The spot along the left bank of the River Thames where Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament stand has been a seat of government since the early 11th century, when Canute, the Danish ruler of Britain, is said to have built a palace there. A few years later, Edward the Confessor built the first Palace of Westminister, which was enlarged by William the Conqueror. Parliament first met on the spot in the late 13th century, but the present building to which Big Ben is attached was erected after Edward’s palace burned down in 1837. St. Stephen’s Tower, in which Big Ben is located, is 320 feet in height.

The clock was designed by Edmund Beckett Denison and built by Frederick Dent, the clockmaker for Queen Victoria. The clock is named after Sir Benjamin Hall, the then-British Commissioner of Works. It was completed in 1859, but a crack in the bell developed, and repair work kept it out of commission until 1862.

Big Ben is renowned both for its accuracy and its 13-ton bell, so enormous it took a team of 16 horses to pull it to the construction site. The bell hammer weighs 400 pounds. Big Ben’s hour hand is 9 feet long, and its minute hand is 14 feet. Since 1924, Big Ben’s chimes have been broadcast by the BBC as a daily time signal.

Big Ben is one of the most reliable clocks on Earth. Although German air raids damaged the tower at least a dozen times during World War II, the clock continued to mark the hours within one and a half seconds of Greenwich Mean Time, as measured at the Greenwich observatory. The only wartime interruption was when a flock of starlings landed on the hour hand and stopped the clock. Since then, despite the clock’s age, it’s suffered only a few glitches. In 1962, snow accumulation caused the clock to ring in the New Year 10 minutes late; in 1976, a piece of the clock’s machinery broke; and in 1997, extremely cold winds froze a rubber buffer on the bell hammer, giving the clock a muffled tone.