Bigben clock tower6/20/2023 Lastly, with a couple of minutes to spare, the dial lights are switched back on, in the order of the West clock face first, and then South, East, and North. With fourteen minutes to go until 2am, there are no quarter or hour chimes left until the big reveal, so both mechanisms are switched back on (again, renovations prevent this from happening at present). For the next two hours (until the new 2am arrives and all your electronic clocks automatically change), the clock runs without any chimes, which allows the team to monitor the accuracy and make any adjustments as needed, until Big Ben’s clock is running perfectly. At the precise midnight moment, the going train is started, and the clock starts ticking once more this means that the Great Clock will actually be telling the wrong time for a little while, though thankfully no-one is able to see it. In the time leading up to the new midnight, the team carries out maintenance on the clock and its mechanisms. There’s a bit of a time crunch here, because during the movement of the hands, the gravity escapement – which regulates the clock’s accuracy – has to be released, and if it’s not back in time, the clock won’t be running smoothly. Once the lights are off, it’s time to move the clock hands to the new midnight (again, this can be BST or GMT depending on the season), taking great care not to go a moment too far, or the whole process will have to begin again. Elizabeth Tower at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London pays homage to one of the most prominent symbols of the United Kingdom, Big Ben. This is mostly to ensure that the public don’t think Ben – or worse, time itself – is having a freakout when the hands start spinning. Next, it’s time for the dial lights in the clock face to be switched off, leaving the Great Clock in the dark until a few minutes before the big moment. So, by this stage Ben’s clock is still telling local time, but just isn’t announcing it to the world. It all begins at around 9pm local time, when the clockmakers silence the strike mechanism and reset it for 2am BST or GMT (depending on whether the clock is going forward or back), which will keep the hour chime silent until then. 292 steps to the clock faces and 334 steps to the Belfry where Big Ben, the Great Bell, hangs. That’s the height of the Elizabeth Tower. (©UK Parliament, Andy Bailey) In addition, new stone was needed to replace roughly a thousand pieces of the tower’s limestone cladding that had severely weathered or cracked over the years. Imagine 21 London buses sitting on top of each other. The process is so precise that not a minute can be spared, and begins well in advance of the clocks actually springing forward. The refurbishment involved structural work on thousands of cast-iron components from the tower’s 30 m tall roof above the clock faces. The responsibility for changing the clocks lies with the very regal sounding Palace of Westminster Clockmakers, who each spring and autumn must scale the tower to add or remove the necessary hour.
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