The first line of the register, entered in the founder’s own hand. Prima was cast in the winter of 1721, mouth down in a pit of rammed loam beside the furnace that still stands, and she carries the house’s name before any other bell in the world: VESPER ME FECIT. Whatever the foundry has learned in three centuries, it learned first from her.
She is honest about her age. Her tierce — the minor third that makes a bell sound like a bell rather than a struck bar — sits a comb’s width sharp of where a modern lathe would put it, and her hum leans flat beneath the strike. The first founder knew it. He had no means of tuning a partial without thinning the whole crown, so he let her stand as the mould made her, and every founder since has refused to correct what he accepted.
Strike her and you hear the argument settle: five partials, none quite agreeing, resolving into a voice that no true-harmonic bell can counterfeit. Three hundred years of apprentices have been made to listen to Prima before touching bronze. The lesson is always the same. A bell is not a note. A bell is a temperament.