How to put an egg in a bottle

To demonstrate the effect of air pressure by putting a hard-boiled egg into a bottle and getting it out intact. Remove the shell of the hard-boiled egg. Drop a burning match into the bottle just before you put the egg on the mouth. The flame burns up the oxygen, thus creating a vacuum that sucks the egg into the bottle. Then turn the bottle upside down so the egg falls into the neck and blow air into the inverted bottle and the egg will pop out.

The egg sucked into the bottle because of how air reacts to changes in temperature. When air gets hotter, it tries to expand i.e. to spread the air molecules out over a larger volume. When air is cooled, it tries to contract. The fire heated the air in the bottle. As the air got warmer, it expanded until it overflowed from the bottle. You may have noticed a little bit of air leaking out around the egg when you first put it on.

Hard

boiled egg A glass bottle or jar. Matches or lighter

How to do this activity.

Peel the shell from your egg. Place the bottle in the sink or on the ground outside in a safe place. Take a small piece of newspaper (say 10cm x 10cm) and squash it into a strip that will easily fit into the bottle. Have an adult light the paper and drop it into the bottle. Immediately place the egg on top of the bottle.

What is happening

You should find the fire goes out, and then the egg gets slowly sucked down into the bottle. There are a couple of things going on here. First of all, the fire needs oxygen from the air to burn. When you put the egg on the top of the bottle, you sealed the fire off from the oxygen outside. Once the oxygen inside the bottle was used up, the fire goes out.

Applications

This activity was made famous many years ago by Professor Julius Sumner-Miller. He always followed his demonstrations by asking "Why is it so?" before explaining why it happened. He also appeared on Australian television performing it as part of a chocolate advertisement. The only people who didn't like his famous experiment were milk producers, as back then empty milk bottles were returned to be used again, which is tricky when they have eggs stuck in them!

Thus far only limited research has been conducted on use of synchronized video combined with graphical representations of data in the science classroom. Controlled, replicable research documenting quantifiable outcomes in classroom use will be needed to determine the potential benefits. This simple experiment shows how air pressure works. Boiling water in a bottle with a peeled hard-boiled egg on top will condense and the resulting lower air pressure in the bottle will suck the egg inside. The secret is that as the steam from the boiling water cools, small droplets of water will form on the inside of the bottle. As the gas condenses to liquid, it requires less space in the bottle, so the air pressure drops inside. As it drops, the greater air pressure outside the bottle will try to equalize with that inside the bottle and will push the egg through the mouth of the bottle.