It was started in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell to reveal the distinctive properties of an everyday material; pitch- a hard tar-like substance. Parnell wanted to prove that though at room temperature, pitch appears to be a solid that can be shattered by a hammer, it is in fact a very high-viscosity liquid. Just getting ready to perform the experiment took years. First, the professor heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a sealed funnel. And then it came time to wait.
For three years, Parnell let the pitch settle in the funnel and then, when he felt the pitch was ready, he cut the bottom of the funnel, and freed the pitch. It started descending at an eye-poppingly slow pace; it’s like watching something in slow motion, in slow motion. Parnell lived long enough to record the first two drips- the first in 1938 and the other in 1947. Parnell died in 1948, but his experiment did not.
About 79 years after the experiment first started, the ninth drop is only now forming. Pitch has now been calculated to be roughly 230 billion times more vicious than water. A live webcam is set up so that everyone could observe the experiment! Check it out in the source!