Confound your friends, delight your family and bemuse the easily bemused by achieving the seemingly impossible.

The challenge is to get an ordinary, everyday, common-or-garden chicken's egg into a bottle whose neck is smaller than the egg without breaking the egg. This amazing trick can be achieved in a few easy steps.

Step One

First, catch your chicken, or at least obtain its egg. You need an egg slightly wider than the opening of the bottleneck you intend to use.

Steps Two And Three

Hard-boil your egg by placing it in boiling water for about ten minutes. Let it cool, then put it in a jar of vinegar so that it is totally immersed. Wait a day or so and gradually the vinegar will dissolve the shell, leaving you with a rubbery, white ovoid.

Step Four

Check that the egg is still bigger than the opening of the bottle. Light two or three matches and drop them into the bottle. When they have completely burnt out, balance your egg on the bottle neck. Much to the surprise of onlookers, the egg will pop into the bottle with a very satisfying plopping noise.

Voilà! You have just achieved the essential life skill of getting an egg into a bottle without breaking either the egg or the bottle. Expect calls from showbiz agents to come flooding in.

How It Works

The burning matches heated the air in the bottle, making it less dense. Just like Dad, nature abhors a vacuum, so wherever there is low air pressure, surrounding air rushes in to make everything equal again. The egg in the bottleneck was preventing the outside air pressure from equalising in the bottle. In effect, air pressure pushed the egg into the bottle.

How To Get the Egg Out Again

Simple. Turn the bottle upside down and blow hard into the neck. The increased air pressure in the bottle will push the egg out again.