Accidental tremors of all kinds

When you make a fountain play from a jet which you hold as still as possible, there are still accidental tremors of all kinds, which impress upon the issuing cylinder slightly narrow and wide places at irregular distances, and so the cylinder breaks up irregularly into drops of different sizes and at different distances apart. Now these drops, as they are in the act of separating from one another, and are drawing out the waist, as you have seen, are being pulled for the moment towards one another by the elasticity of the skin of the waist; and, as they are free in the air to move as they will, this will cause the hinder one to hurry on, and the more forward one to lag behind, so that unless they are all exactly alike both in size and distance apart they will many of them bounce together before long. You would expect when they hit one another afterwards that they would join, but I shall be able to show you in a moment that they do not; they act like two india-rubber balls, and bounce away again.

Soap Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould Them by C.V. Boys, Doubleday Anchor, 1959