The Pitch Drop Experiment
Strange but real experiments and discoveries.
The story
His name was Thomas Parnell. Pitch looks solid. Hit it with a hammer and it shatters like glass. But Parnell wanted to show his students it's actually a liquid, just the slowest one you ever saw. So he set it up at the University of Queensland to prove it. One drop falls about every ten years. Parnell died in 1948. He never saw one fall.
The next caretaker, John Mainstone, watched over it for fifty-two years. He missed every drop. One dropped right after he'd watched it all weekend and gone home for the night. Another fell while he stepped out for a drink. In 2000 they finally set up a camera… and a storm knocked out the power right when the drop fell.
Mainstone died in 2013. Eight months later, the next drop came down. It's the longest-running lab experiment in the world, and it's still in its glass case today. Nobody's ever seen one of its drops fall.
Sources
- smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment
- guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/longest-running-laboratory-experiment
- bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28402709
- theguardian.com/education/2022/apr/30/its-literally-slower-than-watching-austral
- theconversation.com/explainer-the-pitch-drop-experiment-33734
- newscientist.com/article/2000961-longest-experiment-sees-pitch-drop-after-84-yea
- nature.com/news/world-s-slowest-moving-drop-caught-on-camera-at-last-1.13418
- interestingengineering.com/science/worlds-slowest-experiment-explained