We’re ringing in the new year (as well as celebrating National Ring a Bell Day) with the story of a bell that’s been ringing year in and year out for almost two centuries.
It’s known as the Oxford Electric Bell, because it’s found on the campus of Oxford University.
It dates back to at least 1840, possibly earlier, and it demonstrates an early form of a battery known as a dry pile, a stack of metal discs that can generate low levels of current.
The Oxford Electric Bell actually has two bells, each of them positioned above a dry pile.
And in between, there’s a little clapper that oscillates between the two bells, over and over.
It’s rung over 10 billion times, almost continuously, though the works have reportedly slowed or stopped on occasion due to high humidity.
That would probably get on the nerves of the people in Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory, except that this isn’t exactly Big Ben-style bell ringing.
Each oscillation draws just 1 nanoAmp from the dry piles, a very small amount, so it’s a pretty gentle movement against the surfaces of the bells.
Plus, the whole setup is under glass, so you can’t really hear much.
The most common question about the Oxford Electric Bell is, how long can it possibly keep running?
We don’t know, because we don’t know exactly what the dry piles are made of, and we couldn’t find out without taking the whole experiment apart.
Not only that, we may never know how long it could run: some observers think that the clapper will break down before the batteries run out.
Either way, enjoy it while it’s happening, which is good advice for most things in a new year.
It’s a new year’s tradition on US Navy ships that the first deck watch of a new year isn’t in the usual technical form.
Instead, the Officer of the Deck writes a verse or two.
Publishers have released volumes of these naval poems, and there’s an online repository called the Midwatch In Verse Project.
This Battery Has Lasted 175 Years and No One Knows How (VICE)
Midwatch In Verse (Weird Universe)
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