In “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” José Arcadio Buendía takes his son to discover ice. The moment appears in the novel’s famous opening sentence, which looks forward to Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad and remembering that distant afternoon.
The discovery occurs when traveling Romani visitors bring unfamiliar scientific wonders to the isolated settlement of Macondo. Among their displays are magnets, telescopes, and ice. José Arcadio Buendía is fascinated by these objects and treats science as a gateway to mysteries that can reshape the world.
Ice is especially striking because Macondo begins as a remote tropical community whose residents have little contact with the outside world. Something ordinary to modern readers becomes astonishing and almost supernatural when encountered for the first time.
Magnets are a plausible mix-up because they are also introduced by the visitors and fuel José Arcadio Buendía’s experiments. However, the canonical remembered discovery in the opening is ice.