Big Ben Cast: London's Iconic Bell Emerges

The bell now called Big Ben was cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in East London in 1858, after an embarrassing first attempt ended in a crack that could be heard across Westminster. The original bell, cast by Warner's of Norton in Stockton-on-Tees, weighed 16 tons and was tested in the yard of New Palace Yard at Westminster. When a massive hammer struck it during testing, a crack over four feet long split the metal. The failure was a public humiliation, debated in Parliament and mocked in the press. The Whitechapel foundry was commissioned to melt down the cracked bell and recast it at a reduced weight of 13.76 tons. The new bell was delivered to the Palace of Westminster on a carriage drawn by sixteen horses, crowds lining the route to watch. George Mears, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry's owner, supervised the casting personally, and the bell was hung in the Elizabeth Tower (then known simply as the Clock Tower) in 1859. Within months, this bell also cracked, albeit less severely, when struck by a hammer heavier than Mears had specified. Rather than recast the bell a third time, engineers rotated it so the hammer struck an undamaged section and reduced the hammer's weight. The crack gives Big Ben its distinctive tone, a slightly imperfect resonance that Londoners and BBC listeners have associated with the passage of time for over 160 years. Nobody is entirely certain why the bell is called Big Ben. The two leading theories attribute the name to Sir Benjamin Hall, the Commissioner of Works during the bell's installation, who was physically large and whose name was inscribed on the bell, or to Benjamin Caunt, a popular heavyweight boxer of the era. The name originally referred only to the bell, not the tower, though popular usage has extended it to encompass the entire structure. The tower itself stands 316 feet tall, and the clock mechanism, designed by Edmund Beckett Denison, was a masterpiece of Victorian horological engineering. The four clock faces are 23 feet in diameter, and the minute hands are 14 feet long. The mechanism was so accurate that it rarely deviated by more than a second, with adjustments made by adding or removing old pennies from a stack on the pendulum. Big Ben's chimes were first broadcast by the BBC on New Year's Eve 1923 and have marked the hour on British radio and television ever since, becoming the most recognizable timekeeper in the world.