In 1871, William Thomson, more commonly known as Lord Kelvin — a famed British physicist who made key contributions to electromagnetic theory, thermodynamics, navigation and the absolute temperature system that bears his name — proposed a theory about a strange hypothetical shape, which he called an isotropic helicoid.

Kelvin believed that if submerged in water and allowed to sink, a helicoid should spin like a tiny propeller.

By 3D printing five different isotropic helicoids according to Kelvin's instructions and then dropping them into silicone oil, the team discovered that the shapes didn't spin as they fell after all.

According to Voth, the 150-year lag between Kelvin's theory and a recorded experiment to test it may have been the consequence of deliberate omission, by later scientists and even Kelvin himself.

But when the experiment didn't work out, Kelvin may have quietly abandoned it, Voth speculated.

"In Kelvin's manuscript, he explicitly describes how to fabricate an isotropic helicoid, including materials to use, suggesting that he created one," Voth told Live Science.

"I personally suspect that Kelvin and others since have fabricated isotropic helicoids and observed that the measured translation-rotation coupling is determined by limits on the quality of the fabrication, and therefore, they didn't publish their measurements.".

They found that Kelvin was actually right — there was a coupling, or a relationship, between the movement of a helicoid through a fluid and its rotation.

But the coupling between movement and rotation was far too weak to have a distinctly measurable effect or for the helicoids to spin at all as they moved.

Now that they have assessed how the helicoids spin (or don't spin) in a real experiment, the researchers are planning to create a new helicoid with precision fabrication techniques to remove any imperfections.