Life sometimes contains minor annoyances. You might spill milk, stub your toe, or pour a little too much hot sauce onto your plate. Unfortunately, we still can’t build time machines to just turn back the clock. But enterprising inventors have found solutions to some of the little problems that might plague our day. And now, YouTuber Joel Hartlaub of Joel Creates has successfully answered that age-old question… Can you put the toothpaste back into the tube?
We all know the scenario. The clock reads too late or too early, and we squeeze the tube too hard. It seems like a fate we have to live with. But no longer. A creator named Tyler Bell actually addressed this problem once previously. But his solution was too cumbersome to be wholly feasible. So Hartlaub decided to give the impossible a whirl.
Hartlaub wanted to make something portable that the average consumer could feasibly engage with. He shares, “What the world needs is a handheld toothpaste manipulation device capable of both dispensing and retracting toothpaste at the touch of a button.”
This toothpaste-back-into-the-tube-machine is still based on a vacuum chamber and a vacuum pump. This allows the user to manipulate the pressure inside the toothpaste tube. This pressure level determines the direction matter gets pulled. So if the pressure inside the tube is suddenly made higher than the air around it, it will pull the toothpaste back into the tube. Additionally, if the process gets reversed, the toothpaste can be literally launched across 100 toothbrushes in 3 seconds. We couldn’t say why one would need to cover that many toothbrushes with toothpaste so quickly. But we accept it.
Although sucking toothpaste back into the tube is a slower process, it still functions incredibly well. And Hartlaub rightly concludes that with this device anything can be sucked back into a tube. No more wasted ketchup, anyone?
At the end of his video, Hartlaub reveals how he built his machine. We vote they put this portable toothpaste sucker into production right away. And also build one for every condiment available.
