Showing posts with label Liberty Bell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberty Bell. Show all posts

Sunday, July 5, 2026

Liberty literally cracked up in 1846, fifteen years before the whole country did



 
... No one recorded when or why the Liberty Bell first cracked, but the most likely explanation is that a narrow split developed in the early 1840s after nearly 90 years of hard use. In 1846, when the city decided to repair the bell prior to George Washington's birthday holiday (February 23), metal workers widened the thin crack to prevent its farther spread and restore the tone of the bell using a technique called "stop drilling". The wide "crack" in the Liberty Bell is actually the repair job! Look carefully and you'll see over 40 drill bit marks in that wide "crack". But, the repair was not successful. The Public Ledger newspaper reported that the repair failed when another fissure developed. This second crack, running from the abbreviation for "Philadelphia" up through the word "Liberty", silenced the bell forever. No one living today has heard the bell ring freely with its clapper, but computer modeling provides some clues into the sound of the Liberty Bell. ...
 

Sunday, January 16, 2022

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings


... by the middle of the Second Century ... there were few Greeks and Romans left. They had destroyed themselves by miscegenation, internecine wars, and that fatuous tolerance with which they permitted themselves to be displaced by their subjects and slaves. ...

-- Revilo P. Oliver, "By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them", Liberty Bell, August 1985