How to Blow Up a Balloon With Baking Soda & Vinegar

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Colin Kilbane and I'm going to show you how to blow up a balloon with baking soda and vinegar. We have our balloon. We have a wide mouth, this is called a powder funnel but you can use another funnel and I'm going to stretch the balloon over the funnel. Now we have our baking soda. I'm going to put a couple scoops of baking soda in my balloon. Take off the balloon. I'm going to pour my vinegar, I'm using a flask today, but you can use a pop bottle or one of those little mini pop bottles is wonderful for this. An old water bottle is just as good, anything with a lip that will hold the balloon on top. So I'm going to put the vinegar in this. About 100 milliliters of vinegar, you don't have to be exact. Now here's a trick, take your balloon, stretches out, put it over the top and now I'm going to flip up the balloon and dump the baking soda into the vinegar. That's going to produce carbon dioxide gas which will blow up the balloon. Here we go. Notice I'm holding the balloon on, you don't want it to fly off at this point. There we go, getting a little chemical reaction there. Now if you're holding this it will feel cold, this is an endothermic reaction. Still going. Now to remove the balloon, I'm going to twist it, note that this is full of carbon dioxide gas now so it's heavier than air so if we were to drop it, it sinks. It's actually carbon dioxide is denser than air and that's how to blow up a balloon with baking soda and vinegar."