Watch the biggest Mentos and Coke reaction you’ve ever seen! See the Mentos inflate a balloon. I used over 200 mentor for this science experiment and the results were cool…but it wasn’t as big as I expected but was still cool! don’t forget to vote for the next video! 🙂 In the 1980s, Wint-O-Green Life Savers were used to create cola geysers. The rolls of candies were threaded onto a pipe cleaner and dropped into the soft drink to create a geyser. At the end of the 1990s the manufacturer of Wintergreen Lifesavers increased the size of the mints and they no longer fit in the mouth of soda bottles. Science teachers found that Mint Mentos candies had the same effect when dropped into a bottle of any carbonated soft drink. Lee Marek and “Marek’s Kid Scientists” performed the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment on the Late Show with David Letterman in 1999. In March 2002, Steve Spangler, a science educator, did the demonstration on KUSA-TV, an NBC affiliate, in Denver, Colorado. The Mentos Geyser Experiment became an internet sensation in September 2005. The experiment became a subject of the television show Mythbusters in 2006.Spangler signed a licensing agreement with Perfetti Van Melle, the maker of Mentos, after inventing an apparatus aimed to make it easier to drop the Mentos into the bottle and produce a large soda geyser.Amazing Toys, Spangler’s toy company, released the Geyser Tube toys in February 2007. In October 2010, a Guinness World Record of 2,865 simultaneous geysers was set at an event organized by Perfetti Van Melle at the SM Mall of Asia Complex, in Manila, Philippines.This record was afterwards beaten in November 2014 by another event organized by Perfetti Van Melle and Chupa Chups in Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico where 4,334 Mentos and soda fountains were set off simultaneously. The eruption is caused by a physical reaction, rather than any chemical reaction. The addition of the Mentos leads to the rapid nucleation of carbon dioxide gas bubbles precipitating out of solution.Gasses, in general, are more soluble in liquids at elevated pressures. Carbonated sodas contain elevated levels of carbon dioxide under pressure. The solution becomes supersaturated with carbon dioxide when the bottle is opened, and the pressure is released. The nucleation reaction can start with any heterogeneous surface, such as rock salt, but Mentos have been found to work better than most. Tonya Coffey, a physicist at Appalachian State University, found that the aspartame in diet drinks lowers the surface tension in the water and causes a bigger reaction, but that caffeine does not accelerate the process. The geyser reaction will still work even using sugared drinks, but diet is commonly used both for the sake of a larger geyser as well as to avoid having to clean up a sugary soda mess.