A schoolboy in Tanganyika noticed what Aristotle had written about: hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold.
Erasto Mpemba saw it in 1963 while making ice cream; he was mocked, but the effect now bears his name.
More amazing facts
- 356 BC Tradition holds that the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus burned on the very day Alexander the Great was born.
- 356 BC · 221 BC In 356 BC Alexander the Great was born, and the state of Qin began Shang Yang's reforms.
- 351 BC The word 'mausoleum' is a man's name.
- 340 BC Diogenes did not live in a barrel but in a pithos, a huge clay storage jar, in Athens.
- 338 BC One of history's shortest replies came from Sparta.
- 326 BC Alexander’s men marvelled at an Indian reed that “yields honey without bees”. That was how his admiral Nearchus described sugarcane in 326 BC, a plant Europe barely knew.