Big Ben: The Bell, the Clock and the Tower

by Peter MacDonald, Tam Dalyell

Overview

Big Ben is perhaps the most famous clock in the world. Peter Macdonald tells its story, from its conception in the 1830s to its establishment as the national timepiece and the symbol of Britain up to the present day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752495491
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	10/13/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	593 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

Read an Excerpt

Big Ben

The Bell, The Clock and The Tower

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By Peter Macdonald

The History Press

Copyright © 2013 Peter Macdonald
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9549-1

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CHAPTER 1

In the Beginning ...

Had it not been for the fire which destroyed both Houses of Parliament on the night of 16 October 1834, Big Ben might never have been built. Construction was excruciatingly slow and fraught with so much argument, hostility and suspicion that a quarter of a century would elapse between the destruction of the old Palace of Westminster and the completion of the clock.

Before meeting the personalities involved in the designing and building of the Great Clock, in order to set it in context it is worth considering the history of Westminster, the development of horology and, most importantly, the need for accurate timekeeping. Big Ben is not the first great clock to stand by the Thames at Westminster – indeed, the story begins over seven hundred years ago towards the end of the thirteenth century, for it was around this time that a clock was erected in New Palace Yard. Some authorities maintain that this was the first public clock to be built in Britain, but unfortunately no information concerning the mechanism has survived. However, it is likely that the clock was controlled by an early form of verge escapement and that it made use of a foliet, which was a balance bar shaped rather like a dumb-bell. The foliet was the predecessor of the pendulum and it swung horizontally. In fact the pendulum, which swings in the vertical plane and is so familiar nowadays, was not invented until the middle of the seventeenth century. Galileo was believed to have been engaged on the development of a pendulum clock at the time of his death in 1642, but it was the Dutch astronomer and mathematician Christiaan Huygens who completed his design for the first pendulum clock in 1656. His clock is believed to have been made by Samuel Coster during the following year under a patent granted to him by Huygens. Although it is conceded that Huygens was the inventor of the pendulum clock, Galileo's son claimed that the invention was his father's. Contrary to a popular misconception, it is, in fact, the clock that drives the pendulum, whose regular beat enables the clock to maintain time.

The early clock at Westminster is thought to have featured one dial, facing the palace, the hours being indicated by just a single hand as well as being struck upon a bell. The fact that it had a dial is a reflection of the clock's importance. Very early clocks, most of which were used for ecclesiastical purposes, did not possess a dial or hands, relying merely upon the striking of a bell to denote the passing of the hours. In those distant times it was only the nobility and the clergy who could read and write or understand the passage of time as indicated by the movement of a hand upon a dial; the remainder of the population had to rely on the sound of a bell. But the Palace of Westminster was not only the main royal residence, it was also the seat of government, and so the clock had to be designed accordingly. Even so, early turret clocks were very unreliable. They were usually built by blacksmiths and constructed from iron. With no bearings or compensation for changes in temperature, they could vary by perhaps thirty minutes or even more during the course of twenty-four hours and required a daily correction by comparison with a sundial. So, this first clock at Westminster would not have had anything like the accuracy which we would expect today. The bell on which the hours were to be struck was cast around 1290 in the reign of King Edward I and was called Edward of Westminster. It weighed 4 tons, which was a good weight for a bell in the thirteenth century. Although officially called Edward, the bell soon became known as Great Tom. It was to strike the hours at Westminster for almost the next four centuries, during which time it managed to survive a number of minor incidents.

During the early evening of 6 April 1580 an earthquake was felt over a wide area of south-eastern England. It was one of the few British earthquakes known to have caused fatalities. In Dover, part of the castle wall was demolished and it is recorded that in London two deaths were caused by falling masonry and that St Paul's Cathedral sustained some damage. At Westminster, Great Tom was set ringing by the force of the tremor, striking itself against the hammer, although the clock appears to have remained unscathed.

However, the clock is thought to have sustained some damage during the Civil War when a small band of Royalists took refuge in the clock tower. It seems that they felt capable of defending the tower in a siege and offered considerable resistance to Cromwell's men, but when their ammunition became exhausted they removed whatever they could from the clock and threw it down in an effort to fend off their besiegers. Eventually, the damage sustained to the mechanism was repaired but the clock was never the same again, or so it is said. It seems that this lack of reliability was to be of great benefit to one man. There is a story that sometime during the seventeenth century, a young soldier named John Hatfield was brought before a court martial, charged with having fallen asleep while on sentry duty one night at Windsor Castle. The soldier maintained that he had not been asleep and in his defence stated that he had heard Great Tom strike thirteen at midnight. Upon enquiry, his statement was found to be correct, the court accepted his evidence and he was acquitted. Windsor is some twenty miles from London and one might wonder how the soldier could claim to have heard the clock at such a distance, but perhaps in former times, at night and before the constant rumble of traffic, it might just have been possible for someone with exceptionally good hearing under the most favourable conditions. That's the story, but it may or may not be true. It certainly seems very unlikely.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century the clock had fallen into such a state of disrepair that it stopped working altogether. In about 1700, the clock tower, which was crumbling to a great extent, was demolished. It is not known what became of the clock or its mechanism, but the bell was sold to St Paul's Cathedral, which had recently been rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren after the ravages of the Great Fire. Unfortunately, some time elapsed before the bell reached the cathedral, for while being transported along the Strand it fell from its carriage near the road which has subsequently been called Bell Yard, and lay shattered. Two attempts by Phillip Wightman to recast the bell some years later proved unsuccessful, but eventually in 1716 it was recast satisfactorily by Richard Phelps at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. By the provision of some additional metal, he increased its weight to more than 41/2 tons and installed it in the south-west tower of St Paul's, where it remains to this day. For almost three hundred years, Great Tom has sounded the hours as they have been struck from the cathedral, both by the earlier clock and by the present one. But the bell is not the only connection between the clocks at Westminster and St Paul's, as will be shown later.

After Great Tom's departure at the end of the seventeenth century there was to be no great clock at Westminster for more than one hundred and fifty years, during which time horology saw many developments. As already noted, during the middle of the seventeenth century the pendulum had been invented and it was eagerly adopted as the standard by clockmakers. Around the same time, the English physicist Robert Hooke invented the anchor, or recoil escapement. Previously, the verge was the only form of escapement in use and the introduction of the anchor was the first step towards making the pendulum an accurate timekeeper. Most importantly, in 1675, King Charles II had established the Royal Observatory at Greenwich for the purpose of establishing longitude at sea. Estimating the position of a ship when in sight of land was not difficult, but doing the same after many weeks or months at sea and with no landmarks had hitherto proved impossible. Finding the longitude was the most pressing scientific problem of the day for it was known that accurate navigation would bring supremacy at sea. The King's warrant therefore charged John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, 'to find out the so much desired Longitude of Places for perfecting the art of navigation'.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century so many ships and their cargos were being lost as a result of seafarers being unable to determine their position that the situation was desperate indeed. In 1714, in an effort to remedy the situation, Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 to any person who could establish a method which would resolve the longitude to within one half of one degree, a distance of some thirty-five miles at the equator, decreasing to about twenty-two miles at the latitude of London. This prize represented a magnificent sum in the eighteenth century – today it would be worth well over £1 million – and many schemes were put forward, some of which were not worthy of even the slightest consideration. One of the most bizarre suggestions involved using a solution known as the 'powder of sympathy'. This powder, if it ever existed, was reputed to possess almost miraculous healing properties, but unfortunately, not without pain. It was claimed not only that dipping a patient's bandage, or even an implement which had caused an injury, into the powder would hasten the healing of a wound but also that it would continue to do so even over great distances. This scatterbrain scheme for finding the longitude required sending on every voyage a dog which had been wounded with a knife. The knife would be left ashore in the custody of some responsible person who would dip it into the powder every day at noon. On feeling the pain, the dog would yelp in sympathy, thus providing the captain with the time at his home port. Needless to say, this scheme, in common with so many others which were proposed, had no scientific foundation and could not be taken seriously.

In fact, it was not until John Harrison set to work to develop his chronometers that any advance was made. Harrison reasoned that if a ship could carry a clock which maintained the time of its home port, the mariner could establish his longitude by comparing the difference between clock time and local noon which occurs when the sun reaches its greatest altitude above the horizon. Time is longitude and longitude is time – the idea was simple but the solution was virtually impossible. Because of the pitching and rolling of a ship, a pendulum clock would be useless at sea, so Harrison spent the greater part of his working life perfecting the chronometer, a precision instrument driven by a spring rather than by a weight. Harrison was a perfectionist who worked alone and was never satisfied. After the decades of frustration and rejection, which he had experienced with the development and presentation of his three earlier models, he completed his H4 chronometer in 1759. It was a masterpiece of engineering which became the forerunner of all marine chronometers. The H4 underwent many exhausting trials, and after several months at sea it had accumulated an error of a mere few seconds and provided the determination of longitude to within limits far more stringent than those which had been laid down by Parliament. Harrison had made the greatest possible contribution to navigation, yet his reward for finding the longitude was given very grudgingly, and by instalments, his final payment being made when he was eighty years of age; even then it was received only after he had appealed to the king, George III. It has been said that Harrison gave Britain the Empire, for without the development of the chronometer it is unlikely that she would have become such a great seafaring nation. Harrison's chronometers H1 to H4 are among the nation's treasures and may be seen at the Old Royal Observatory, Greenwich, where they are on permanent exhibition. His final endeavour, H5, is on display in the Clockmakers' Museum at the Guildhall in London. Harrison was also one of Britain's most gifted clockmakers and produced some splendid examples, his finest turret clock probably being that at Brocklesby Park in Yorkshire.

As society developed so there was an ever greater need for the accurate measurement of time. Almost every village and town had a clock, usually on the church or an important civic building. Even the most modest of these clocks would probably have been accurate to within a few minutes. The clock face would have been the same as we know today, with two hands, one indicating the hours and the other the minutes, and the dial showing the twelve hours. The hands would move in a 'clockwise' direction, that is to say, the direction of the shadow cast by the gnomon on any horizontal sundial, or even by a simple stick in the ground, situated in European latitudes, which is where horology developed.

Because time varies with longitude, there were considerable differences in the time shown on clocks in the east of the British Isles and those in the west. These differences had become apparent through the timing of stage coaches, but it was the coming of the railways in the 1830s and 1840s which demonstrated beyond any doubt the need for uniformity. The effect was not so noticeable on lines running to the north, but the greatest problems were experienced by the Great Western Railway on their services to the West Country – for example, the time in Plymouth is more than a quarter of an hour behind that in London. As most lines radiated from the capital, the railway companies preferred to operate their schedules to London time which came to be known in its more diplomatically acceptable form as railway time. In 1848 a bill which sought the introduction of a standard time was brought before Parliament, but it faced such strong opposition, particularly from local and regional interests, that it was thrown out. Local time was always implied unless it was stated otherwise. A court case in the 1850s illustrated just how confusing was this state of affairs when it had to be retried after the defendant arrived late for the hearing, but claiming that he was on time by the clock in his home town! Indeed, it was not until 1880 that the Definition of Time Act was passed and Greenwich Mean Time became the standard for the whole of the British Isles. Even when Big Ben started its long and distinguished career in 1859 it showed London time while clocks in other parts of Britain gave their local time. Today, we are so accustomed to having the time displayed accurately at our fingertips that we do not stop to consider how different things would have been in the early part of the Victorian period when there was no radio, no television, no telephone or satellite communication and consequently no broadcast time signals.

However, the concept of providing a time signal was beginning to be discussed and in 1833 the Astronomer Royal, John Pond, instituted the Greenwich Time Ball as a means of providing a signal to shipping on the River Thames. A marine timekeeper is designed to keep time, but before setting out on a long voyage, it was necessary to know the time in the first place. At Greenwich, ships' chronometers could be compared with the observatory clock. This would have to be done indirectly; as any movement of the chronometer might affect its rate, a pocket watch would be taken ashore and used as a go-between.

During the early part of the nineteenth century, there appears to have been a number of experiments which were undertaken at various locations involving the sending of a time signal from the shore for the benefit of ships anchored at harbour. The modes of operation were very rudimentary and included the waving of a flag or the firing of a gun. In 1829, an experimental time ball which was controlled by a signal from the Royal Naval College in the dockyard was erected at the entrance to Portsmouth harbour. This appears to have been the precursor of a regular time signal because in October 1833 the Admiralty issued the following Notice to Mariners:

The Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty hereby give notice that a ball will henceforth be dropped every day from the top of a pole on the Eastern Turret of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, at the moment of one o'clock pm mean solar time. By observing the first instant of its downward movement, all vessels in the adjacent reaches of the river as well as in most of the docks, will thereby have an opportunity of regulating and rating their chronometers. The ball will be hoisted half-way up the pole, at five minutes before one o'clock, as a preparatory signal, and close up at two minutes before one.

As the observatory had been built upon the hill in Greenwich Park, it is easily visible from the Thames, so the ball was set upon a tower on Flamsteed House and operated in the following manner. In accordance with the Notice to Mariners, at five minutes to one the ball was hoisted from its 'dropped' or resting position to half way up the pole by an assistant operating a pulley far below in the observatory, as an indication that the hour was approaching. Then at 12.58 it was hoisted the remainder of the way to the top. Finally, at one the ball was released by another assistant located in front of the clock in the observatory and fell to the 'dropped' position, giving the time.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Big Ben by Peter Macdonald. Copyright © 2013 Peter Macdonald. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
1 In the Beginning ...,
2 A Great Clock for Westminster,
3 Obstacles Overcome,
4 The First Tick – then Trouble,
5 The Name of the Bell and the Music of the Chimes,
6 Pennies on the Pendulum,
7 On the Air,
8 Big Ben during Wartime,
9 Great Tom Takes Over,
10 Big Ben Clocks up a Century,
11 Mishaps, Curiosities and Breakdowns,
12 A Glorious Moment,
13 A Look to the Future,
Appendix I: A Visit to the Clock Tower,
Appendix II: The Whitechapel Bell Foundry,
Appendix III: The Astronomer Royal's Specification,
Appendix IV: Dimensions of the Great Clock and Bells,
Appendix V: Britain's Heaviest Bells,
Chronology,
Notes and References,
Bibliography,