3 ms·

Source for it being fictional? The original 1960 source describes it as extremely nonfictional: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1960-analog-octobe

• gjm11 5mo ago
  It also, unsurprisingly, tells a slightly different and less startling story: it's not that glycerine crystallized in one lab and suddenly others around the world had the same problem, it's that glycerine hadn't been crystallizing in one lab but once the lab was sent a sample of crystallized glycerine the stuff always did crystallize there, presumably (assuming the story's true) because of some sort of tiny particles (whether of glycerine or of something else) that float about in the air or adhere to glassware and encourage glycerine to crystallize.