Good morning, Whitewater.
Our month ends with scattered thunderstorms and a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:26 PM, for 15h 07m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 28.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1859, the clock on Elizabeth Tower (the tower named as such in 2012) goes into operation:
The name Big Ben is often used to describe the tower, the clock and the bell but the name was first given to the Great Bell.
The Elizabeth Tower, which stands at the north end of the Houses of Parliament, was completed in 1859 and the Great Clock started on 31 May, with the Great Bell’s strikes heard for the first time on 11 July and the quarter bells first chimed on 7 September….
Until installation in 1859, the clock was kept at Dent’s factory. Denison made many refinements including inventing the ‘Double Three-legged Gravity Escapement’. This was a revolutionary mechanism, ensuring the clock’s accuracy by making sure its pendulum was unaffected by external factors, such as wind pressure on the clock’s hands.
Denison’s invention has since been used in clocks all over the world. It is also known as the ‘Grimthorpe Escapement’ as Denison was made Baron Grimthorpe in 1886.
The clock was installed in the Clock Tower in April 1859. At first, it wouldn’t work as the cast-iron minute hands were too heavy. Once they were replaced by lighter copper hands, it successfully began keeping time on 31 May 1859. It was not long before the chimes of the Great Bell, also known as Big Ben, joined in.
On this day in the last year of the nineteenth century, a Bible society is founded after a meeting in Beaver Dam:
1899 – The Gideons International Founded
On this night two salesmen, John H. Nicholson and Samuel E. Hill, crossed paths a second time, in Beaver Dam. The pair had first met eight months before in the Central Hotel in Boscobel and discussed the need for some way to provide Christian support to traveling businessmen. During this second meeting in Beaver Dam the two decided to “get right at it. Start the ball rolling and follow it up.” They invited their professional contacts to an organizational meeting to be held in Janesville on July 1, 1899, at which the organization was formally named and chartered. By 1948, The Gideons had distributed over 15 million bibles world-wide. View more information about the founding of the Gideons elsewhere at wisconsinhistory.org [Source: Wisconsin Local History & Biography Articles]
A Google a Day asks a science question: “If the Saffir-Simpson Scale had existed at the time, the storm described in Erik Larson’s 1999 book would have been rated as what?”