CRYSTAL BALL

BURAGO DI MOLGORA (MONZA BRIANZA), SINCE 1947

A soap bubble is the most beautiful thing, and the most exquisite, in nature… I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap bubble if there was only one in the world”. Mark Twain

Love of soap bubbles must have been the very thing to transform Claudio Pasini from chemist to first-rate inventor. In 1947, barely two years after the Second World War, Pasini starts commercializing a special paste that produces high-resistance bubbles. It’s easy to use: take a small quantity of paste and perch it at the end of a straw. Blowing in it causes a gumlike membrane to expand, creating a colorful balloon with a sturdiness that no soap bubble could ever achieve. Pasini thinks this game to be enormously fascinating. Indeed, history is full of illustrious fans of soap bubbles: Sir Isaac Newton celebrating them in his optical studies, physicist Antoine Ferdinand Plateau, created a crank machine to study them closer. Despite this glorious history, the timing is just plain wrong; most families cannot afford to spend money on any kind of toy after the war. And so Pasini needs to shelve the project until the time is right. In 1968 the paste hits the shops under the name Crystal Ball. Its success is immediate and reaches its peaks in the 80s to continue to this day with its unbreakable joy.