In 1927 a physicist sealed tar in a funnel to prove a 'solid' is actually a liquid. Nearly a century later it has released only nine drops — and for decades not a single human ever caught one in the act of falling.
The 2013 Trinity College Dublin footage — the first time in history a pitch drop was ever recorded mid-fall, ending a jinx that had defeated observers for 69 years.
News coverage of the Queensland funnel's ninth drop — and the cruel irony that the custodian who watched it for decades died months before it fell.
Thomas Parnell's 1927 setup, the 1930 stem-cut, and the numbers: pitch is ~100 billion times more viscous than water, yet it flows. Guinness's longest-running lab experiment.
Not just Queensland: rival funnels at Trinity Dublin, St Andrews, Aberystwyth (1914!) and the National Museum of Scotland, plus Lord Kelvin's original demonstrations.
How the Dublin team's webcam succeeded where the more famous Queensland experiment kept failing — including the moment a power outage nearly cost them the shot.
35,000 people from 160 countries are registered to watch a funnel of tar do almost nothing — waiting to be the first person alive to witness the Queensland drop land.