"Aerosol cans work through the magic of something very near and dear to your heart, Lester... compressed gas."

"Tell me, oh, Beak-man o' science. Can we make compressed gas sprayers, too?"

"We aerosol can and we aerosol will!"

• Plastic soda bottle
• Cork
• Water
• Plastic eye dropper
• Long straw
• Chewed up chewing gum
• Power drill
• Grown-up!

1. Start chewing your chewing gum.
2. Have your grown-up drill a hole in the cork big enough for the straw and the eye dropper to fit in snugly.
3. Remove the squeezy bulb part from your eye dropper.
4. Fill your soda bottle about a quarter of the way up with water.
5. Put the straw halfway up into the bottom of the cork.
6. Stick the eye dropper into the top of the cork.
7. Wrap gum around the straw and the eye dropper to make a tight seal between them and the hole in your cork.
8. Put the straw end into the bottle and push the cork in firmly so the eye dropper end sticks up out of the bottle. The bottom end of the straw must extend into the water about one inch.
9. Put your mouth around the dropper (NOT around the cork), and blow really hard. Then pull your mouth away quickly.
10. Water will shoot out of the bottle like a fountain!

"Inside every aerosol can is the active ingredient -- the stuff you buy the can for. In this case, it's the water inside our soda bottle. An aerosol can also contains a compressed gas called a propellant which propels, or shoots, the active ingredient out of the can. The gas in our soda bottle is regular old air. We compress it by blowing more air into the bottle. This compressed air pushes outward on the bottle and also down on the water. When we push on the aerosol can button, or activator, we open the door to the can. All we have to do is take our mouth off the dropper and the compressed air propels the ingredients up the dip tube (our straw) and out of the can! Bada-bing, bada-bay, bada aerosol spray!

The fact that gases are highly compressible and highly elastic (they "bounce back" when the pressure is reduced) makes them very useful in storing energy and releasing it when needed -- kind of like a spring. In our experiment the energy we used to compress the air in the bottle was then used to propel the water out of the bottle. Because of their elasticity, gases are not only useful in aerosol cans but also in shock absorbers, tires, air mattresses, and pump-up garden sprayers.

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