Helium makes your voice sound high and squeaky, because it’s six times lighter than air. But what about a gas that is six times heavier than air? I’ve done this demonstration several times before, including on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. It’s always vert entertaining and a lot of fun. About 30 seconds before we went on-air, the entire news anchor team on our 9News Morning Show decided to participate in our heavy gas experiment with sulfur hexafluoride. The result was complete controlled chaos! Take a look…
The news anchors at Fox 4 News in Dallas wanted to see if I could find a few ways to make science fun on their Good Day show. Let’s see… I could show them pictures of my science project from 3rd grade… or discuss freezing point depression… or make it snow and change their voices. I’ll pick door number 3. As you’ll see in the video, we covered the interview counter with erupting Insta-Snow and allowed Tim and Megan to experience the “reverse helium” effect using sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).
It was fun to see David Willey on The Tonight Show this evening doing some nice variations on the classic sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) demo. This is the inert gas that is six times heavier than the air we breath. If you breath in helium (six times lighter than the air we breath), the pitch of your voice goes up. However, if you breath sulfur hexafluoride (six time heavier than normal air), your voice sounds low. You’ll find a complete explanation of the sulfur hexafluoride demo or anti-helium experiment as some call it in my experiment library.
For the Tonight Show, David filled an open top plastic box with the gas and proceeded to float aluminum foil boats and bubbles on this very dense gas. These demos got a nice reaction from the audience. Instead of inhaling the SF6 gas from a balloon, David had Jay Leno dip his head down into the box and inhale some of the gas. As you might imagine, Jay had fun with his “Barry White” voice.
