Sound technique
Something just didn’t sound right. Three years ago, the nearly 5,000-pound bell at Harvard’s Memorial Church started making an ugly clang. Justin Mullane, the church’s director of communications, occupies an office about 200 feet below the bell. “I remember the noise” — closer to a feeling than to a sound and “terrible,” he said, like an aluminum bat hitting a steel pole. In August 2011, the clear ring of the Memorial Church bell — a familiar alert to the start of morning prayers and the top of a new hour — gave way to a harsh, much louder peal. Passersby, and even students at Harvard Business School across the Charles River in Allston, noticed the difference. “You could feel it in your body, resonating,” said Mullane. The culprit: a 30-inch crack in the 85-year-old ringer. This week, a work crew that included an employee of John Taylor & Co., the foundry in Loughborough, England, where...