July 1, 1985, The New Yorker...

   "One night recently, we got to watch forty-two-year-old David Stein create gigantic bubbles, with diameters of up to eight feet, using ordinary dish-washing soap and a hand-operated device he's invented and christened a Bubble Thing. The bubbles---he also calls them "flying Henry Moores," because they come out in unpredictably shaped blobs, resembling anything from whales to tractor tires---rose on the amiable updrafts of his West End Avenue launching site, then tended to drift, laterally, toward a nearby apartment building, where Mr. Stein, who asked us to call him David, lives, and where, incidentally, some early Bubble Thing prototypes were tested. ("I always put out a sheet in the hallway to catch the drips," he assured us.) Eventually, after a life span varying from a few seconds to well over a minute, each bubble burst. "Bubbles seem to implode," David told us as he continued to create new air sculptures. "They can pop inches from a wall without wetting it," he added, and that observation helped to keep us from flinching as much as we might have when, later, a colossal low-flying ottoman, hypnotizing us with its frantic surface colors, borrowed from an adjacent traffic light, burst immediately before our eyes..... David was raised on a cattle ranch in Montana, just north of Yellowstone Park. When he isn't involved in the development of the Bubble Thing, he is an architect. He recently designed a dining garden next to the Loeb Boathouse, in Central Park, and was one of the winners of the Times Tower design competition sponsored by the Municipal Art Society...." --by Bill Franzen

Well, Of Course Bubbles Had Existed Before...

   In applying for a patent, my first task was to research the “prior art” on giant bubbles.  I ran across a news report of a three or four foot sphere blown from a hoop at a festival. I also read that Eiffel Plasterer, one of the earliest bubble performers, could hoop a bubble about that size. And the San Francisco Exploratorium (a pioneering science museum) was displaying a very large bubble hoop, which when raised by pulley from a pond of solution could form soap film curtains a story high or so. Another bubbleman, Felix Cartagena, had built an “Ephemeral Sculpture Machine” of wood that operated something like a guillotine. He used a pulley to raise a frame from a trough of solution, so the breeze, if any, could inflate the soap film. And Bernie Zubrowski, at the Boston Children’s Museum, was making bubble toy frames of two soda straws with string threaded through.
    But hoops require dipping pools, and frames require troughs. As size increases, these equipments become heavy, unwieldy, expensive, and as a practical matter unmarket-able. My simple loop with its bucket for dipping had a decided advantage over these heavy methods. It was light, portable outdoors, and so easy and inexpensive that anyone could enjoy it. And most people already owned a bucket.
    But the prior art most similar to mine was a toy by Arthur Fulton. Like me, Fulton showed a flexible loop and an extended handle. But the similarity ended there. Fulton’s one-handed device lacked any means of control. He couldn’t control the opening and closing of the loop. Whereas my two-handed invention did it beautifully.
    To make sure of my argument, I spent some time locating Arthur. I finally found him running an Indian artifacts shop in Iowa, dependent on his sister’s telephone across the road. He seemed a genial old guy and was astounded when I said I had eight-foot spheres sailing over the roofs. He’d never heard of such a thing. He’d invented his toy many years back while running a chicken cage factory in Shrevesport. He said his toy didn’t work very well, and he’d only filed patent because his partner insisted, and they’d never tried to market it.

1984

It Started With
The Baby...

One-Stick, Two-Stick, Humidity, Etc...

    One might fairly say that my U. S. Patent 4,654,017-- “Apparatus For Forming and Controlling Large Volume Bubbles”-- is the founding document of the giant bubble sport. Filed in 1985, issued in 1987, It disclosed for the first time (along with half a dozen other bubble loop configurations) the two most widely used today...

Figure 1 (top right) of the patent shows the original one-stick Bubble Thing: a loop of jack chain suspended from a dowel and from a sliding washer used to open and close the loop. This prototype has been refined over time to a more elongated fabric design (above), the basic elements and method of control remaining unchanged.

   Figure 28 (right)-- and related patent text specifying rods as handles --was the first disclosure of today’s two-stick design, sometimes called the “tri-string.” This model was publicized world-wide in 1997 by Alan McKay of New Zealand in connection with his world record. Alan, who cites Bubble Thing as a source, built an enormous loop supported on 12-foot poles. Smaller two-stick models began appearing in the United States several years later.

    Another document (below right) that shaped the giant bubble sport was my pink sheet of instructions copyrighted 1986. This sheet, still partially useful, is the original source, now paraphrased throughout the toy trade and bubble art community, of our common knowledge about humidity, wind, safety, updrafts, water bouncers, and so on.

Before the giant bubbles of 1984, humidity didn’t matter, or wind, or the rest... I worked it all out for the first time in my back yard. Humidity especially was a puzzle, not at all obvious. I thought the on-again off-again performance might be due to temperature, barometric pressure, pollen or salt or pollution in the air, or iron or zinc leaching in my (galvanized) bucket, or variation in the soap or water...

If Imitation Is Highest Praise...

    Copycats are an unpleasant fact of life in the toy trade, and while my patent was still pending they descended. Fortunately the web has made them easier to find. In a Yahoo chat group I recently found one Kalvin Klundt rumoring that I had borrowed my invention from Arthur Fulton. This was untrue, and fighting words to an inventor. Quite a fracas ensued, but I managed to show that his 1990 patent copied almost verbatim the key paragraphs of mine issued in 1987. (See below.) The ideas he praised so highly are the essence of my invention and of the giant bubble sport. They are as true today as ever and perhaps worth reading twice...