A Floating Paper Clip

Motivated by Science Bob, my daughters and I attempted to make a paper clip float in water.  Sounds easy right?  Wrong.  Drop a paper clip in water and see what happens?  As you can probably guess, it immediately sinks to the bottom.  So how does one get the paper clip to float?  The trick is to avoid breaking the surface tension of the water when you drop in the paper clip.  How do you do that?  You need the following supplies.

Paper clips
Tissue paper
Pencils

Make sure that you use gift wrapping tissue paper and not an actual tissue.  I started with a tissue for your nose and the experiment was a complete failure!

To start the experiment, fill up a bowl of water.  Then tear off a piece of tissue paper about half the size of your cell phone.  Gently place the paper on the surface of the water.  Then gently place the paper clip on the tissue.  The next step is to use the pencils to gently push/pull the paper out from under the paper clip.  Our video is below.

As you can see from the video, it can be a little tricky.  It took me 3 or 4 tries to get it right in the video.  If done properly the paper clip will float on top of the water.  It's not really floating since the density of the paper clip is greater than that of the water.  What's happening is that the surface tension of the water is not broken.  This can't be done by simply placing the clip in the water but it is possible with the tissue paper.  My daughters had a lot of fun with this experiment...as did I!