meant independence from them.
Karie Diethorn dismissed the novel theories, saying that no mention of the bell appears in Franklin’s voluminous correspondence and misspellings were common in the eighteenth century when universal rules for spelling had yet to be adopted. “My sense is that Norris, as a Quaker, thought about the applicability of biblical verse to everyday life. And the significance of the jubilee year would not have been lost on him. Having spent so much time on the architecture of the building, he probably wanted to follow that to the nth detail and make the statement that the Charter of Privileges was a meaningful experience.”
I asked if the quotation suggested Norris and his colleagues viewed themselves as a continuation of the Israelites.
“I doubt they considered themselves chosen like the Israelites,” she said. “I think they looked on themselves as Englishmen, first and foremost, and that they were entitled to the rights of Englishmen. Winthrop, Bradford, and others in the seventeenth century viewed themselves more as exceptional. By the eighteenth century, people were more practical. The idea that the Bible portrays oppression, and everybody knows the text, made it easy for them to quote the Bible.”
AS SOON AS we stepped through the door and into the bell tower I began to sweat. The first two floors are air-conditioned, the others are not. A worn wooden staircase leads to the third floor, an unfinished space that reminded me of the attic in my childhood home. Inthe building’s early years, Diethorn explained, the State House employed a doorkeeper, who cleaned the fireplaces, lugged wood, and replaced the candles. This floor was his living quarters. “In the late eighteenth century, the doorkeeper’s wife had a baby in this room,” she said. The next level up, the fourth, is where the bell ringer would have stood—Philadelphia’s Quasimodo. This floor is where Isaac Norris’s ill-fated bell spent much of its life, inactive and trapped.
Norris’s request for a bell arrived in London in the spring of 1752 and was quickly relayed to Whitechapel Bell Foundry. The foundry cast the bell using the customary method of an inner mold, called the core, and an outer mold, called the cope, into which the founders poured molten bell metal, an alloy of 77 percent copper and 23 percent tin, mixed with traces of arsenic and gold. “Basically, it’s like a fruitcake,” Diethorn said. A bell has five parts: the lip; the sound bow, where the clapper strikes; the waist, the concave part in the middle; the shoulder, which is where the Leviticus quote is located; and the crown, which connects the bell to the wooden yoke. The note Norris’s bell sounded was an E-flat.
The bell arrived in Pennsylvania that September, and eager workers made a critical misstep: They hurriedly unpacked the bell, mounted it on a temporary rigging, and bolted in the clapper. They pulled back the metal clapper, dropped it toward the lip, and listened intently as a deadly thud reverberated through history. The bell cracked. A horrified Norris blamed Whitechapel for using metal that was “too high and brittle.” Whitechapel, in turn, blamed “amateur bell-ringers.” Wars have been launched over less. Norris tried to send the bell back, but the ship’s captain refused to transport it, so Norris dispatched the bell to “two Ingenious Work-Men” in Pennsylvania, Charles Stow and John Pass, who melted it down and recast it. Tinkering with the alloy, they added an ounce and a half of copper foreach pound of bell, yet another miscalculation. The following April they lugged the recast bell to the top of the tower for a ceremonial chime. Instead of a sonorous peal, the bell issued an atonal bonk, which one witness described as the sound of two coal scuttles being banged together. Far from proclaiming liberty throughout the land, the bell couldn’t be heard on the ground floor.
Stow and Pass were so humiliated by the
Karie Diethorn dismissed the novel theories, saying that no mention of the bell appears in Franklin’s voluminous correspondence and misspellings were common in the eighteenth century when universal rules for spelling had yet to be adopted. “My sense is that Norris, as a Quaker, thought about the applicability of biblical verse to everyday life. And the significance of the jubilee year would not have been lost on him. Having spent so much time on the architecture of the building, he probably wanted to follow that to the nth detail and make the statement that the Charter of Privileges was a meaningful experience.”
I asked if the quotation suggested Norris and his colleagues viewed themselves as a continuation of the Israelites.
“I doubt they considered themselves chosen like the Israelites,” she said. “I think they looked on themselves as Englishmen, first and foremost, and that they were entitled to the rights of Englishmen. Winthrop, Bradford, and others in the seventeenth century viewed themselves more as exceptional. By the eighteenth century, people were more practical. The idea that the Bible portrays oppression, and everybody knows the text, made it easy for them to quote the Bible.”
AS SOON AS we stepped through the door and into the bell tower I began to sweat. The first two floors are air-conditioned, the others are not. A worn wooden staircase leads to the third floor, an unfinished space that reminded me of the attic in my childhood home. Inthe building’s early years, Diethorn explained, the State House employed a doorkeeper, who cleaned the fireplaces, lugged wood, and replaced the candles. This floor was his living quarters. “In the late eighteenth century, the doorkeeper’s wife had a baby in this room,” she said. The next level up, the fourth, is where the bell ringer would have stood—Philadelphia’s Quasimodo. This floor is where Isaac Norris’s ill-fated bell spent much of its life, inactive and trapped.
Norris’s request for a bell arrived in London in the spring of 1752 and was quickly relayed to Whitechapel Bell Foundry. The foundry cast the bell using the customary method of an inner mold, called the core, and an outer mold, called the cope, into which the founders poured molten bell metal, an alloy of 77 percent copper and 23 percent tin, mixed with traces of arsenic and gold. “Basically, it’s like a fruitcake,” Diethorn said. A bell has five parts: the lip; the sound bow, where the clapper strikes; the waist, the concave part in the middle; the shoulder, which is where the Leviticus quote is located; and the crown, which connects the bell to the wooden yoke. The note Norris’s bell sounded was an E-flat.
The bell arrived in Pennsylvania that September, and eager workers made a critical misstep: They hurriedly unpacked the bell, mounted it on a temporary rigging, and bolted in the clapper. They pulled back the metal clapper, dropped it toward the lip, and listened intently as a deadly thud reverberated through history. The bell cracked. A horrified Norris blamed Whitechapel for using metal that was “too high and brittle.” Whitechapel, in turn, blamed “amateur bell-ringers.” Wars have been launched over less. Norris tried to send the bell back, but the ship’s captain refused to transport it, so Norris dispatched the bell to “two Ingenious Work-Men” in Pennsylvania, Charles Stow and John Pass, who melted it down and recast it. Tinkering with the alloy, they added an ounce and a half of copper foreach pound of bell, yet another miscalculation. The following April they lugged the recast bell to the top of the tower for a ceremonial chime. Instead of a sonorous peal, the bell issued an atonal bonk, which one witness described as the sound of two coal scuttles being banged together. Far from proclaiming liberty throughout the land, the bell couldn’t be heard on the ground floor.
Stow and Pass were so humiliated by the
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