Some background first.
About eight months ago I started learning change bell ringing at the Washington National Cathedral a long-term effort requiring diligent and frequent practice and the willingness to deal with the frustration of not learning it right away! Stephen Humphreys and the others from the UK will know immediately what this is as there are over 5000 bell towers over there. (In North America, there are far fewer only about 42 in the USA and 8 in Canada, with a few others in other parts of the world. As befits its origins most of these rings (but not all) are in Episcopal/Anglican churches.) For those not from the UK, who may not know as much about change ringing, the following three links may be interesting. The Cathedrals Bells http://www.cathedral.org/cathedral/music/bells.shtml The Washington Ringing Society http://www.cathedral.org/wrs/wrs.htm North America Guild of Change Ringers http://www.nagcr.org/ As you can see from the second of the three links, there is a column describing the Cathedrals bells called CWT. This is the traditional way to describe the weight of a bell. It came from England and is over 400 years old. The three numbers mean, in order Hundredweights (112 lbs, not 100, dont ask me why) Quarters (28 lbs, not 25 two stone apparently make a quarter) Pounds same thing as any other pound So the largest bell at the Cathedral, called the tenor bell (the tenor is the largest bell in any tower; the treble is the smallest; this applies no matter how many bells there are), is described as 32-0-4, meaning 32 cwt 0 qtr 4 lb, that is (32x112) + (0x28) + (4x1) lbs, or 3584 + 0 + 4 = 3588 lb. (Although these bells are very heavy, the largest weighing as much as a car, they are so well balanced and the bearings so well crafted that one person can easily ring any of them. Often a 60 kg woman will ring the tenor bell described above, and there are some young teenage girls from the Cathedral school who are learning to ring.) There is a bronze plaque in the ringing room in the tower entitled The Cathedral Ring describing all 10 bells, what note each plays, who donated it, and its weight, in lbs only. Describing the weight in lbs only is not the traditional way, but the ring was fairly new in the USA and I guess it was felt that the UK method would be too confusing as it isnt used over here. Why is it done this way? The only guess I can come up with is that 400 years ago, few people had mathematical ability, particularly with large numbers. So a given property (weight in this case) was chopped up into many names so that no one number would get that big. If you werent good with large numbers 32-0-4 was probably easier to understand than 3588. (This probably also explains weight in stone and lb, or, for that matter, feet and inches, ounces/cups/pints/quarts/gallons, dry pints/dry quarts/pecks/bushels, etc.) Now, I told you that story to tell you this one. There is a weekly newsletter for ringers, called The Ringing World. It is published in the UK by the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers. http://www.ringingworld.co.uk/ About a month and a half ago, the cover story (by Alan Blair) was of this absolutely gigantic bell that was cast for a VERY rich person in Japan for a tower as his bungalow near the foot of Mt. Fuji. It is not part of a ring of bells, but will stand alone. It is one of the largest bells ever made (it actually had to be cast at a shipyard using the equipment that makes propellers, as the Eijsbouts Bellfoundry in the Netherlands had no equipment that could make a bell of that size). The size was described by the British writer of the article as something like 3.82 m in diameter, 3.72 m tall, and with a mass of 36.2 tonnes. The clapper alone was 1550 kg. Yes, all measurements were metric (I may be a bit off on the exact figures), imperial measure was nowhere to be found, and the article was written by a British writer. Amazingly, the bell will be rung by HAND (four people on ropes). I was quite pleased (and a little surprised, given the cwt tradition) to see the bell described this way. The Ringing World of course also has a letters section, and I started looking at this section in later issues with interest, wondering what the comments on this article were going to be like. They werent long in coming. Here they are. First Letter Issue of February 23, 2007 Imperial Preference SIR, - Alan Blairs articles are always welcome, but would you please wield the editorial pencil and convert his French metric measurements into British imperial ones. The impact of todays front cover story (9th February) was completely lost with incomprehensible measurements! - P.G.S., Middlesex. Second Letter Issue of March 30, 2007 Metric Measures SIR, - Get with it P.S. (letters, page 187). Do you still shop with £.s.d.? The horrible European metric system is the only one now taught in our schools. No wonder youngsters think were odd! - A.C., Leicester Third Letter Issue of April 6, 2007 Post Imperial Delight SIR, - Alan Blairs articles are always welcome and it was a delight to see weights and sizes given in metric units in his 9th February piece. I am so pleased no attempt was made to convert them into some other, long-outdated and thoroughly confusing system. To have done so would have rendered the article incomprehensible and robbed of any impact. - D.N., Hobart, Tasmania Carleton P.S. Its actually not too hard to estimate how big a bell is 1 cwt is about 50.8 kg so if you know the cwt figure, divide it by 2, add two zeros, and youll come close to the mass in kg 32 cwt/2 = 16 plus 2 zeros = 1600 kg. (Actual figure is 3588 x 0.454 = 1629 kg, rounded off. But thats close enough for understanding it. This would make the mass of the bell in the article something north of 710 cwt, as theyd describe it.)
