156 chimes

Big Ben chimes 156 times a day, a useful fact I calculated yesterday while listening to six glorious such chimes.

March 27, 2007 | Filed Under Random thoughts 

Comments

5 Responses to “156 chimes”

  1. John on March 27th, 2007 18:43

    Knowing you have a very special love of numbers, I thought you might be interested in this – http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/further5.shtml – mind bensing stuff.

  2. elise on March 28th, 2007 06:18

    what sort of chimes are they? ‘bong bong’ or something more melodic?

  3. Art Vandelay on March 28th, 2007 18:33

    Sort of a majestic ‘BONG’, as though it was delivering a full stop to life itself.

  4. Dan on March 29th, 2007 07:49

    That BBC page looks great, John. I’m so busy at the moment, but hope to get to listen to the programmes over the weekend.

    Elise, the bongs are the bongs themselves, not the preceding melodic stuff. Here’s how it works:

    At quarter past the hour, you get the following sequence of notes:

    A, F, G, C

    At half past the hour, you get:

    A, F, G, C, C, G, A, F

    At quarter to the hour, you get:

    A, F, G, C, C, G, A, F, A, G, F, C

    And on the hour, you get:

    A, F, G, C, C, G, A, F, A, G, F, C, A, F, G, C, followed by one bong for each number of the hour we’re at.

    My relative pitch means that all the notes above are correct in relation to one another, but not necessarily correct. Steve?

    So, if you include the preceding ditties, you have an additional 960 bell rings (which I wouldn’t constitute as bongs), taking the total to 1,116 per bell rings day.

  5. Dan on March 29th, 2007 08:02

    Oh, and Art is right. The full stop (period) analogy is a wonderful one!

Leave a Reply