As anyone who has tested this knows, it is possible to watch a pot until what is inside boils. This phrase is a proverb, meant to teach a lesson, and not to be taken literally. The idea is that water takes so long to boil that whoever is doing the watching will be unable to resist stepping away. It's all relative, really, because time does seem to fly sometimes if a person goes and does something else while the water is boiling.

Like many great phrases, this one seems to have originated with Benjamin Franklin, the American polymath who invented bifocals and the stove that's named after him and all sorts of other things. He also had a way with words, as evidenced by his many writings that have come down to us. He was famously known as the alter ego of Poor Richard, the person who was said to have published Poor Richard's Almanack, a series of writings that included aphorisms like ""Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" and other witty things that Poor Richard is said to have said. The Almanack appeared from 1732 to 1758.

The phrase in question is a corruption (or, perhaps, an augmentation) of something that Franklin himself wrote in a report in 1785. The exact quote, as Franklin wrote it, was this; "I was very Hungry; it was so late; 'a watched pot is slow to boil,' as Poor Richard says."

The quote itself doesn't appear in any editions of the Almanack. And yet, because Franklin really was Poor Richard and Poor Richard is said to have said it, Franklin is the one to whom the quote attributed, in its original form. How the words changed to "never boils" is anyone's guess. It first appeared in print in its now familiar form in the early 19th Century, by which time "is slow to boil" had already become "never boils."

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