Reactions | Turning the Boston Harbor into Actual Tea | Season 5 | Episode 36

On December 16, 1773, a bunch of protesters did a slightly more intense version of what I'm doing here.

They chucked more than 340 chests full of tea, which would be about eighteen and a half million of these, into this harbor right here to protest tea taxes.

You can read about the history if you want to.

We're a chemistry channel, so what we want to know is this: was the Boston Harbor actually temporarily transformed into a giant cup of tea?

According to one report we found Boston Harbor has a volume of roughly 600 trillion liters, which is a lot.

The Boston Tea Party protesters dumped about 42,000 kilograms of tea into the water, which is also a lot.

Depending on who you ask it takes roughly two grams of tea to make a 240 milliliter or eight ounce cup of tea.

We're gonna round that off to a gram of tea for every hundred milliliters of water or about 10 grams per liter.

42,000 kilograms of tea in 600 trillion liters works out to about this much which is probably too weak to even taste, so the Boston Tea Partiers didn't add nearly enough tea to the harbor to actually turn it into a cuppa.

They would have needed this much tea, which works out to about 6.6 million US tons or between 2 and 3 trillion of these, which I couldn't fit in the cab on the way here.

And if we want a proper cuppa of course we need milk and sugar.

One lump or two translates to 4 or 8 grams of sugar for 240 mLs.

Of course we're gonna go for 2, which means we would need this many kilograms of sugar, or just five billion sugar cubes, and a splash of milk, which is about 10 or 15 mLs per cup, works out, very roughly, to 30 billion liters.

We are estimating wildly by the way.

These are ballpark figures but even wildly estimating amounts of tea, milk, and sugar doesn't take into account the underlying chemistry.

First the harbor is salt water, which both tastes bad and also means it's not drinkable as is.

Also the presence of salt might affect how much certain chemicals in the tea like caffeine can be extracted from the leaves.

Second, you normally make tea with boiling water, because the hotter the water the more quickly it will extract all the delicious chemicals we want from the tea.

The Boston Tea Party took place in December when sea surface temperatures around here are a cool eight degrees Celsius, which isn't too far off from the temperature of your refrigerator.

But the good tasting stuff in tea is water soluble even when the water is cold.

The cold temperature slows down its diffusion from the tea leaves into the water, but it doesn't prevent it entirely.

So maybe the colonists were going for cold brewed tea.

So the temperature isn't a problem exactly, but there's another potential issue.

Boston Harbor is not a tea cup.

It doesn't have boundaries.

Doesn't have walls.

Water flows into the harbor and out to sea.

Which means it completely turns over after a while.

In fact surprisingly fast.

After just one to five days all the water in the harbor has been replaced, which means all our tea would be gone.

So the real question is if we did dump enough tea into the harbor - theoretically make a cup of tea, would it diffuse quickly enough throughout the harbor to make said cuppa, or would the water turn over too fast for the tea to ever reach an acceptably high concentration.

My calculus is a little rusty so we called in some help.

Our expert, Dr. Gordon Zhang, figures that if you could get enough tea in there, the one to five days the water sticks around would be enough time for the tea to get strong enough to taste.

But he also says that salt water would need to be diluted about thirty times to make it drinkable.

So we did all that hard work.

Came up with all these massive numbers, and now we need to dilute it another thirty times.

Ugh.

I give up.

So we couldn't actually turn the Boston Harbor into tea we did have a lot of fun trying.

Huge thanks to the Liberty fleet of tall ships for letting us play around on their tall ship, the Liberty Star.

Thanks for watching.

Feel free to dispute my math down in the comments below or argue about the correct number of sugar cubes and whether milk actually belongs in tea (IT DOES) but before you do make sure to LIKE share and subscribe so that we can keep making cool videos like

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