The crossover

[Chris Pickford]

I'm sure we're all very grateful for Andrew Higson's contribution on this, which certainly helps to sort out the chronology. I'd taken it as understood that the references to '86 and '87 were typos for '96 and '97, but Dennis's posting shows that this may not be quite so obvious to those who haven't been following the matter closely. For clarification, all of this concerns Taylors' work of the period 1895-1898 and not the 1880s.

There's still an issue over subjectivity and opinion, though. I haven't been to Norton, so I don't have an impression of them, but if the overall character of sound is true-harmonic then I can't help feeling that the laurels should go to this ring (even if one bell has a flat fundamental / prime) rather than to the ring in which all the partials were in line. Some of the first true-harmonic rings claimed by or attributed to other founders are far less accurately tuned than Norton, I suspect.

To raise another hare, how many of us are really thinking of a ring of eight (rather than a five or six) for the first complete true-harmonic ring? I did omit a couple of fives (Bracebridge 1896 and Rosscarbery 1897) from the list for this reason

CP


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]