Baby Balls

No, they aren't children of the ball. They are siblings.

There are some pieces of aluminum foil which are too small to bother applying to the ball. The most prodigious source of these is Hershey's kiss wrappers. When flattening out a wrapper (especially those of kisses, which are very thin and gathered tightly at the corners), one finds that despite the most careful attention, small bits do come detached from the rest of the wrapper. This produces a number of pieces, generally less than 4 square cm, which may or may not be possible to flatten out and which are so small that they wouldn't stay on the ball long enough to glue down. These are the stuff of which baby balls are made.

There tends to be some misunderstaning about baby balls. I do not suddenly decide to start making baby balls instead of building up the ball. Rather, all wrappers are used for the ball. It is only the aforementioned lost bits, which would otherwise be waste material, that are used to make baby balls. That said, there are two exceptions. Just enough pattie wrapper (usually less than one) is used for a glue coat, and a little bit of gum wrapper is used for a finish coat.

Baby balls are proof for those people who insist that there must be something alien, like a glass marble, at the center of the ball. As you can see from the history of the ball as recorded in this site, its growth (as measured by its diameter) slows as it increases in size. This is easily explained by the fact that the surface area increases proportionally with the square of the radius. In other words, the larger the ball gets, the more foil is required to achieve a given increase in its radius (and, therefore, its diameter). In still simpler terms; baby balls grow much faster than the ball.


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