Picture credits
The drawings are our own. The photos are from Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons licences (Attribution, or Attribution-ShareAlike), CC0, or in the public domain.
Photos
Big Ben Elizabeth Tower London 2023 01.jpg
by Julian Herzog, CC BY 4.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes.
Big Ben, Londres, Inglaterra, 2022-11-23, DD 70-72 HDR.jpg
by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) from the south bank of the River Thames.jpg
by chris.rycroft, CC BY 2.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes.
Big Ben (first version) 1856.png
by Illustrated London News, Public domain. Cropped and resized; no other changes.
Lord Grimthorpe Vanity Fair 2 February 1889.jpg
by Leslie Ward, Public domain. Cropped and resized; no other changes.
Westminster Clock (Big Ben) – mechanism plan, c.1854 (design by Edmund Beckett Denison; made by E J Dent).png
by Edmund Beckett Denison, Public domain. Cropped and resized; no other changes.
Big Ben clock mechanism.jpg
by Paulobrad, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
Big Ben Covered in Scaffolding.jpg
by Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
London Big Ben Inner Clock Face 1070925-PSD.jpg
by Ermell, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped and resized; no other changes. Shared here under the same licence.
Our own drawings
- A simplified cut-away drawing of the Elizabeth Tower. From the top: a gilt cross and orb, a small spire, the Ayrton Light 65 steps above the belfry, the belfry holding Big Ben and four quarter bells 334 steps up, the clock stage with four dials 281 steps up, and a tall shaft containing an air shaft, a central weight shaft and a stone spiral stair in one corner, with rooms once used for prisoners low down. Brackets show 96 metres overall and 61 metres of stone-faced brickwork below the spire, on a footprint 12 metres square.
Our own drawing - Bar chart of the five bells by weight: Big Ben 13.7 tonnes, note E; fourth quarter bell 4 tonnes, note B; third 1.7 tonnes, E; second 1.3 tonnes, F sharp; first 1.1 tonnes, G. A note says another Parliament page gives Big Ben as 13.5 tonnes.
Our own drawing - Bar chart of four weights given for the Great Clock: 5 tonnes for the mechanism on the facts page, 11 tonnes in a 2019 news story, 11.5 tonnes for more than 1,000 parts from the Cumbria Clock Company in 2021, and 12 tonnes on the conservation page.
Our own drawing - A vertical timeline: 1290s, a clock tower said to stand here; 1367 new tower and clock; 1698 medieval tower pulled down; 1834 fire; 1843 foundation stone; 1856 first bell cast; 1857 it cracks; 1858 second bell cast; 1859 clock starts and Big Ben rings; 1863 bell turned with a lighter hammer; 1923 chimes on the radio; 1939 to 1945 dials dark; 1976 clock breaks down; 2012 renamed Elizabeth Tower; 2017 to 2022 biggest conservation yet.
Our own drawing - Bar chart in millions of pounds: first estimate in spring 2016, 29; September 2017, 61; February 2020, 79.7; approved budget including up to 9 million for Covid, 89; final outturn cost including Covid, 85.5.
Our own drawing - Two clock dials side by side. The left one has a black surround and black hands, labelled Before: black and gold, probably chosen in the 1930s. The right one has a Prussian blue surround and blue hands, labelled After: Prussian blue and gold, Barry’s original scheme, restored. A note says each dial has 324 pieces of pot opal glass, 1,296 in all, and that four o’clock is shown as IV, not IIII.
Our own drawing - Drawing of the pendulum, 4.4 metres long, with a bob of 203 kilograms made of concentric steel and zinc tubes, and a note that one beat lasts 2 seconds. Beside it, a small stack of old pennies with the note: add one penny and the clock gains two-fifths of a second in 24 hours. A footnote gives the pendulum weight as 310 kilograms on Parliament’s facts page or 170 kilograms according to the Cumbria Clock Company.
Our own drawing
The drawings are simplified teaching drawings, not to scale, made from the sourced descriptions on this site. Useless the eraser is the network’s own mascot. Fonts: Bricolage Grotesque, Newsreader and Kalam (SIL Open Font Licence), served from this site.