Diet Coke and Mentos

"The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments" is a fountain show made of soda. Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of EepyBird, in lab coats and goggles, drop Mentos into 101 bottles of Diet Coke and set off geysers in patterns modeled on the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas.

The trick itself was an old science-class favorite. The pair first used it as the finale of a stage sketch in Maine in November 2005, then spent five months developing the big show. They filmed it in a field in Buckfield, Maine, on April 29, 2006, and posted it on EepyBird.com on June 3. Two days later, the Late Show with David Letterman called.

More than 10,000 copycat videos followed within nine months, U.S. Mentos sales had the biggest jump in the company's history, and the video won the first Webby Award for Viral Video.

The video remains on EepyBird's YouTube channel. It turned a classroom experiment into one of the defining viral hits of 2006 and set off a wave of copycat soda geysers.