The encyclopedia · R&D & Science · Strategic decision · 1966–1973
Polywater — the 'new form of water' that was mostly sweat
A Soviet chemist announced a new form of water in 1966; by 1969 the Pentagon was funding a polywater gap — until a postdoc matched it to his own sweat.
Soviet Academy of Sciences · Bell Labs · 1966
What happened
In the early 1960s, Nikolai Fedyakin, a chemist at a technical institute in the Soviet city of Kostroma, forced water through hair-thin quartz capillaries and found the bottom portion denser than ordinary water. Boris Deryagin, director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Moscow, took up the experiment, made the material faster, and reported anomalous properties: it boiled near 150 °C instead of 100, froze below −40 °C, and flowed like syrup. The Soviet results were published in 1962 with short English summaries in Chemical Abstracts, and the West took no notice.
In 1966 Deryagin presented the work at the Faraday Society discussions in Nottingham, calling it 'anomalous water', and in 1969 the West caught up: a Unilever team led by Brian Pethica confirmed the anomalies and published in Nature, and on 27 June 1969 Ellis Lippincott of the University of Maryland and two National Bureau of Standards colleagues announced in Science that the liquid's spectrum matched no known substance — they named it 'polywater' and proposed a polymer structure.
The mania followed: the Wall Street Journal reported the Pentagon was bankrolling US research against a Soviet 'polywater gap' and the CIA monitored Soviet work, and J. D. Bernal called it the century's most important physical-chemical discovery. At an April 1970 symposium at Lehigh, Deryagin gave the opening talk as the American evidence fell apart: Lippincott admitted trouble reproducing his spectrum, a co-author conceded serious doubt, and Denis Rousseau — a postdoc at Bell Labs — reported samples 'highly contaminated' with sodium, potassium and chloride; a laser burned it dark brown.
Rousseau then ran the control the field had never run. After a handball game he wrung out his T-shirt, put the sweat in the spectrometer, and got a matching spectrum: 'polywater' was ordinary water carrying biological impurities — silica dissolved from the capillaries and, quite literally, the experimenters' perspiration. Science published his analysis in January 1971, and the press summed it up as '1% inspiration and 99% perspiration'. By August 1973 Deryagin and his colleague N. V. Churaev had conceded in Nature that the anomalies came from impurities, not a new form of water.
Why it happened
- The claim was published for three years with no one outside one lab able to reproduce it — and the anomaly appeared only in apparatus that leached silica into the sample.
- The incentives were geopolitical: a 'polywater gap' with the Soviets made the Pentagon and the CIA pay for replication rather than skepticism — money that needed the phenomenon to be real.
- Thermodynamics said it could not exist: if polywater were more stable than water, all the water on Earth would already be polywater. The impossibility made headlines instead of ending the affair.
- The decisive control came from an outsider — a Bell Labs postdoc with no stake in the field ran the sweat test the believers never did, and the anomaly vanished with the contamination.
The lesson
A result that appears only in one lab's special apparatus is usually an artifact of the apparatus. Polywater was 99% perspiration — run the control before the funding race.
Aftermath
The affair collapsed within three years of the mania. Deryagin and Churaev's 1973 letter in Nature attributed the anomalies to impurities, and the field that had absorbed millions of research dollars evaporated. No careers were wrecked the way Blondlot's was, and the episode became the standard case of how status, geopolitics and a striking number hold a false phenomenon together. Rousseau's controls — clean glassware, his own sweat — are still cited as the model for killing a phantom. The literature survives mainly as a cautionary tale: '1% inspiration and 99% perspiration'.
Sources
- Wikipedia — Polywater (Fedyakin, Deryagin, claimed properties, Rousseau, 1973 concession)
- Science History Institute — Ainissa Ramirez, 'The Rise and Fall of Polywater' (Distillations, 25 Feb 2020)
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