Though he came from a wealthy family (Joule's Stone Ales), the British physicist James Prescott Joule devoted much of his life to science (and was rewarded with his discovery of the first law of thermodynamics).

Such was his love of experimentation (much of it done at the family brewery) that Joule rarely left home without scientific apparatus. Indeed, while visiting a waterfall with his wife on their honeymoon in 1847, he produced a thermometer with which to measure the change in the temperature of the water as it fell.

[It would take more than 24 hours for all of the Coca-Cola ever produced to flow over Niagara Falls.]