Big Ben is a bell: the facts behind the name

Ask for a picture of Big Ben and you will usually be shown a clock tower. The name belongs to something you cannot see from the street: a bell hanging in the belfry. The tower, the clock and the bell each have their own name and their own history, and keeping them apart is the quickest way to get the facts straight.

Three things, three names

• Elizabeth Tower is the tower. It was renamed in 2012, in the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. Before that it was generally called the Clock Tower.
• The Great Clock is the clock mechanism and its four dials.
• Big Ben is the Great Bell, the heaviest bell in the tower, which strikes the hour.

Using “Big Ben” for the whole building is so common that it is understood everywhere, and nobody is wrong in conversation. But if you are asked what Big Ben weighs, the answer is the bell's weight, not the tower's.

The numbers worth knowing

Three figures cover most of what people ask:

• Tower height: about 96 m.
• Dial diameter: about 7 m. Each of the four faces is roughly the width of a small house.
• Great Bell: about 13.7 tonnes. That is 13,700 kg, around the mass of ten or eleven small cars.

The car comparison is a rough one, taking a small car as about 1.2 to 1.3 tonnes: 13.7 ÷ 1.25 is nearly 11. The bell figure itself is usually given as 13.76 tonnes, which is why you will see both “13.7” and “13.8” in print.

The first bell cracked

The bell in the tower now is the second one. The first was cast in the north of England and cracked while it was being tested, before it ever hung in the tower. It was broken up and recast, and the replacement was made in 1858 at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London. That is the bell that hangs there today.

The new bell did not last long without trouble. After it went into service it cracked as well, a failure usually put down to a striking hammer that was too heavy for it. For about three years the bell was out of use, and the clock struck the hours on one of the quarter bells instead. The repair was a practical one: the bell was turned so that the hammer strikes a different spot, and a lighter hammer was fitted. The crack was never welded closed. It is still there, and it is the reason the Great Bell has a slightly sour tone that people who know it well can pick out.

That is a useful detail for anyone who wants to check the story: a bell that has been struck for well over a century with a visible crack in it is not a legend. It is a known flaw that was managed rather than repaired.

Where the name comes from

Nobody has a settled answer. The two usual explanations are that it honours Sir Benjamin Hall, the commissioner of works when the bell was hung, who was a large man known as “Big Ben”, or that it was borrowed from a well-known heavyweight boxer of the time. Both are repeated in popular accounts, and neither is documented well enough to settle it, so treat either as a story rather than a fact.

The chimes around the bell

The Great Bell strikes only the hour. The tune you hear on the quarter hours is played by four smaller quarter bells, which ring the pattern known as the Westminster Quarters. On each quarter the chime is made of groups of four notes, and the number of notes grows through the hour:

The sums are easy to check: each quarter adds one more group of four, so the hour carries 4 × 4 = 16 notes. Only after those does the Great Bell speak. At three o'clock you would therefore hear 16 quarter-bell notes and then three strikes of Big Ben, one for each hour.

What stays the same

The facts hold whichever name you use. A clock tower of about 96 m with dials about 7 m across carries a bell of about 13.7 tonnes that was cast in 1858, was hung after a first bell failed, cracked again, and kept ringing. If a quiz asks which part is Big Ben, the answer is the bell.

The name in a puzzle

The bell is also where the puzzle game Big Ben Blocks: Block Puzzle gets its name. Its listing describes ten Adventure levels across London, from Westminster to Piccadilly, played on a 9x9 grid. If you want to know how that grid works, the post on where the 9x9 block puzzle comes from covers it.