Celebrating Two Years of Internet Celebrity!

The year was 2006. I had just finished my first year of law school and returned to Provo to pursue a meaningless internship at the Utah County District Attorney's office. Aside from a budding romance with Robyn it was an otherwise normal summer until my friend Mike sent me a link to a video. The video showed a couple of youths conducting a juvenile, yet fascinating and irresistible experiment with Diet Coke and mentos. The very afternoon I was introduced to what became the Coke Rocket phenomenon, I rushed right down to the local grocery store and purchased what would become in a few short weeks dozens of two liters of Diet Coke and hundreds of mentos.

For several weeks I tried mostly unsuccessfully to equal the incredible aerials featured on internet videos. What the videos don't show is how difficult it is to create the optimal conditions for a Coke Rocket. The toss has to be just so. The cap has to be loosened just the right amount to insure that the coke can shoot out with enough force to propel it upward, yet tight enough so it doesn't harmlessly fall off when the bottle hits the ground.

On July 11th, 2006, with my friend Mike manning the camera, we attempted yet another round of Coke Rockets. It just so happened that on the only occasion we had a camera we captured the most successful Coke Rocket ever seen on the world wide internets.

The following video, uploaded to YouTube soon after the launch, has been viewed nearly 1,700,000 times by people all over the world and garnered such praise (as seen on the comments page) as: "LOL," "ROTFLOL," and "LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL."