Money In A Blender - An Experiment
One of my son’s favorite websites is SteveSpanglerScience.Com. He visits that site as often as possible to look for new and fun “experiments”. One of the more recent experiments we’ve tried is the “Money In A Blender”. See, in an effort to prevent counterfeiting, U.S Dollars are printed with special ink that contains traces of iron and other magnetic materials. The idea of this experiment is to extract the iron from a dollar bill. So here goes:
Materials:
You’ll need:
- A $1 bill
- A kitchen blender
- Water
- A zipper-lock bag
- Super Strong Neodymium Magnet (we didn’t have one of these so we used a magnet out of his “magnetix” collection. It worked just as well.
- Some adult supervision.
Follow these steps:
1. Fill the blender half full with water (about 3-4 cups)
2. Place the dollar bill in the blender and pop on the lid.
3. Blend, liquify, grind the dollar bill til it looks like soup.
4. After the dollar bill is thoroughly “blended”, pour the contents into a ziplock bag and make sure to seal it.
5. Place the magnet in the palm of your hand and place the bag of money soup on top of the magnet. Place your last remaining hand on top of the bag and rock the slurry back and forth in an effort to draw all of the iron to the magnet. Flip your hands over and look closely at the iron that is attracted to the magnet. You can slowly pull the magnet away from the bag to reveal the iron!
Isn’t that neat? The video can be found here.
My son enjoyed this experiment so much he took the contents to school to show his class how he extracted iron from a dollar bill. 
**The U.S. Treasury has an unofficial comment on this activity “ As long as you don’t try to spend your ˜liquid money”, you can do whatever you want with your dollar bill, I guess.” So, don’t try to spend the money after you blend it.
Filed under Fun Experiments For Kids, School, Science, Steve Spangler
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