World's Biggest Smoke Bomb

What did you do with your weekend? We set out to make the world's largest smoke bomb. Before applying to the Guinness World Records, we ran a test run.

Making the Biggest Smoke Bomb

The first question was: How big is the biggest? Nathan Wagner and Eric Helmenstine, the pair who built the smoke bomb, searched books and the internet to find the largest smoke bomb to date. The biggest recorded smoke bomb came in at 6 pounds. They had made a smoke bomb fountain that big, so knew it could be surpassed. But... that's a big smoke bomb! Pyrotechnics don't work on the more-is-more principle. Just increasing the size of a regular smoke bomb could produce a device that would fail to ignite, split apart, act as rocket, burn incompletely, or produce only fire and no smoke. Also, there are several ways to make smoke. We went with the basic smoke bomb recipe, which calls for 3 parts potassium nitrate to two parts of sucrose. How did it turn out?... Watch the video