Polywater story

A book describing the polywater story has been published (Franks 1981). 

The amusing story of polywater, which excited the scientific community for a few years during the late 1960 s and early 1970 s, has been reviewed by Franks [175]. It turned out that polywater was not a new and more stable form of pure water, but merely dirty water. The strange properties of polywater were due to high concentrations of siliceous material dissolved from quartz capillaries in which it was produced. 

The victory of the As over the Bs, at the end of the 1960s, was consolidated by the polywater debacle, a story to be alluded to later, in conjunction with some other episodes of lemmings-like collective behavior. 

It was argued by some, early on in the story, that pol5water was simply impure water since boiling point elevation and freezing point depression are colligative properties characteristic of solutions. However, the flurry of papers emphasized the precautions that had been taken to avoid contamination, so for several years the existence of polywater was taken for granted as a real phenomenon. However, eventually the case for polywater began to crumble. Because it could only be formed in quartz capillaries of very small internal diameter, very little was available for analysis. When eventually small samples could be subjected to trace chemical analysis, polywater was shown to be contaminated with a variety of substances from silica to phospholipids. Moreover, electron microscopy revealed that polywater also contained finely divided colloidal particulates in suspension. 

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