1860s bells

[Carl S Zimmerman]

David Bryant wrote:
>fundamentally I think that 'grotty' is when they sound nasty, which,
>it is probably fair to say, the majority of mid-Victorian rings do.
>Of course there are exceptions, but offhand I can't think of any
>1860s rings famed for their fine tone....

This could equally well be said of chimes (and bells in general) from 
the American bellfoundries of the same period. Unfortunately I don't 
yet have a chronological index to chimes on the GCNA Website, nor do 
I have all North American chimes posted. However, from the American 
foundry indexes (listed at 
http://www.gcna.org/data/IXfoundries.html), one can see that American 
production of chimes essentially began in the 1850s (Hooper/Blake, 
Jones, Meneely/Watervliet) and expanded through the 1890s 
(Meneely/Troy, McShane, Stuckstede, Vanduzen), declining after the 
Great Depression and expiring in 1951. Most of the early chimes that 
I have heard sound pretty bad. None of the foundries had any idea of 
how to tune bells--one even boasted that all their bells were shipped 
as cast. The sole exception was Meneely/Watervliet, which began to 
use two-point tuning around the turn of the century, and eventually 
made some respectable-sounding small carillons (23 to 31 bells). In 
addition, some of their heavy chimes were later used as the basses of 
fine carillons without any retuning or replacement. A couple of the 
other foundries did use heavy enough profiles that some of their 
chimes have been successfully tuned (not "re"tuned) as part of a 
renovation/expansion project.

-- 
Carl Scott Zimmerman, CCP <XNS-Name:=Carl Scott Zimmerman=>
Certified Computing Professional (ICCP) Campanologist
Co-Webmaster: http://www.gcna.org/
Avocation: tower bells / Recreation: handbells / Mission: church bells
Voicemail: +1-314-361-5194 (home) E-mail: csz_stl at s...
Saint Louis, Missouri, USA - - 19th c. home of at least 32 bell
. . . . . . . . . . . . . foundries or resellers