb.
Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest used dried candlefish, a saltwater fish about eight inches long, as candles.
Spermaceti, a waxy material obtained from the enormous head of the sperm whale (making up a third of its body), was once used to make candles.
The world's largest candle on record, displayed at the 1897 Stockholm Exhibition, was eighty feet high and 8-1/2 feet in diameter.
The world's largest needle, measuring 6 feet 1 inch long, used for stitching on mattress buttons lengthwise, can be visited at the National Needle Museum in Forge Mill, Great Britain.

Burn, Baby, Burn!
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
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