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“On one given day the Soap Bubble Room is out of soapsuds,” a journalist from The Post wrote after a visit in 1994, the year Ms. Lewin-Benham stepped down.

She was up to her wrists in soapsuds and called out to us to be careful as we whizzed back outside.

She had been wearing a swimsuit in the tub, she said, and “the soapsuds were up to my neck.”

And bubbles are everywhere, on every scale, once you start looking: high-tech drug-delivery mechanisms, emulsified salad dressings, soapsuds, black holes and beyond.

He smelled like soapsuds and catnip and the ocean at night.