World's slowest science lab experiment is still going and about to turn 100 years old
Published on Jan 20, 2026 at 7:08 AM (UTC+4)
by Claire Reid
Last updated on Jan 20, 2026 at 1:23 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Kate Bain
The world’s longest continuously running lab experiment has been live for almost 100 years, and it’s not set to end anytime soon.
The low-tech Pitch Drop experiment will have been up and running for a whopping 100 years in 2027.
It was started in 1927 at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, by Professor Thomas Parnell.
The experiment requires an awful lot of patience, with researchers waiting up to 12 years to see any movement.
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The Pitch Drop lab experiment has been running non-stop for almost 100 years
Parnell introduced the experiment to demonstrate the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch – one of the world’s thickest fluids.
He poured the hot pitch, which is a derivative of tar, into a sealed funnel in 1927 and then allowed it to settle for three whole years.
In October 1930, he cut the stem of the funnel to allow the pitch to drip through.
However, as you might have guessed, with pitch being one of the world’s thickest fluids, it didn’t exactly flood through the funnel.
In fact, the first drop took over eight years – 98 months, to be exact – to land.
Researchers had to wait even longer for the second drip, a total of 99 months, but the third landed in a far speedier 86 months.
OK, so we might be exaggerating slightly by calling it far speedier, but it was a whole lot faster comparatively speaking.
The seventh drop fell in July 1988 and took 111 months, and it seems as though it started a trend of slowing down, with the eighth drop falling in November 2000 – a 148-month wait – and the ninth and most recent landing in April 2014, 161 months later.
It was a real exercise in patience.
Researchers were able to study the eighth drop and found that it had a viscosity of around 280 billion times that of water.
The experiment has earned itself a spot in the Guinness World Records as the ‘world’s longest continuously running lab experiment’ and is expected to keep running for around another 100 years or so.
No one has ever seen one of the drops land, but one is expected to fall soon
Interestingly, no one has ever seen one of the pitch drops fall.
In a stark display of bad timing, the experiment’s previous custodian, John Mainstone, had just stepped out of the lab for a drink back on July 3, 1988, when the seventh drop landed.
And even though the Pitch Drop experiment has been live-streamed for decades, technical glitches meant that the 2000 and 2014 events were not recorded.
But experts believe the next drop will happen at some point in the 2020s; here’s hoping someone is around to see it.
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With a background in both local and national press in the UK, Claire moved to New Zealand before joining the editorial team at Supercar Blondie in May 2024. As a Senior Content Writer working on New Zealand Standard Time (NZST), Claire was the first writer on the team to make the site’s output a slick 24/7 operation covering the latest in automotive news.
