Russian Bell Chiming

Semantron, holy wooden boards, have long been used by Eastern Christian churches to signal to their faithful, a tradition that grew out of the early Christian practice of knocking on monks’ doors to call them to worship.* Like bells for Western Christians, the beating of the semantron then and now calls its members to the …

The Drama of Bell Founding in Andrei Rublev

The seminal film Andrei Rublev directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and co-written with Andrei Konchalovsky is regarded as one of the best films of all time. That’s nice and all, but what I’m interested in is the extended, dramatized section on bell founding. The final section shows in over 30 minutes the entire casting process of …

Bell Ringing Methods in the Leaning Tower of Niles

https://videopress.com/v/pxEKj9j4?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata Watching this video, you probably guessed that a computer communicates the programmed melodies to the external bell clappers, and that it keeps the bell performances on a schedule. And you are correct! And you are also correct that the Clock-O-Matic’s Apollo III bell controller can be accessed and manipulated via an onsite controller, remote, …

Hell’s Bells

In honor of the invasion of spooks and ghouls tomorrow on Halloween, I thought we’d focus on bells representing the profane. I give you . . . "Hell’s Bells" by AC/DC. https://videopress.com/v/CfpBlzJv?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata That is a real, honest-to-goodness one-ton bronze bell hanging above the stage. Michael Milsom, former bellmaster at Taylor foundry in Loughborough, England, gives …

The Long Resonance of Bronze

Christians once ascribed powerful properties to bells—the power to drive away demons, for example,  and still today some Christians believe they embody the voice of God. Before Christians, the members of ancient civilizations ascribed magico-sacral properties to bells too. Why were bells thought to hold so much sacred power? I never thought about this too …

Value of Bells: Connection to Histories

The fourth main value of bells I perceive is their connection to histories. The first history I mean is the particular history of Western Europe. Today we are familiar with one main use of tower bells that dates to the middle ages—to signal to faithful Christians. For example, tower bells would signal when to pray …

Bell Founding of Beit Chabab, Lebanon

A find about the last bell founder in Lebanon piqued my interest in bells in the middle east. I was intrigued by the explanation that the casting of big bells didn’t arrive in Lebanon until the Crusaders came through in the twelfth century.* Hadn’t they been making bells already for a long time? Yes, the …

Buried Alive, with Bells

Happy Halloween! Bells have a sinister side, too, you know. As my colleague Tiffany Ng has argued in her doctoral dissertation, in cultural representations bells have been associated with utopias and dystopias—death, decay, and all the rest of it. And we don’t even have to look at cultural representations—we can just look at the macabre …

The Bell of the Great Chicago Fire II

Thanks, B.D., for passing along these dramatic details about the Great Chicago Fire and the courthouse bell! Donald L. Miller, author of City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, explains the particulars. He does it so well, no need for me to paraphrase. Note the name of the watchman/bell …

The Bell of the Great Chicago Fire

Dear loyal readers, I have a scrumptious treat to share with you! We don’t know much about Henry Rincker, Chicago's own bell founder, and his metallurgical output in the mid-nineteenth century, but we know he did cast a bell for the combined courthouse and city hall. This government building, constructed in 1853, was destroyed in …