By Andrew Grant
Grass grows quicker. Paint dries faster. Yet there’s something irresistible about watching the glacial flow of pitch.
And now a long-forgotten experiment with pitch has come to light, probably the oldest known of its kind. In a small display case at Aberystwyth University in Wales sits a glass funnel filled with a heap of ultra-viscous pitch, dated April 23, 1914. That’s 13 years older than a similar setup at the University of Queensland in Australia, which Guinness World Records lists as the longest continually running laboratory experiment.