After six months of work developing different Diet Coke & Mentos geyser effects, our first video, "The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments," went online at EepyBird.com on Saturday, June 3, 2006. We told one person. He told some friends... They told some friends... Within hours, thousands of people were coming to see the video. That Monday morning, the Late Show with David Letterman called. It was that quick. Three weeks later, we were headed to New York to appear on Letterman, the Today Show, and more!

We had only ever done the big Bellagio-style fountain (we call it "Experiment 137") once - what you see in the video was the first and only time we'd done more than 20 geysers at the same time. And it took us three days to set it all up for the video. Now we were faced with doing it three times in twenty-four hours, and on national television! =gulp= We had just two chances to rehearse before going to New York.

The first rehearsal was a disaster: bottles tipping over, strings tangling, geysers only going a foot high... That was the worst day we've ever had. We scrambled to fix the problems: bracing bottles, new ways of attaching the strings, speeding up the setup so that the geysers didn't fizzle... When it was time to go to New York, we were ready! But with so much potential for disaster, we're still amazed that Letterman and the Today Show went off without a hitch. We even survived a group of dogs running right through the entire setup just before going live on the Today Show!

Everything took off from there. There were articles in the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone called us "wizards", the New York Times said we were "hilarious" - it was surreal. We were even in GQ. We were on Mythbusters twice, and we even went to Las Vegas to do a live performance at Caesar's Palace for HBO's The Comedy Festival. Some of our favorite moments were meeting Ellen DeGeneres, who was super nice when we were on her show, and doing a live webcast on MTV's Total Request Live - from our headquarters in Buckfield, Maine! It's probably a safe bet that that's never been done before (or since).

In just the first year after the video went online, we got to go to Paris, Istanbul, Holland, Belgium, and more. In Istanbul, they sealed the inside of a nightclub with plastic so that we could perform indoors. In Holland, we got to visit the Mentos factory where all the Mentos for the U.S. are made. That's a lot of Mentos! And we had no idea they made flavors like grape, strawberry yoghurt, and chlorophyl. Yes, chlorophyl. It tastes like spearmint. Why is it called chlorophyl? Your guess is as good as ours.

Our favorite trip was to visit WET Design. They're the folks that designed and built the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas. We got a tour behind the scenes at the Bellagio and a look at what they're working on in their labs! It was a huge inspiration, and we still can't believe we've seen water do what they can make it do! Perhaps we could collaborate on something someday - a giant Coke bottle geyser?

That September, we got to make a video that was shown during Blue Man Group's "How to Be a Megastar 2.0" arena tour. We went down to their amazing theater in Boston to film all sorts of geysers. The challenge: only sixteen feet to the ceiling, where all sorts of electrical equipment is hanging. And we've spent all our time trying to make the geysers go higher. That was the first video where we used sprinkler attachments and donut dominoes. That's where we have these donut-shaped sprinklers that cause the bottles to tip over when they start spraying. When each bottle tips over, that pulls the string that triggers the next geyser. That was what started us working on "The Domino Effect."

We made "The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments II - The Domino Effect" that October. That was the most intense day we've ever had. We'd been setting up for days, and we'd barely slept the whole time. With over 250 delicate trigger mechanisms linked together to make one giant chain reaction, everything had to be checked and double checked. At 2 AM the night before, we were literally cutting pieces of wood to fix a potential problem in the stair-climbing mechanism. After six hours of setting up all the bottles that morning, it was very hot. So hot that the soda was fizzing and evaporating up onto the Mentos, making them sticky. We discovered this as we did the final check of all the triggers, and we had to face the possibility that after all this work, the Mentos might just stick to the nozzles and nothing would work. We crossed our fingers and pulled the first pin. And it worked! We've never been so exhausted and relieved!

At the end of this crazy year, we got some amazing honors, including being nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Broadband - Variety. We saw Oscar the Grouch and Elmo at the ceremony, which was one of our most star-struck moments. We won both the Webby Award and the Webby People's Voice Award for Viral Video. For that, we got to perform live on the sidewalk on Wall Street for all the people in their fancy clothes and try not to get them soaking wet. People Magazine had us in their Best of 2006 issue, and we were on Vh1's Greatest Internet Celebrities (we were #12!). We were even among the Internet celebrities included in the Barenaked Ladies video "The Sound of Your Voice." When they first called to ask if we wanted to be in it, we completely couldn't believe it!

Those first six months of working on creating different geyser effects, spending about a thousand bucks on Coke & Mentos, and wondering if we were completely insane were totally worth it. It's been so much fun! And who would have guessed that Mentos sales would go up 15 to 20%, that traffic to Coke.com would double, and that we'd be doing Diet Coke & Mentos twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week!

Now the friendly folks at Coke and Mentos provide us with the soda and candy for our new projects, which is great since we've been through almost 4,000 bottles of Diet Coke and over 24,000 Mentos so far. We went through over 500 bottles at once in Cincinnati to set an official Guinness World Record: with the help of 500 volunteers, we set off 504 geysers simultaneously. That was quite a sight!

We really appreciate all of you coming to EepyBird.com and watching our videos. It's thanks to you that we can go around and have a blast (no pun intended) doing all these crazy experiments. About 50 million people have seen our videos online, with who knows how many views of bootleg copies. We hope that's just the beginning: we're hard at work in the laboratory coming up with wild new experiments - some with Diet Coke & Mentos and some that are even stranger! So thanks for watching!