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Big Ben
back to sights listingBig Ben is one of London's well-known sightseeing, The most spectacular look it has at night when the clock faces are illuminated.
First of all you should know that "Big Ben" does not refer to the whole clocktower, but to the huge thirteen ton bell that strikes the hour.
The four dials of the clock are 23 feet square, the minute hand is 14 feet long and the figures are 2 feet high. Minutely regulated with a stack of coins placed on the huge pendulum, Big Ben is an excellent timekeeper, which has rarely stopped.
THE STORY OF BIG BEN
The Beginning...
On the night of the 16th of October, 1834 the old Palace of Westminster was destroyed by fire. The history say that Charles Barry, an architect, was coming back to London from Brighton, where he had designed a church, saw the glow of the fire in the distance and found the Houses of Parliament on fire. In 1844, Parliament made up a decision that the new buildings for the Houses of Parliament, then under construction, should incorporate a tower and clock. They launched a competition for design suitable for the new Palace. Charles Barry's design won.
Barry invited Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy, a clockmaker of reputation, to submit a design and price for constructing such a clock. No doubt Vulliamy was pleased to be the clockmaker of choice for what was then to be the largest clock in the world, but other enterprising firms were not happy with the manner in which they had no opportunity to compete for the contract. Subsequently, the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy, was appointed as referee for the new clock and produced a specification in 1846.. One of his requirements was that: "the first stroke of the hour bell should register the time, correct to within one second per day, and furthermore that it should telegraph its performance twice a day to Greenwich Observatory where a record would be kept". Tenders for such clock were invited and were received from three makers, Dent, Vulliamy and Whitehurst. In 1849 the famous horologist, Edmund Beckett Denison, later Sir Edmund Becket, the first Baron Grimthorpe was appointed co-referee with Airy. Denison was in agreement with Airy that Dent was the maker most capable of constructing the clock and they produced a revised specification and drawings, in respect of which Dent was requested to revise his estimate. In 1852 Dent was awarded the contract. In 1852 Dent was awarded the contract.
Next came the bells, and Denison discovered that Barry, now Sir Charles Barry, had specified a 14 ton hour bell but had made no provision for its production or for that of the four smaller quarter chime bells. Denison's studies of clocks had included bells and he had developed his own ideas as to how they should be designed and made.
The largest bell ever cast in Britain up to that time had been 'Great Peter' at York Minster. This weighed just 10? tons, so it is not surprising the bellfounders were wary of bidding for the contract to produce the new bell, particularly since Denison insisted on his own design for the shape of the bell as well as his own recipe for the bellmetal. It was during this period that he invented the double three-legged gravity escapement which enables the clock to keep such accurate time. In both respects his requirements varied significantly from traditional custom and practice. Eventually, a bell was made to his specification by John Warner & Sons at Stockton-on-Tees on 6th August 1856. This bell weighed about 16 tons, which was two tons heavier than intended. To compensate for this, Denison increased the weight of the ball hammer from 4 to 6 cwt, but the bell cracked irreparably while under test in the Palace Yard at Westminster.
Denison proclaimed the casting as faulty but the manufacturers denied this and claimed it was his fault for using too heavy a hammer. George Mears of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry was given the contract to recast the bell from the metal of the old in 1858 which he did successfully, producing a bell weighing 13.5 tons which is the one in use today.
It took a week to break up the old bell, three furnaces were required to melt the metal, and the mould was heated all day before the actual casting, the first time this had been done in British bell-founding. It took 20 minutes to fill the mould with molten metal, and 20 days for the metal to solidify and cool. After the bell had been tested in every way by Mears, Denison approved it before it left the foundry.
Transporting the bell the few miles from the foundry to the Houses of Parliament was a major event. Traffic stopped as the bell, mounted on a trolley drawn by sixteen brightly beribboned horses, made its way over London Bridge, along Borough Road, and over Westminster Bridge. The streets had been decorated for the occasion and enthusiastic crowds cheered the bell along the route.
The bells of the Great Clock of Westmister rang across London for the first time on 31st May 1859, and Parliament had a special sitting to decide on a suitable name for the great hour bell. During the course of the debate, and among many suggestions that were made, Chief Lord of the Woods and Forests, Sir Benjamin Hall, a large and ponderous man known affectionately in the House as "Big Ben", rose and gave an impressively long speech on the subject. When, at the end of this oratorical marathon, Sir Benjamin sank back into his seat, a wag in the chamber shouted out: "Why not call him Big Ben and have done with it?" The house erupted in laughter; Big Ben had been named. This, at least, is the most commonly accepted story.
In September, a mere two months after it officially went into service, Big Ben cracked. Once again Denison's belief that he knew more about bells than the experts was to blame for he had used a hammer more than twice the maximum weight specified by George Mears. Big Ben was taken out of service and for the next three years the hours were struck on the largest of the quarter-bells. Eventually, a lighter hammer was fitted, a square piece of metal chipped out of the soundbow, and the bell given an eighth of a turn to present an undamaged section to the hammer. This is the bell as we hear it today, the crack giving it its distinctive but less-than-perfect tone.
Big Ben remains the largest bell ever cast at Whitechapel. Visitors to the foundry pass through a full size profile of the bell that frames the main entrance as they enter the building. The original moulding gauge employed to form the mould used to cast Big Ben hangs on the end wall of the foundry above the furnaces to this very day.
During the second world war in 1941, an incendiary bomb destroyed the Commons chamber of the Houses of Parliament, but the clock tower remained intact and Big Ben continued to keep time and strike away the hours, its unique sound was broadcast to the nation and around the world, a welcome reassurance of hope to all who heard it.
There are even cells within the clock tower where Members of Parliament can be imprisoned for a breach of parliamentary privilege, though this is a rare case; the last recorded case was in 1880. There is a light at the top of the tower which indicates whether the House of Commons is sitting or is not. During the day you can tell if they're sitting by looking for a flag at the top of the nearby Victoria Tower, which is the tallest and largest of the Westminster towers.The tower with the world known bell Big Ben has been called by many names, one of the most popular is St Stephen's Tower. Though the official line, from the Head of Public Information at the Palace suggested that Clock Tower should be simply called The Clock Tower, the name Big Ben has now passed into every day use and is spread now for the tower as well.
The Clock Tower is unfortunately not open to the public so you won't be able to count how many steps actually lead to the belfry. But as some sources tell us, it's not 39, as everybody thinks. It's actually closer to 400 depending on where you start and finish. It is widely thought that Buchan dreamt up the idea of using 39 steps at a time when he was recovering from illness in a convalescent home. Directly outside his windows there were 39 steps leading from the patio to the lawn!
The room where the actual clock mechanism is placed has a lot of Victorian mechanical wonders that whiz and band each time the clock strikes.
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