The AnatomyA section through Great Holloway, the tenor — 56 in. at the mouth
Scale 1 : 14
A bell is cast deliberately sharp. Everything that happens to it afterwards is subtraction.
Once the mould is broken away, the casting is bolted mouth‑upward to a vertical boring lathe and a fixed tool is brought against the inside wall. Each band of that wall governs a different partial. Cut near the soundbow and the nominal falls. Cut at the waist and the prime falls with it. Cut at the shoulder and the hum — the long note underneath everything, the one that outlives the strike by twenty seconds — comes down.
The cuts are irreversible. Metal can be taken out of a bell; it cannot be put back. A tuner therefore works in one direction only, downward, from sharp toward true, and stops early rather than late.
Since Canon Simpson’s essays of 1896, an English bell is called true‑harmonic when its hum, prime, quint and nominal stand at 1, 2, 3 and 4 — against a tierce at 2·4.
That tierce is a minor third above the prime. It is not a defect and it cannot be tuned away: it is a consequence of the shape. It is also the reason a ring of bells sounds elegiac at a wedding.
The casting pit, Aldgate. Bronze is tipped at about 1150 °C into a mould buried in the floor, so that the sand takes the pressure rather than the iron case. A tenor of this weight takes eleven days to cool. Broken out too early, it cracks; too late, and the loam bakes on.
Screened in‑browser as a two‑colour halftone — bronze at 15°, ink at 45° — from a generated source.
Five PartialsA bell does not sound at the note you hear it sound
Great Holloway
| Partial | Ratio | Interval | Hertz |
|---|
The chart is fed by an analyser tapped off the output, not drawn from the numbers in the table. When a peak settles exactly on a rule, that is the synthesis agreeing with the theory.
Play the five in isolation and none of them is the note you would name if the bell were rung at you across a churchyard. The pitch you hear — the strike note — is a phantom, assembled by the ear out of the nominal, the superquint and the octave nominal, which stand at 4, 6 and 8. The ear supplies a fundamental at 2 to explain them, and that invented note is the one written on the bell.
The RegisterEight bells, drawn to true relative scale
112 lb to the hundredweight
The MethodEnglish change ringing has no tunes. It has permutations.
One lead · 16 changes
Eight bells hung for full‑circle ringing cannot be played as melody. Each weighs what it weighs; each takes about two seconds to come round; and the most a band can do between one row and the next is move a bell one place earlier or one place later in the order.
So the music is the ordering. You begin in rounds — 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, treble to tenor — and from there you work through permutations, never repeating a row, until you arrive back where you started. Eight bells admit 40,320 distinct rows. A band ringing at a steady pace would need about twenty‑two hours to ring all of them, and no one ever has.
What is rung instead is a method: a rule for choosing the next row. Below is one lead of Plain Bob Major. Two paths are traced through it — the treble, which simply hunts out to the back and home again, and the second, which hunts until the lead end and is then made to dodge.
Rows are struck in pairs, handstroke then backstroke, with a gap of one blow after each pair — the open handstroke lead. It is the reason a ring of bells breathes.
× — every bell swaps with its neighbour.
18 — the bells in first and eighth place stand still; the rest swap.
12 — the lead‑end change: first and second stand.