Big Ben

Big Ben is the bell of the Palace of Westminster in London, United Kingdom also known as the Great Bell of Westminster, the largest bell in the tower and part of the Great Clock of Westminster. some people would call the whole tower Big Ben, but the name properly refers only to the bell. 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. The tower is also sometimes referred to as St. Stephen's Tower.

The bell was cast in Stockton on Tees, but had to be re-cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry before completion of the clock and chimes in 1859. The BBC first broadcast the chimes on 31 December 1923 - there is a microphone in the turret connected to Broadcasting House.

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 bottom 61 m (200 ft) is the clock tower, consisting of brickwork with stone cladding; the remainder of the tower's height is 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. Due to thermal effects it oscillates annually by a few millimetres east and west. ^*

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. The clock faces are set in 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 heavily gilded. At the base of each clock face in gilt letters is the Latin inscription 'DOMINE SALVAM FAC REGINAM NOSTRAM VICTORIAM PRIMAM' meaning 'Lord save our Queen Victoria I'. The name Big Ben was first given to a 16-ton hour bell, cast in 1856. The bell was never officially named, but the legend on it records the commissioner of works, Sir Benjamin Hall, who was responsible for the order. 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.

The clock became operational on September 7 1859.

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.

A clock tower similar to Big Ben is the Chamberlain Tower of the University of Birmingham, England. Often referred to as "Old Tom" or "Old Joe", it is around three quarters of the size of Big Ben. Its four faces are each seventeen feet in diameter.

Baby Big Ben is the Welsh version of Big Ben at the Pierhead in Cardiff. Its mechanism is almost identical to the one which powers the Big Ben clock in London. ^*

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 the clock 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 31.8ºC/90ºF). It resumed keeping time, but stalled again at 10.20 p.m. and remained still for about 90 minutes before starting up again. ^*

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 a terrorist manual was found in the home of Abu Hamza al-Masri, marking Big Ben, The Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower as a terrorist targets. In his trial at The Old Bailey in 2006 he denied all knowledge of them being targets.

Starting on 5 June 2006 at 0700 hrs GMT, Big Ben's "Quarter Bells" are scheduled to be out of commission for four weeks ^*. A bearing holding one of the quarter bells was damaged from many years of wear and will be removed for repairs. BBC Radio 4 has taken to broadcasting different types of birdsong immediately prior to 6pm, followed by the pips.

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 can be used in the classroom to demonstrate the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. If a person visits London and stands at the bottom of the clock tower, they 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 the observer. (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)

An image of the clock tower was also used as the logo for London Films.

Fiction

A cultural cliche

The clock has become a visual symbol for the United Kingdom and London, particularly 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 popular 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 suggest to most British people 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, the unique nature of this particular sound has been considerably diluted.

Examples

The clock features in the climax of Don Sharp's 1978 film The Thirty-Nine Steps. This ending does not appear in John Buchan's original spy novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, nor other versions of the film.

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.

A variation of the Westminster Quarters is used as a leitmotif in the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd, first heard as the title character arrives back into a London port and recurring throughout the piece, helping to maintain a sense of location.

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". "The Clockwise Man", the first in a series of novels based on the 2005 series, uses the clock tower as a location in the finale. The clockwork mechanism of the tower is used to store energy to power up a spaceship which is hidden in the River Thames, in a story set in 1924.

In the graphic novel and film adaptation of V For Vendetta 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 centre of it over the clock tower.

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 Captain Scarlet the third episode is entitled Big Ben Strikes Again where Big Ben is supposed to strike thirteen but this is due to the physics of sound and Captain Blue uses it to pinpoint the location of an atomic bomb.

In an episode of FOX's The Simpsons, in the episode Lisa's Wedding we see that Big Ben's four faces have been replaced by digital clocks, which (most likely due to power outtage) are all flashing 12:00.

In Thunderball, the bell misrings to communicate with terrorists.

In Mars Attacks a scene is shown of the Martians attacking London, culminating in a shot of one of the ships attacking and destroying the clock tower.

In The Avengers, Sir August de Wynter uses his weather machine to make a lightning bolt strike the clocktower, causing the clock faces to explode and shower debris onto the city below.

A plot to take over the British Empire created by Brain in Pinky and the Brain centers around the laboratory mice breaking into the clocktower and stopping it at four PM, citing that if the Empire stops for teatime; then if the clock was permanently stopped at that time the Empire would grind to a halt.

In Futurama, the clocktower is featured as a part of 'Monument Beach' in the episode When Aliens Attack and is later destroyed in an Independence Day style parody when, as the title suggests; aliens attack.

In National Lampoon's European Vacation, the Griswold family becomes stuck on a roundabout while the father repeatedly says, "Look kids, Big Ben, Parliament!"

External links

Big Ben Webcam, Houses of Parliament, London, UK
Big Ben photo gallery
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
Aerial view at Google Local
Notes and Images on 1976 repairs

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