Obscurity to fame for Professor Thomas Parnell, MA: the physicist, his pitch, and a prize

The young physicist Thomas Parnell left the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and St. John’s College, for Australia in 1904, firmly convinced that he would soon return to a fellowship at his alma mater. That did not happen. He founded the Department of Physics at The University of Queensland, but still the Cambridge fellowship eluded him. In 2005, however, fifty-seven years after his demise in 1948, he was to receive a great ovation from an audience of more than a thousand people in Cambridge—not his Cambridge, but the one which is home to Harvard University—for his having initiated in 1927 the now-famous UQ Physics pitch drop experiment