It all started with the Soviet physicist, Nikolai Fedyakin, who performed experiments on the properties of water that had been forced through a narrow capillary tube. The experiments resulted in a new type of water with a higher melting point and a lower freezing point. It also had a higher viscosity than that of ordinary water.
Boris Derjaguin, a physicist in Moscow, heard about Fedyakin's experiments and improved the production of the new water, even though it was in small quantities. Although his work was published in journals and scientific magazines, no one took notice of it until he went to England and presented his work at a conference. In two years time, the United States was studying polywater as well.
The main debate between Russian and American scientists was the authenticity of polywater- whether or not it truly existed. Some said that polywater was simply water with small amounts of biological impurities. Others said that the high level of boiling point and low freezing point was due to the impurities present in the water. It took the Russians a little longer to come to the notion that polywater did not exist because they still wanted to cling to the idea.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/ATG/polywater.html
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