词汇 | big ben |
词源 | Big Ben. Big Ben is not the huge clock in London’s Parlia- ment tower, though it is often given this name. The words really describe the huge, deep-toned bell in St. Stephen’s Tower that strikes the hours over the British Houses of Parliament. Big Ben, cast from 1856 to 1858, weighs 131⁄2 tons, more than twice the weight of the 61⁄2-ton bell in Philadelphia’s Indepen- dence Hall. The great bell’s first stroke, not the last, marks the hour, four smaller bells in the tower striking the quarter hours on the famed Westminster Chimes. The tower clock, 329 feet high, was designed by lawyer and architect Edmund Grimthorpe (1816–1905), and was named St. Stephen’s Tower. This was to be the name of the bell, too, but newspapers took to calling it after Sir Benjamin Hall, Chief Commissioner of Works at the time, and the sobriquet stuck. Big Ben, though a notable achievement in bell founding, is far from being the world’s largest bell. Moscow’s Tsar Kolokol, a broken and unused giant weighing about 180 tons, is called the “King of Bells.” |
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