Making the world's most expensive carbonated water!

Earlier this year, my brother was reading a lot  about the history of chemistry, and he was telling   me about an experiment, that he thought was really  interesting. For this experiment, a diamond was   placed in a jar with oxygen, and then it was  heated up using sunlight, and a really big lens.   The diamond which was nearly pure carbon, burned  and combined with the oxygen, and the entire   thing, was converted to CO2 gas. This experiment  was really important, and it helped

confirm,   a few fundamental ideas and theories, that were  controversial at the time. The thing that my   brother found

most

surprising though, was just  the fact, that it was possible to burn diamond,   and when he told me about this, I had pretty much  the same reaction. For some reason we were always   under the impression that diamond was basically  indestructible, but that really isn't the case. To   be fair it's really hard and chemically resistant,  but when

it's heated until it's red-hot, it can   start reacting with oxygen. As we talked about  this more, we joked about burning diamonds, and   then using that CO2, to make

carbonated

water

. We  thought that the idea of

making

carbonated

water

   using diamonds, was really funny and interesting,  and if it worked, we'd kind of be able to drink   diamonds. Initially it was

most

ly just a joke, but  over the next few months, it slowly changed into   something, that I really

wanted to do. I just had  to know, what it was like to drink diamond

water

.   So I set out on a mission, to make what was to my  knowledge, the

most

expensive

carbonated

water

in   the

world

. To start off I first had to buy  some diamond. Large and high carat diamonds,   are of course extremely

expensive

, and can easily  cost millions, which is just slightly above the   budget of this channel. As the size goes down  though the price does as well, and after searching   for a while,

I found what I felt was one of the  best deals. It was on eBay and it was offering   five carats or 1g, of nice and clean uncut white  diamonds for $47. I definitely could have gotten   this price lower, if I went with even smaller  diamonds, or was something like diamond dust,   but I didn't want to go so small that it stopped  looking like diamonds altogether. I thought that   what I found was a good balance of size, quality  and price, but I'm not exactly a dime an

expert,   so I honestly have no idea if it really was  a good deal. I did some rough calculations,   and I found that I probably needed about 4g, so  I bought four orders from this listing. In total   this came out to be just a bit over $200, and it  took about a week to arrive. They all eventually   showed up in their own separate bags, which  I thought looked oddly suspicious for some   reason. The diamonds themselves were about as  small as I had expected, and they looked

like   slightly oversized grains of sand. Despite being  so small though, they were still clearly diamonds,   and they were actually able to sparkle a bit.  Okay so now that I had the diamonds, the first   thing that I had to do, was figure out how I was  gonna burn them to make the CO2. I probably could   have tried recreating the historic way, using a  jar and a giant lens, but I just didn't feel like   that was very efficient. Instead what seemed like  a much better idea,

was to heat them until they   were red-hot using something like a blowtorch,  and then to pass oxygen over them. To do this   though I had to hold the diamonds in some sort of  material, that could both handle the high heat,   and the oxygen. Also ideally wanted it to be  transparent so that I could see what was going on,   and it seemed like glass, was the only real  option that I had. Regular glass would have melted   though, including the lab grade borosilicate stuff  so

instead, I had to try using something called   quartz glass.

Most

forms of glass are made from  SO2, but a bunch of other additives are included,   to lower its softening point, and to make it  easier to work with. However a quartz glass is   nearly pure silicon dioxide, which gives it a  much higher softening point. And hopefully this   should give me the ability to continually blast  it with a torch, without it bending or sagging.   I looked online and I found that tubes made

of  quartz were commonly used in UV

water

stars,   and I found some relatively cheap ones on Amazon.  So I ordered a few bigger ones, removed the ends,   and cut them into roughly 9 inch sections. To  hold the tube up I just used a long glass rod,   which let me hang it over two clamps. It wasn't  exactly the

most

stable method, but it was just a   test, so I didn't think it really mattered. The  glass rod was also just regular glass however,   I figured that it would

probably be okay. For  the oxygen, I was originally just gonna use   those small red bottles that you can get from  the hardware store, but they tend to be really   overpriced. So instead I went out and bought  a proper full-sized oxygen tank. I also picked   up a good quality regulator with it, which would  give me much more careful control, over the flow   of oxygen. When I was ready to get things started,  I loaded the tube with some of the diamond, and I   blasted it with the

blowtorch. Slowly over about  30 seconds, the diamonds started glowing red,   and then I opened the oxygen regulator, and I shot  in a very gentle flow of oxygen. This caused them   to glow even brighter, and they were now, being  slowly turned, into CO2 gas. The quartz glass   seemed to be working really well, but the rest  of the glass, was kind of a disaster. I thought   that the glass rod would be okay, because it  wasn't getting hit directly by the torch, but   that

definitely wasn't the case. I also thought  that using a glass pipette for the oxygen would   be fine because it wasn't touching anything, but  again I was obviously wrong. The air in the tube   was apparently getting hot enough to start melting  it, which meant that it was above at least 800°C.   This was exactly why I had to use quartz glass for  the tube, otherwise it all would have become, a   miserable and melted mess. So that run was pretty  clearly a failure, and

regular glass just wasn't   something that I could use at all. I wanted to  try again though, and this time besides the quartz   tube, everything else was metal . This run went  way better than before and, after blasting it for   just a few minutes, all of the diamond eventually  disappeared. After doing all this, it was clearly   possible to burn diamonds, but all the CO2 that  I was

making

, was kind of just being shot into   the air. If I was gonna be using it to

carbonate 

water

though, I had to somehow figure out a way   to capture it. I thought about how to do this for  a long time, and the best and easiest way that I   came up with, was just using liquid nitrogen.  As the CO2 was made, I could pass it into a   tube surrounded by liquid nitrogen, which should  freeze the gas and turn it into dry ice. I had   to first test this out though, and I started by  filling a small Dewar, with some liquid nitrogen. Then after that I dropped in a

test tube, and I  waited for it to cool down. I then got a flask,   threw in a few pieces of dry ice, and attached  some hosing to it. With this setup, the dry ice   was slowly turning back into CO2 gas, and then  traveling out through the hosing. When this gas   is fed into the test tube though, it should  be able to freeze the CO2, and turn it back   into dry ice. This was exactly what happened,  and the moment that it was added to the tube,   a cloud of dry ice started forming.

The liquid  nitrogen also started boiling a lot more, and I   just left it like this for several minutes. After  that I pulled out the hosing, and there was a huge   chunk of dry ice, that had formed around it. At  the bottom of the tube there was a bunch more,   and to get it out, I just hit it while it was  upside down. So from this it all clearly worked,   and the liquid nitrogen was definitely able  to freeze the CO2. I now knew how I would burn   the diamonds and collect the

dry ice, but after  this I had to somehow use it to carbonate

water

,   and this would have to be done under pressure.  I'm sure there are many ways that this could   have been done, but what I wanted to do was to  somehow use one of those kitchen soda makers. I  

most

ly wanted to do this because I just kind of  thought it was funny, but also I thought that   it would be really satisfying to be able to see  the diamond CO2 being shot into the

water

. To   set this all up I'd

have to build some sort  of pressure chamber, and somehow rigged it   to the soda machine. I also wanted to make it as  simple as possible, and after about a week of just   tinkering with different ideas, I came up with  something I thought would work. Overall it was   relatively simple, and I was able to buy all the  parts that I needed online from a company called   McMaster-Carr. All the parts arrived a couple  days later, and I moved around all the pieces to   lay out the

basic setup. On the left was the main  pressure chamber, which was basically just a pipe,   and on the right was the pressure gage, and below  that was the valve. The idea was to throw the   diamond dry ice into the pipe, then quickly seal  it, and let it slowly turn back into CO2 gas,   and pressurize the chamber. All the metal here was  316 stainless steel, and it was rated at 3000psi,   which was way higher than it was ever gonna get  to. At

most

it would never even get above

1000,   and if it ever even got close to 3,000, it would  probably mean that the entire room was on fire.   To put together

most

of it, I just wrapped each  of the threaded pieces with Teflon tape, and I   screwed them in. The only tricky part was this  last end cap piece, which had no place for me to   screw into. So to attach the pipe to the rest of  the setup, I had to make a threaded hole myself.   To do this I started by drilling a small pilot  hole in it. Then I replaced the

small drill bit   with the bigger one that I actually needed, and I  kept on drilling. After taking out a small amount   of metal, I added some soapy

water

to help keep  things cool. To hold the end cap, I was just using   a cheap plastic clamp, which really wasn't very  ideal. It wasn't able to hold on to it very well   in general, and with the soapy

water

it really had  a tendency to spin. However this didn't turn out   to be a huge deal, and it was still

relatively  easy to drill the hole through it. Now with a   hole in it, the next step was to make the threads  using a tap. It was important to screw the tap in   as close to vertical as possible, and one trick  to do this is to load it into the drill press,   and then to manually turn it. When I felt that the  tap was deep enough, I loosened it and I took the   whole thing from the press. I then clamped it down  in my vice, lubricated it with some cutting oil,   and I started

turning the tap. As I turned it, it  was cutting away the metal and

making

the thread,   but the deeper that it got, the more force  that it took. Initially things seem to be   going pretty well, but I somehow ended up  damaging the tap, and ruining its threads,   so I had to go out and buy a new one. They're  relatively cheap though, and I got the replacement   for about five dollars. Eventually I felt  that I had carved out the threads deep enough,   and at this point it was

done. I then quickly  cleaned the cap and all the threads, and now, I   was ready to finish putting everything together. I  started by clamping down the part with the gauge,   and I screwed on the cap by hand. And after that  using a pipe wrench, I really tightened it down.   With this upper part of the chamber now ready,  I just had to do a quick test to make sure that   it all worked. I clamped on the lower pipe part,  dropped in some dry ice, and then quickly screwed   on this

upper section. The dry ice was slowly  turning back into CO2 gas and with everything   sealed, the pressure was slowly increasing. I then  shot some soapy

water

onto it, which would start   to bubble if there were any leaks. At this point  it all looked fine, but there was still barely any   pressure in it, so it wasn't that surprising. As  the dry ice was turning back into a gas, it was   cooling down the pipe a lot, and it caused

most

  of the

water

on it to freeze. To properly

test it,   I was gonna have to wait for all the dry ice to  disappear, and for the whole thing to get back   up to room temperature. It ended up maxing out at  around 600 or 700psi, and I shot the soapy

water

   on it again. Pretty much all the joints still  looked good, except for the one next to the valve,   which was clearly bubbling. This just meant  that it wasn't tight enough, and I'd have to   screw it on a bit more the. Test was now over,  and I opened the valve to

let everything out. After fixing that valve connection this  was gonna be the final pressure chamber,   but at the last minute, I decided to modify it  a bit. When designing it I didn't really feel   that I needed a pressure release valve, because  the metal was rated way higher than I was ever   gonna be putting it at, and also I was gonna be  emptying it very quickly after filling it. The   only way that it would ever get over pressured was  that if it somehow fell into a fire

or something,   but that just really wasn't very likely. However  despite all that, I decided that it was still   important to do things safe and properly, so  I picked up a release valve that would pop,   if the pressure ever went above 2,000 psi. To  modify things I just had to swap this t-joint that   I had with a cross, and screw on the new valve.  After that I tested it with some dry ice to make   sure that there were no leaks, and I didn't see  any, so the chamber

was good to go. Now the very   last thing that I had to do, was figure out how to  connect it, to one of those kitchen soda makers.   I decided to go with the SodaStream brand, and it  was all relatively easy. All I needed was a small   section of high-pressure hosing, two quick-release  adaptors, and another adapter to screw into the   SodaStream. I was able to find all these parts  on Amazon which was convenient, but they were all   kind of overpriced. For the actual SodaStream

I  just went out and bought whatever was the cheapest   model. To set it up I took off the back, screwed  in the adapter, and connected one side of the hose   to it. To attach the pressure chamber to it I cut  a small hole in the side, and slid in the zip tie.   I figured that the best and easiest way to hold  it there, was to just strap it to the side of it,   and it seemed to work pretty well. I then  attached the other end of the hose to the valve,   and the setup was finally

done. I did a few  quick tests to make sure that the system   wasn't leaking or anything, and it all seemed  to be good. So now I guess I was finally ready,   to try and make the diamond

water

. For the burning  setup I started by adding the quartz tube and this   time I actually clamped it down, instead of just  balancing it. I then attached a bubbler with a   small amount of

water

in it, which would wash all  the co2 gas that was made. This would probably add   a bit of

moisture to it though, so I followed  this up with another bubbler that was filled   with a drying salt. This was then fed directly  into the test tube and the Dewar from before,   and I started loading up the quartz tube, with all  the diamonds. After all my little tests and some   other things, I had about three and a half grams  of diamond left, and I decided to just use it all.   When this was all eventually done, I sealed the  end with a stopper that was pre-fitted with the  

oxygen feed. I then opened the oxygen tank and I  carefully adjusted the flow of it, by looking at   the

water

bubbler. The main purpose of the bubbler  here was to wash the gas, but it was also really   useful to gauge how much of it was flowing through  the system. When I felt that it was going at a   good and steady rate, I filled the Dewar with some  liquid nitrogen, and then I started blasting the   diamonds with a torch. Like before the diamonds  slowly started glowing bright

red, and I could   tell that they were reacting with the oxygen. They  were definitely burning and turning into carbon   dioxide, but I didn't see any dry ice forming,  and this kind of concerned me. I knew that there   was a bunch of oxygen that first had to be pushed  out of the system before the CO2 made it there,   but I wasn't sure if that was actually what was  happening. It was also possible that maybe I had   a leak, and I was somehow losing all my

precious  diamond CO2. I honestly started to get a bit   worried about it, and I thought that this might be  just a total failure, but then it actually started   working. Along with all this nice dry ice though,  unreacted oxygen was also getting liquefied,   and I was gonna be collecting a whole bunch of it.  I initially thought that this might have been a   problem, but it actually turned out to be a good  thing. It stopped the dry ice from clumping up,   and solidifying on the

side, and from potentially  blocking the tube. I initially thought that   this was just going to take something like 10  minutes, but the whole process was over an hour,   which kind of killed me. The reaction that was  going on here was quite simple, and the diamond,   which is nearly pure carbon, was reacting with  the oxygen, to make CO2. As this reaction happens,   the diamond just kind of slowly disappears, and  when it's done, it should pretty much be all gone.   Even in

very pure diamond though, there's always  still a small amount of impurity in it, which is   gonna be left behind. I purposely went with white  diamond, because it's one of the

most

pure forms.   A lot of other diamonds can be slightly colored  from impurities, and they probably would have   been fine to use. However I just wanted the CO2  to be as pure as possible, and to avoid as much   contamination as I could. When it was done I took  out the tube, and there was a lot of

dry ice at   the bottom, but there was also a whole bunch of  liquid oxygen. To get rid of the oxygen though,   it was easy and I just had to shake the tube  around, and let it all boil off. As I did this it   slowly sounded more and more solid, and eventually  all I had left was the dry ice. At this point I   was planning to just throw it directly into the  pressure chamber, but I really wanted to see how   much I got. On something warm though dry ice would  sublime really

quickly, so to minimize the loss I   made a really cold watch glass. I was able to pour  out pretty much everything that was in the tube,   and I was honestly surprised by how much dry  ice there was. I was also just really happy   that this project seemed to be working, and I was  genuinely still kind of blown away that this all   came from diamond. I weighed the tube before and  after I poured it out, and my yield was 10.5g,   but in theory I should have gotten around 12.8g.  I

think that some of the CO2 was missing though,   because it was able to get out of the tube before  getting frozen by the liquid nitrogen. There also   could have been leaks in my system, and I could  have also lost some when trying to weigh it.   Either way though I still had way more than I  needed, and the next thing that I had to do,   was load it all into the chamber. I just  dumped it all in as fast as I could,   and I quickly screwed on the cap. The pipe that  I used for

chamber here was also a lot smaller,   and it was because I scaled it based on the  amount of dry ice that I got. All the dry   ice slowly vaporized over the course of about 15  minutes, and the pressure got up to around 800psi.   I waited another half an hour just to make sure  that all the dry ice had turned back into a gas,   and it was pretty much good to go. I now had this  weird cross looking pressure chamber thing, and   all I had to do was attach it to the

SodaStream.  Because the chamber was much smaller now, I had to   make a new hole for the zip tie. That didn't even  take a minute though, and then I clamped on the   chamber, I attached the tubing, loaded a small  bottle filled with cold

water

, and opened the   valve. I was now finally ready to make my diamond 

water

, but I was honestly pretty nervous because   I really felt that I was gonna somehow mess it up.  After a few minutes of psyching myself up though,   I just went

ahead and pushed the button, and the  diamond gas started flooding into the bottle. When I felt that it was done I took it off, and  a bunch of bubbles formed, the moment that the   pressure was released. I made sure to quickly cap  it though to try and lose as little of the gas as   possible. To make this bottle I pretty much  used all of the CO2 that was in the chamber,   but there still was a very small amount of it  left. Unfortunately though this wasn't enough to  

carbonate anything else with, and I just decided  to keep it. I thought it was cool to still keep   a small amount of the diamond CO2, but I don't  really have any purpose for it. But anyway now,   after spending over $1,000, and weeks of working  on this, I was finally done. As far as I could   tell I'd successfully

carbonated

water

using  diamonds, and I was honestly surprised that it   worked this well. At over $1000 for this  bottle though not even counting labor,   I

still wasn't sure if it was actually worth  all the work and money. However I was really   hoping that once I tasted it and experience the  amazing flavor of diamond CO2, that all those   doubts would disappear. Okay so it's finally  time to taste it and to uh, see how it is. So... tastes uhm, exactly like soda 

water

. Weeks of work to have something,   that is indistinguishable from regular soda

water

.  Its it's honestly kind of worse than regular soda  

water

, because

I just used tap

water

, and pass  it through a Brita filter before

carbonated

it.   I think even think of using better quality 

water

. And the tap

water

at my office, or   yeah here kind of tastes horrible on its own. The  Brita recovers a lot of the flavor, uh and makes   it not taste absolutely terrible, but I think  the Brita makes it taste okay but in hindsight   I should use something better, and now it just  tastes like either just regular soda

water

,   or maybe slightly

inferior. But knowing that it  has diamonds in it, or diamond CO2, in it makes   it inherently better still. Okay so it turned out  to be no different than regular

carbonated

water

,   and I actually expected that to be the  case. Carbon dioxide is just carbon dioxide,   and it doesn't matter if it came from diamonds,  or from burning something like gasoline. It's   always just going to be CO2, which means it'll  have the same chemical properties, and the same   taste.

Despite this though I still really like the  idea of diamond

water

, and I'm still blown away by   the fact that it worked so well. After tasting  it I still had a

most

ly full bottle of

water

,   and I poured the rest of it into a bunch of small  vials. I didn't feel it was appropriate though   just leaving them as these unmarked vials, so I  went out and had some nice custom stickers made.   In total I was able to fill ten vials, and

most

of  these ended up being given out to

friends. I made   sure to keep three of them though, which I wanted  to give away to you guys. If you want a chance to   get one, you just need to follow the link in the  description, which will give you a few different   ways to enter. They're all free and for example,  you can get two entries by just following a link   to my YouTube or my Instagram page. You literally  just have to follow the link to the page, and   that's pretty much it. If you want to subscribe  or do

something else while you're there though,   that would be cool, but it's not at all required  for the giveaway. To give everyone a chance I   think I'll let this contest go for about  a week, and then I'll make the drawing for   the winners. Oh and also, I'll ship the vials  anywhere in the

world

totally free of charge,   and I'll include one of my beaker mugs with it.  But anyway I think that's about it for now. I   hope you guys enjoyed the video, and

I guess I'll  see you guys next year. As usual a big things goes   out to all my supporters on Patreon. Everyone  who supports me can see my videos at least 24   hours before I post them to YouTube. Also  everyone on Patreon can directly message me,   and if you support me with $5 or more you'll  get your name at the end like you see here.