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 mostly 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 one gram of nice and clean uncut white diamonds for forty seven dollars 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 four grams 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 would seem 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 silicon dioxide 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 remove the ends and cut them into roughly nine 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 could 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 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 mostly 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 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 pressurized the chamber all the metal here was 316 stainless steel and it was rated at 3000 psi which was way higher than it was ever gonna get to at most it would never even get above a thousand 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 spend 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 vise lubricated it with some cutting oil and I started turning the tap as I turned ed 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 top 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 I went 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 6 or 700 psi 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 everyone above 2,000 psi to modify things I just had to swap this t-joint that I had with the 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 dime 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 then 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 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 coloured 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 it was honestly surprised by how much try 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 10.5 grams but in theory I should have gotten around twelve point eight 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 someone 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 800 psi 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 it 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 [Music] 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 Capitao 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 a thousand dollars for this bottle though not even counting labour 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 see how it is tastes exactly like soda wash weeks of work to have something that is indistinguishable from regular septa 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 I think even think of you things that air 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 and makes it not taste absolutely terrible but I think the Bruno 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 mostly 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 files 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 [Music]

Channel: NileRed

Views: 6,282,412

Rating: 4.9319844 out of 5

Keywords: nile, red, science, chemistry, diamond, carbonate, fizzy, soda, soft drink, burn, forever, jewelry, white diamond, gold, most expensive water, sparkling, sparkling water, real diamond water, diamond water, water, expensive, luxury, carbon, carbon dioxide, sodastream, nilered

Id: n0wvDwSnzcw

Length: 26min 25sec (1585 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/-Metacelsus-]

Wow, I bet he could make a lot of money selling this to rich people

[u/maqsym1928]

I laughed way too hard that he used tap water for it

[u/warfarin11]

You could purchase a solution of nanometer size diamond for super cheap and dilute it to 1000X and add it as needed to your 'diamond water'.

​

Kind of reminds me of Snoop's (?) diamond filtered vodka.

[u/EponHusk]

Biggest flex of em all

[u/[deleted]]

Burns money nearly $2000 then says "tastes like regular soda but worser than that." While controlling his internal screams, it is funny because he was about to cry on air." I am an idiot ". But overall a good demonstration how we can make a soda.

[u/[deleted]]

This guys voice sounds so sarcastic

[u/i_suck_toes69420]

Jesus close the cap

[u/bradye0110]

This is how McDonald’s sprite is carbonated

[u/i_suck_toes69420]

Sell it to rich people saying there are diamonds in it but just put normal CO2 water in it