any information on the bigben in london england would help???

Question

i am doing a project for school and if u hade and information or any were i can find infromation on the big ben in london england. i am looking for an architeects name, size of the building (which is the entire building of parlemnt not just bigben), and the motivation for making it any thing will help thank you

Answer 1

This site gives you the story of how it came to be: http://www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk/bigben.htm

This site gives some facts and figures: http://www.londonnet.co.uk/ln/guide/about/gallbigb.html

This site tells you about Parliament and Big Ben itself: http://www.parliament.uk/about/index.cfm

Answer 2

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Answer 3

Big Ben, as it is colloquially known, is the Clock Tower at the north-eastern end of the Houses of Parliament building in Westminster, London, England. It is popularly known as Big Ben, but this name actually belongs to the clock's main bell. The tower has also been referred to as St. Stephen's Tower or The Tower of Big Ben, in reference to its bell.

The tower was raised as a part of Charles Barry's design for a new palace, after the old Palace of Westminster was destroyed by fire on the night of 16 October 1834. The tower is designed in the Victorian Gothic style, and is 96.3 metres (316 feet) high.

The first 61 metres (200 feet) of the structure 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 metre by 15 metre (49 foot by 49 foot) raft, made of 3 metre (9 foot) thick concrete, at a depth of 7 metres (23 feet) below ground level. The tower has an estimated weight of 8,667 tonnes (9,553 tons). The four clock faces are 55 metres (180 feet) above ground.

Due to the condition of the ground, the tower leans slightly to the north-west by roughly 220 millimetres (8.66 inches). Due to thermal effects it oscillates annually by a few millimetres east and west.

The clock faces were once large enough to allow the Clock Tower to be the largest four-faced clock in the world, but have since been outdone by the Allen-Bradley Clock Tower in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The builders of the Allen-Bradley Clock Tower did not add chimes to the clock, so the Great Clock of Westminster still holds the title of the "world's largest four-faced chiming clock." The clock mechanism itself was completed by 1854, but the tower was not fully constructed until four years later in 1858.

The hour hand is 2.7 metres (9 feet) long and the minute hand is 4.3 metres (14 feet) long.The clock and dials were designed by Augustus Pugin. The clock faces are set in an iron framework 7 metres (21 feet) in diameter, supporting 576 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 clock became operational on 7 September 1859 but during World War II, the Palace of Westminster was hit by German bombing, destroying the House of Commons and causing damage to the tower's western clockface.

The name Big Ben was first given to a 14.5 tonne (16 ton) hour bell, cast on 10 April 1856 in Stockton-on-Tees by George Mears. The bell was never officially named, but the legend on it records that the commissioner of works, Sir Benjamin Hall, was responsible for the order; another theory is that the bell may have been named after heavyweight boxer Benjamin Caunt who was popular at the time. There's also a story that the bell was to be called "Victoria" in honour of Queen Victoria, but the ceremonial speeches went on so long that some joker shouted out "Oh, just call it Big Ben and have done with it!" and the name stuck.

After the bell was made, the tower was still not finished and so it was mounted in New Palace Yard but the bell cracked under the striking hammer and its metal was recast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and made into the bell we use today. The new bell, which chimes on E, was mounted in the tower in 1908 alongside four quarter-hour bells, the ring of bells that ring the familiar changes.

The BBC first broadcast the chimes on 31 December 1923 - there is a microphone in the turret connected to Broadcasting House.

Along with the main bell, the belfry houses four quarter bells which play the Westminster Quarters on the quarter hours. The four quarter bells are G sharp, F sharp, E, and B. They play a 20-chime sequence. Because the low bell is struck twice in quick succession, there is not enough time to pull a hammer back, and it is supplied with two hammers on opposite sides of the bell.

A 6 metre (20 foot) metal replica of the clock tower, known as Little Ben and 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.

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 birds 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 to 11.37pm, 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, the mechanism 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 terrorist targets. In his trial at The Old Bailey in 2006 he denied all knowledge of their being targets.

Big Ben's "Quarter Bells" were taken out of commission for four weeks starting at 0700 hrs GMT on 5 June 2006 as a bearing holding one of the quarter bells was damaged from many years of wear and needed to be removed for repairs. During this period, BBC Radio 4 broadcast recordings of British bird song followed by the pips in place of the usual chimes.

Big Ben is a focus of New Year celebrations in the United Kingdom, 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 minute 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 (6pm and midnight, and 10pm on Sundays) and the BBC World Service, a practice that began on 31 December 1923.

Big Ben can be used 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 City or Hong Kong), that location will hear the bell before the person 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 them.

The clock has become a 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 Britain, a popular way to do so is to show an image of Big Ben, often with a Routemaster bus or Hackney carriage 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.

The structure has been shown in films such as The Thirty Nine Steps, V for Vendetta (which pictured the clock tower graphically exploding), Shanghai Knights, Peter Pan, Basil, The Great Mouse Detective, Independence Day, My Learned Friend, Mars Attacks!, National Lampoon's European Vacation, The Avengers, Gorgo, The War of the Worlds, and Flushed Away. It has also been shown in various television shows such as Futurama, The Simpsons, Doctor Who (particularly in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Aliens of London, The Empty Child and The Christmas Invasion) and Captain Scarlet. It has also been shown in the James Bond film Thunderball, the James Bond computer game From Rusia With Love, the computer game War Of The Worlds, the computer game Sim's City 4 and the computer game Command And Conquer.
The sound has been featured in many plays such as Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd.
In Supertramp 's song Fool's Overture, you can hear Big Ben chime the Hour.
The clocktower has appeared in Kingdom Hearts, part of the level relating to Disney's adaptation of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan.
In the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, the design of the Clock Tower Prison card is based on the tower.

I hoped this has helped and good luck with your project.

-Cheecky Chic-