Big Ben
Big Ben is the colloquial name of the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster in London, and an informal name for the Great Bell of Westminster, the largest bell in the tower and part of the Great Clock of Westminster. Coordinates: 51°30′2.6″N 0°7′28.6″W / 51.500722°N 0.124611°W. The clock tower is at the north-eastern end of the building, the home of the Houses of Parliament, and contains the famous striking clock and bell.
Naming
The name, "Big Ben" is almost universally used to describe the clock tower as a whole. However, officially, "Big Ben" refers specifically to the principal bell within the tower - the largest and lowest in pitch that counts the number of hours, following each hourly chime sequence. One theory says that the bell is named after Sir Benjamin Hall, the Chief Commissioner of Works. Another theory suggests that at the time anything which was heaviest of its kind was called "Big Ben" after the then-famous prizefighter Benjamin Caunt, making it a natural name for the bell.
The tower is also sometimes referred to as St Stephen's Tower, though this name refers to the other tower at the Palace of Westminster. This name might originate from St Stephen's Hall, site of the old House of Commons in the western wing of the Palace of Westminster, which is the entrance used by visitors wishing to view the proceedings of the Houses of Parliament, and British subjects wishing to lobby their MP.
History and construction
The Clock Tower
The tower was raised as a part of Charles Barry's design of a new palace, after the old Palace of Westminster was destroyed by fire on the night of October 16, 1834. The tower is designed in the Victorian Gothic style, and is 96.3 m (316 ft) high.
The 61 m (200 ft) tower consists of brickwork with stone cladding; the remainder of the tower's height is accounted for by a framed spire of cast iron. The tower is founded on a 15 by 15 m (49 by 49 ft) raft, made of 3 m (9 ft) thick concrete, at a depth of 7 m (23 ft) below ground level. The tower has an estimated weight of 8,667 t. The four clock faces are 55 m (180 ft) above ground.
Due to ground conditions present since construction, the tower leans slightly to the north-west, by roughly 220 mm. It also oscillates annually by a few millimetres east and west, due to thermal effects. [1]
The clock and its faces
The clock in the tower was once the biggest in the world, able to strike the first blow for each hour with an accuracy of one second. The clock mechanism was completed by 1854, but the tower was not fully constructed until four years later.
The clock faces and dials were designed by Augustus Pugin. It is an iron framework 23 feet in diameter supporting 312 pieces of opal glass, rather like a stained glass window. Some of the glass pieces may be removed for inspection of the hands. The surround of the dials is heavly gilded. At the base of each clock face in gilt letters is the Latin inscription 'DOMINE SALVAM FAC REGINAM NOSTRAM VICTORIAM PRIMAM' which means 'Lord save our Queen Victoria I'. The name Big Ben was first given to a 16-ton hour bell, cast in 1856. Since the tower was not yet finished, the bell was mounted in New Palace Yard but the bell cracked under the striking hammer, and its metal was recast as the 13.8 ton bell which is in use today. The new bell was mounted in the tower in 1858 alongside four quarter-hour bells.
On September 7, 1859, the clock became fully operational.
The hands of the clock are very good.
EXCELLENT SITE HUH??????
Other bells
Along with the main bell, the belfry houses four quarter bells which play the Westminster Quarters, derived from Handel's Messiah, on the quarter hours. The C note in the chime is repeated twice in quick succession, faster than the chiming train can draw back the hammers, so the C bell uses two separate hammers.
Similar turret clocks
A 20 foot (6 m) metal replica of the clock tower, known as Little Ben, complete with working clock, stands on a traffic island close to Victoria Station. Several turret clocks around the world are inspired by the look of the Great Clock, including the clock tower of the Gare de Lyon in Paris and the Peace Tower of the Parliament of Canada in Ottawa.
Reliability
The clock is famous for its reliability. This is due to the skill of its designer, the lawyer and amateur horologist Edmund Beckett Denison, later Lord Grimthorpe. As the clock mechanism, created to Denison's specification by clockmaker Edward John Dent, was completed before the tower itself was finished, Denison had time to experiment. Instead of using the deadbeat escapement and remontoire as originally designed, Denison invented the double three-legged gravity escapement. This escapement provides the best separation between pendulum and clock mechanism. Together with an enclosed, wind-proof box sunk beneath the clockroom, the Great Clock's pendulum is well isolated from external factors like snow, ice and pigeons on the clock hands, and keeps remarkably accurate time.
The idiom of putting a penny on, with the meaning of slowing down, sprung from the method of fine-tuning the clock's pendulum by adding or subtracting penny coins. Even to this day, old pennies, phased out of British currency by the 1971 decimalisation, are used.
Despite heavy bombing, it ran accurately throughout The Blitz. It slowed down on New Year's Eve 1962 due to heavy snow, causing it to chime in the new year 10 minutes late.
The clock had its first and only major breakdown in 1976. The chiming mechanism broke due to metal fatigue on 5 August 1976, and was reactivated again on 9 May 1977. During this time BBC Radio 4 had to make do with the pips.
It stopped on 30 April 1997, the day before the general election, and again three weeks later.
On Friday, 27 May 2005 the clock stopped ticking for 90 minutes from 10.07pm, possibly due to hot weather (temperatures in London had reached an unseasonal 31.8°C/90°F). It resumed keeping time, but stalled again at 10.20 p.m. and remained still for about 90 minutes before starting up again. [2]
On 29 October 2005, Big Ben was stopped for approximately 33 hours so that the clock and its chimes could be worked on. It was the lengthiest maintenance shutdown in 22 years.
In 2005, Abu Hamza had a terrorist manual in his house which was found labelling Big Ben as a terrorist target. It also labelled The Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. In his trial at The Old Bailey in 2006 he denied all knowledge of them being potential targets.
Culture
Big Ben is a focus of New Year celebrations in England, with radio and TV stations tuning to its chimes to welcome the start of the year. Similarly, on Remembrance Day, the chimes of Big Ben are broadcast to mark the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month and the start of two minutes' silence.
For many years ITN's "News at Ten" began with an opening sequence which featured Big Ben with the chimes punctuating the announcement of the news headlines. The Big Ben chimes are still used today during the headlines and all ITV News bulletins use a graphic based on the Westminster clock face. Big Ben can also be heard striking the hour before some news bulletins on BBC Radio 4 (currently 6pm and midnight, plus 10pm on Sundays) and the BBC World Service, a practice that began on December 31, 1923. The chimes are transmitted live via a microphone permanently installed in the tower and connected by line to Broadcasting House.
Big Ben is often used in the Physics classroom to demonstrate the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound for British children. Specifically, if you were to visit London and stand at the bottom of the clock tower, you will hear the chimes of Big Ben approximately 1/6 of a second later than the bell being struck (assuming a bell height of 55 metres). However, using a microphone placed near the bell and transmitting the sound to a far away destination by radio (for instance New York or Hong Kong), that location will hear the bell long before you do on the ground. In fact, if the recipient were to echo the sound back to the observer on the ground, the bell would be heard on the radio before the natural sound reached you. (Example: New York is 3456 miles from London, and radio waves will reach New York in 0.018552 seconds; round trip is 0.037105 seconds, compared to 0.1616 seconds for the natural sound to reach the ground)
Fiction
A cultural cliche
The easily recognisable image of the clock has become a very well-used visual symbol for the United Kingdom, and specifically for London. This is particularly true in the visual media. When a television or film-maker wishes to quickly convey to a non-UK audience a generic location in the United Kingdom; a very popular and cliched way to do so is to show an image of "Big Ben", often with a Routemaster bus in the foreground. This gambit is less often used in the United Kingdom itself, as it would to most British people suggest a specific location in London, which may not be the intention.
The sound of the clock chiming has also been used this way in audio media, but as the Westminster Quarters are heard from many other clocks and other devices elsewhere, the unique nature of this particular sound has been considerably diluted.
There are very many examples in film, televison, and cartoon media of this use and those following are but a few of them.
Examples
- The clock features in the climax of Don Sharp's 1978 film adaptation of John Buchan's spy novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, although it does not appear in either Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 adaptation nor, more interestingly, Buchan's book.
A similar scene is recreated in the 2003 film, Shanghai Knights which culminates with Jackie Chan hanging from the hands of the clock.
- In the monster movie Gorgo, the mother monster destroys the tower.
- The tower is featured several times during the 2005 series of Doctor Who. It is destroyed in Aliens of London by a spacecraft that crashes into the River Thames; seen during the Blitz in "The Empty Child"; and is seen being restored in "The Christmas Invasion".
- In the graphic novel V For Vendetta (as well as its film adaptation), the terrorist hero V blows up the tower along with the rest of Parliament.
- In the first entry of the computer military game series "Command & Conquer," a player has the option of destroying the tower.
- Individual clock faces were stolen by the evil Doctor Dredd in The Drac Pack, and a Jack and the Beanstalk style giant, who used it for his cuckoo clock (Secret Squirrel). The whole tower was stolen by the snake-witch Messina in Freddie as FRO7
- The clock also features in the climax of the animated film Basil, The Great Mouse Detective.
- Big Ben can be seen on television in Independence Day as a large alien destroyer is seen hovering over London with the center of it over the clock tower. (and is eventually destroyed by the plasma ray).
- An earlier film climax on the clock face of Big Ben appears in Will Hay's 1943 film My Learned Friend, although the scene is more slapstick than thriller.
- In a scene in the Disney classic, Peter Pan, the Darling children and Peter take a rest on the minute hand of Big Ben. The video game Kingdom Hearts has Neverland as one of the last worlds in the game, and it features this same clock.
- In an episode of FOX's The Simpsons, in episode where a fortune teller helps Lisa Simpson see her future, we see that Big Ben's four faces have been replaced by digital clocks.
External links
- Big Ben Webcam, Houses of Parliament, London, UK
- Explore Parliament
- Whitechapel Bell Foundry on Big Ben
- Factsheet from Palace of Westminster (includes details on The Great Clock)
- Big Ben
- Innovative engineering to control Big Ben’s tilt - A technical paper from Cambridge University
- Skyscrapernews detail on Big Ben
- Big Ben Clock widget on Yahoo! widgets