Founders at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry cast the 13.5-ton bell that would become known as Big Ben, the second attempt after an earlier casting cracked during testing. Hauled by a team of sixteen horses to the Palace of Westminster and hoisted into the clock tower, the bell first rang out over London in 1859 and has marked the hours ever since, cracking again within months but never being fully replaced.
The bell we call Big Ben has a name mystery embedded in its very casting: nobody is entirely sure whether it was named after Sir Benjamin Hall, the portly Commissioner of Works who oversaw its installation, or after a popular heavyweight boxer of the era, Benjamin Caunt. Parliamentary debate over the bell's specifications reportedly grew so tedious that an MP jokingly suggested naming it after Hall, and the nickname stuck in the press.
The first casting, made by a different foundry in 1856, cracked irreparably during test strikes, forcing the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to melt it down and try again in 1858, producing the bell that survives today. Moving the finished 13.5-ton bronze bell across London required a specially built carriage and sixteen straining horses, with crowds lining the streets to watch the spectacle.
Even the second casting wasn't perfect. Within two months of its first strikes in 1859, it cracked under the weight of its own hammer, and rather than recast it a third time, engineers rotated the bell and installed a lighter hammer, leaving the crack in place. That flawed, imperfect bell is the one whose distinctive, slightly off tone has rung out over Westminster for over 160 years, surviving Blitz bombing raids and becoming one of the most recognizable sounds in the world.