St. Mark's Church, Marske-by-the-sea
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The Liberty Bell
 The Liberty Bell was ordered from England in 1751 by the Pennsylvania Legislature. It cracked shortly after arriving and was melted down and recast by two local artisans, John Pass and John Stow. Pass and Stow melted it down and recast it a second time in 1753 in an attempt to improve the bell's sound.
On June 11, 1753 the Liberty Bell was hoisted into the belfry of Independence Hall (known then as the State House), where it rang to mark special occasions until 1828. On July 8, 1776 the Liberty Bell rang to call Philadelphia's citizens to the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.
During the British occupation of Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War, the bell was hidden under the floorboards of a church in Allentown, Pennsylvania, so as not to be melted down and used for British ammunition. During the reconstruction of the steeple of Independence Hall in 1828, a new bell was ordered to replace the Liberty Bell. The Liberty Bell was moved to another part of the steeple.
In 1839, a poem entitled "The Liberty Bell" is the first documented usage of the term, "Liberty Bell." The Liberty Bell first achieved the iconic status for which it is known today during the 1840s when abolitionists adopted it as a symbol of their movement. In 1846, when being rung to commemorate George Washington's birthday, the bell obtained its infamous crack that rendered it unringable thenceforth.
In 1852, the bell was brought down from the steeple and placed in the "Declaration Chamber" of Independence Hall. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing through 1915, the bell travelled to cities and exhibitions across the country. On January 1, 1976, the Liberty Bell was moved from inside Independence Hall to the Liberty Bell Pavilion on Market Street enabling visitors to see the bell at anytime of day. On October 9, 2003, the Liberty Bell was moved from the Liberty Bell Pavilion to the new Liberty Bell Center.
The Liberty Bell weighs 18cwts. 4qtrs. 7lbs. (776 kilo's) and attracts 1.6 million visitors per year making it Philadelphia's most popular tourist attraction.
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The Lutine Bell
 The Lutine Bell sits in the atrium, or lobby of Lloyds Insurance Office in the City of London. It was recovered from the HMS Lutine, a cargo ship that was insured by Lloyds in the 19th Century.
The ship sank off the Dutch coast with millions of pounds worth of treasure supposedly on board. The treasure has never been recovered, but the ships' bell was found in 1860.
Since the recovery, the bell has been sounded when bad news was received, and today is still rung for both good and bad news.
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Tsar Kolokol - the biggest bell in the world
 The Tsar Kolokol weighs over 200 tonnes. In 1599 the Andrej Chokhov, generally considered the father of the Moscow school of founding, cast the Kremlin Godunov Bell, estimated at some 38 tons. The bell has been twice recast, the first time in 1654 by Emelian Danilov, who increased its weight to 144.5 tons.
The second recasting took place in 1735 under Mikhail Motorin, and brought the weight of this bell to 218 tons. This is the famous "Tsar-Kolokol" which stands in the Kremlin, the high-water mark of Russian founding.
Sadly, it has never been rung. It was stored for several years while engineers pondered how to hang such a monstrous weight. The storage shed mysteriously caught fire and in dousing the flames, the water sprayed on the hot bell and cracked it. The piece that fell out of its rim weighs an estimated 11 tonnes and serves as a doorstep to enable visitors to clamber inside bell.
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Big Ben - the hour bell at Westminster
 Big Ben is the hour bell in the clock tower at Palace of Westminter - the Houses of Parliament. The bell stands 7'6" high and is 9'0" in diameter. Weighing 13 tons 10 cwts 3 qtrs 15lbs (13,760 Kg), the hour bell of the Great Clock of Westminster - known worldwide as 'Big Ben' - is the most famous bell ever cast at Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
Big Ben was cast on Saturday 10th April 1858, but its story began more than two decades earlier. On 16th October 1834, fire succeeded where Guy Fawkes and his fellow plotters had failed on 5th November 1605, and destroyed the Palace of Westminster, long the seat of the British government. In 1844, Parliament decided that the new buildings for the Houses of Parliament, by then under construction, should incorporate a tower and clock and the Astronomer Royal, George Airy was appointed to draft a specification for the clock.
The largest bell ever cast in Britain up to that time had been 'Great Peter' at York Minster, weighing 10¾ tons. It was not surprising the bellfounders were wary of bidding for the contract to produce the new bell, particularly since Denison insisted on his own design for the shape of the 14 ton bell as well as his own recipe for the bell metal.
Eventually, a bell was made to his specification, albeit somewhat oversize at 16 tons, by John Warner & Sons at Stockton-on-Tees on 6th August 1856, but this cracked irreparably while under test in the Palace Yard at Westminster. It was then that Denison, by then a Queens Counsel, turned to the Whitechapel foundry . . .
George Mears, then the master bellfounder and owner of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, undertook the casting. According to foundry records, Mears originally quoted a price of £2401 for casting the bell, but this was offset by £1829 for the value of the metal he was able to reclaim from the first bell so that the actual invoice tendered, on 28th May 1858, was in the sum of £572. It took a week To break up the old bell, three furnaces were required to melt the metal, and the mould was heated all day before the actual casting, the first time this had been done in British bell-founding. It took 20 minutes to fill the mould with molten metal, and 20 days for the metal to cool and solidify. After the bell had been tested in every way by Mears, Denison approved it before it left the foundry.
Transporting the bell the few miles from the foundry to the Houses of Parliament was a major event. Traffic stopped as the bell, mounted on a trolley drawn by sixteen brightly be-ribboned horses, made its way over London Bridge, along Borough Road, and over Westminster Bridge. The streets had been decorated for the occasion and enthusiastic crowds cheered the bell along the route.
The bells of the Great Clock of Westmister rang across London for the first time on 31st May 1859, and Parliament had a special sitting to decide on a suitable name for the great hour bell. During the course of the debate, and amid the many suggestions that were made, Chief Lord of the Woods and Forests, Sir Benjamin Hall, a large and ponderous man known affectionately in the House as "Big Ben", rose and gave an impressively long speech on the subject. When, at the end of this oratorical marathon, Sir Benjamin sank back into his seat, a wag in the chamber shouted out: "Why not call him Big Ben and have done with it?" The house erupted in laughter; Big Ben had been named. This, at least, is the most commonly accepted story.
In September, a mere two months after it officially went into service, Big Ben cracked. Once again Denison's belief that he knew more about bells than the experts was to blame for he had used a hammer more than twice the maximum weight specified by George Mears. Big Ben was taken out of service and for the next three years the hours were struck on the largest of the quarter-bells. Eventually, a lighter hammer was fitted, a square piece of metal chipped out of the soundbow, and the bell given an eighth of a turn to present an undamaged section to the hammer. This is the bell as we hear it today, the crack giving it its distinctive but less-than-perfect tone.
Big Ben remains the largest bell ever cast at Whitechapel. Visitors to the foundry pass through a full size profile of the bell that frames the main entrance as they enter the building. The original moulding gauge employed to form the mould used to cast Big Ben hangs on the end wall of the foundry above the furnaces to this very day.
Picture & story courtesy of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
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