The best-known version of the experiment was started in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, to demonstrate to students that some substances which appear solid are highly viscous fluids. Parnell poured a heated sample of the pitch into a sealed funnel and allowed it to settle for three years. In 1930, the seal at the neck of the funnel was cut, allowing the pitch to start flowing. A glass dome covers the funnel and it is placed on display outside a lecture theatre. Each droplet forms and falls over a period of about a decade.
The seventh drop fell at approximately 4:45 p.m. on 3 July 1988, while the experiment was on display at Brisbane's World Expo 88. However, apparently no one witnessed the drop fall itself; Professor Mainstone had stepped out to get a drink at the moment it occurred.
The eighth drop fell on 28 November 2000, allowing experimenters to calculate the pitch as having a viscosity of approximately 230 billion times that of water.
This experiment is recorded in Guinness World Records as the "world's longest continuously running laboratory experiment", and it is expected there is enough pitch in the funnel to allow it to continue for at least another hundred years. This experiment is predated by two other (still-active) scientific devices, the Oxford Electric Bell (1840) and the Beverly Clock (1864), but each of these has experienced brief interruptions since 1937.
The experiment was not originally carried out under any special controlled atmospheric conditions, meaning the viscosity could vary throughout the year with fluctuations in temperature.  Sometime after the seventh drop fell (1988), air conditioning was added to the location where the experiment takes place. The lower average temperature has lengthened each drop's stretch before it separates from the rest of the pitch in the funnel, and correspondingly the typical interval between drops has increased from eight years to 12–13 years.
In October 2005, John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in physics, a parody of the Nobel Prize, for the pitch drop experiment. Mainstone subsequently commented:
The experiment is monitored by a webcam but technical problems prevented the November 2000 drop from being recorded. The pitch drop experiment is on public display on Level 2 of Parnell building in the School of Mathematics and Physics at the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland. Hundreds of thousands of Internet users check the live stream each year.
Professor John Mainstone died on 23 August 2013, aged 78, following a stroke. Custodianship then passed to Professor Andrew White.
The ninth drop touched the eighth drop on 12 April 2014; however, it was still attached to the funnel. On 24 April, Professor White decided to replace the beaker holding the previous eight drops before the ninth drop fused to them (which would have permanently affected the ability of further drops to form). While the bell jar was being lifted, the wooden base wobbled and the ninth drop snapped away from the funnel.