"Screaming jelly babies" is a chemistry demonstration which is practised in schools in the United Kingdom and Australia, and other countries where the sweets are commonly available. It is often used at open evenings to demonstrate the more light-hearted side of secondary school science. The experiment shows the amount of energy there is in a "jelly baby". Potassium chlorate is a very strong oxidizing agent that oxidizes the sugar in the jelly baby almost instantaneously.
When the experiment is performed, the jelly baby bursts into flames and a screaming sound can be heard as rapidly expanding gases are emitted from the test tube in which the experiment is performed. The smell of candy floss is also given off.
Famous quotes containing the words screaming, jelly and/or babies:
“Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in
armies! Old men weeping in the parks!”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jelly beans.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“Let’s just call what happened in the eighties the reclamation of motherhood . . . by women I knew and loved, hard-driving women with major careers who were after not just babies per se or motherhood per se, but after a reconciliation with their memories of their own mothers. So having a baby wasn’t just having a baby. It became a major healing.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)