Joey Green's Mad Scientist

Steel Wool Sparkler

What You Need

Steel wool pad
9 volt battery
Baking pan

What to Do
With adult supervision, pull the steel wool pad apart until it is the size of a tennis ball. Place the steel wool pad in the baking pan. Touch the ends of the battery to the steel wool.

What Happens
The sparks from the battery cause the steel wool to catch on fire, and the iron filings from the steel wool sparkle like a Fourth of July sparkler.

Why It Works
The threads of iron in the steel wool, surrounded by more oxygen than in a solid block of iron, combust easily.

Bizarre Facts

In 1917, Edwin Cox, a struggling door-to-door aluminum cookware salesman in San Francisco, developed in his kitchen a steel wool scouring pad caked with dried soap as a gift to housewives to get himself invited inside their homes to demonstrate his wares and boost sales. A few months later, demand for the soap-encrusted pads snowballed, and Cox quit the aluminum cookware business and went to work for himself.
Mrs. Edwin Cox, the inventors wife, named the soap pads S.O.S., for Save Our Saucepans, convinced that she had cleverly adapted the Morse code international distress signal for Save Our Ships. In fact, the distress signal SOS doesn't stand for anything. It's simply a combination of three letters represented by three identical marks (the S is three dots, the O is three dashes). The period after the last S was deleted from the brand name to obtain a trademark for what would otherwise be an international distress symbol.
Brillo is a derogatory name for a person with tight curly hair.

Be Prepared
The Boy Scout manual now instructs all Boy Scouts to start a fire with a steel wool pad and a 9-volt battery rather than the traditional method of starting a fire with flint and steel.

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