The pitch drop experiment
The longest lab experiment: one drop a decade
In 1927 Professor Thomas Parnell put pitch, a tar that looks solid and shatters under a hammer, into a funnel to show students it is really a liquid. Only nine drops have fallen since, and nobody has ever seen one actually fall.
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Did you know
The keeper of the pitch drop experiment waited 52 years to see a drop fall, and never did. John Mainstone once missed one by stepping out for tea, and in 2000 the camera failed in a thunderstorm. The experiment won an Ig Nobel Prize. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1914–1918 World War I — 13 years earlier
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 9 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 12 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 20 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 21 years later
Europe
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — 8 years earlier
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 1 year later
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 6 years later
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 9 years later
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 14 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1917 October Revolution — 10 years earlier
- 1917–1922 Russian Civil War — 10 years earlier
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 2 years later
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 9 years later
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 14 years later
Middle East
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — 19 years earlier
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 12 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 11 years earlier
- 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — 4 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 5 years later
Africa
- 1904–1908 The Herero and Nama genocide — 23 years earlier
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 5 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 8 years later
Asia
- 1911–1912 Xinhai Revolution — 16 years earlier
- 1923 Great Kantō earthquake — 4 years earlier
- 1931 China floods — 4 years later
- 1934–1935 Long March — 7 years later
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 18 years later
Americas
- 1913 Ford's moving assembly line — 14 years earlier
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 13 years earlier
- 1914 Death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon — 13 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 2 years later
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 3 years later
Alive at the time
- Thomas Edison (aged 80)
- Nikola Tesla (aged 71)
- Marie Curie (aged 60)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 58)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 56)
- Winston Churchill (aged 53)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 49)
- Albert Einstein (aged 48)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 46)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 46)