Bárány discovered the principles of the caloric test when he was a young otologist in Vienna. He found that, while he was injecting warm and cold water in the auditory canal, subjects reported vertigo and dizziness. Importantly, he described in several articles how such irrigations evoked highly predictable reflexive eye movements, called nystagmus, and that the direction of this ‘caloric nystagmus’ depended on the water’s temperature.