In , politicians decided to hold a ceremonial ringing of the broken bell in hopes of drumming up support for World War I. The bell was actually tapped with a mallet. That led to the bell becoming the symbol of the immense fundraising effort for the war in the form of buying Liberty Bonds in and They also sent it on a national railroad tour, with a newfangled lighting system that kept it illuminated each night on its journey aboard the Liberty Bell Special.
Citizens flocked to see it. By some estimates, nearly a quarter of the entire country managed to set eyes on the symbol of freedom. And these Liberty Bond drives were a smashing success, raising billions of dollars in war bonds to help the Allied Powers win the war. In , the Liberty Bell Center at Independence Hall in Philadelphia was opened, which is where the bell now resides.
Over the decades, there have been numerous calls to repair it and make it whole. A scientist at steel giant ArcelorMittal claimed it would be rather simple to melt the bell, balance the various metals in it, and then recast it to make it usable, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer in But a representative for the NPS, which runs the center, said fixing the bell might be illegal and would serve no purpose.
Even its crack is part of our patriotic metaphorical landscape. Correction: The sentence on the role of the bell in World War I has been corrected to note that the bell was not sent on tour to drum up support for war bonds. Rather, it sent on tour to drum up support for the war effort. Later, it became a symbol for the drive to raise funds for the war via the selling of bonds.
In , researchers at the Winterthur Museum set out to understand exactly why the bell cracked. Using x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, they found that the bell was doomed from the outset. The high tin content resulted in a brittle composition that was prone to cracking — and that's exactly what happened. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close.
Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. After the British invasion of Philadelphia, the bell was hidden in a church until it could be safely returned to the State House. So when did the Liberty Bell get its famous crack? According to one of many stories, it first cracked back in , during the visit of the Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette. Another story holds that it fractured later that year, while tolling to signal a fire.
One of the most popular legends claims that the bell cracked during the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall in , but newspaper accounts of the funeral do not mention such an incident.
Though attempts were made to repair an existing fracture in the bell for the occasion, and the bell reportedly tolled loud and clear at first, it subsequently cracked beyond repair and had to be taken out of service. Chalk the Philly landmark's famous blemish up to faulty building materials from across the pond.
The Whitechapel Bell Foundry — famous for casting Big Ben a century later and listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as Great Britain's oldest manufacturing company — dropped the ball on the bell, casting it with too-brittle metals. More from Mental Floss : 11 eat-it-all-and-it's-free road trip gems for hungry foodies. When the bell arrived in Philadelphia in , it cracked on its first test strike. Two local craftsmen, John Pass and John Stow, twice cast a new bell using metal from the cracked English bell.
They also added more copper, to make the bell less brittle, and silver, to sweeten its tone. The recast behemoth weighed in at 2, pounds: 70 percent copper, 25 percent tin, and a scattering of lead, zinc, gold, silver, and arsenic. Once Americans gained independence in , the landmark fell by the wayside until the s, when abolitionists adopted the bell dubbing it "The Liberty Bell" in William Lloyd Garrison's anti-slavery publication, The Liberator as a symbol for their movement.
There's no one widely accepted story for how the recast bell got its now-famous crack. One account asserts that the bell fractured during Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette's visit to the City of Brotherly Love in
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