The first true bell in the register. In the 1890s the foundry had followed the tuning experiments coming out of England — Canon Simpson’s papers arguing that a bell’s five partials could be brought into exact harmony by cutting metal from precise zones inside the wall — and by 1901 Vesper had built its own tuning lathe to prove it. The Meridian was the proof.
Cast for an observatory that rang the hour of local noon, she came off the lathe with her hum a true octave below the prime, her tierce an exact minor third, her nominal a clean octave above: figures her eighteenth-century sisters miss by whole fractions of a semitone. The seventh founder circled the measurements in the register in red ink, a thing done neither before nor since.
She was tuned once, as every bell here is: cast, cut to true on the lathe, and never touched again. Her voice is short, bright, and entirely without argument — the partials agree, so there is nothing to quarrel over as she decays. Some in the trade called the new true-harmonic bells characterless. The founder’s answer is entered beside her name: accuracy, kept daily at noon for a hundred years, is a character.