Physics is as crazy as it is wide-ranging. Sometimes, you’d find one conclusion after the next. But the rest of the times, Physics is a bitch that further tumbles you down the slope of infinite possibilities. The second premise is what has scientists going over a bell that has not stopped ringing in the longest possible time.
With a battery that was installed in the year 1840, the Oxford Bell has been ringing for the past 175 years, and nobody has a clue how. Made up of a single battery, the researchers have been itching to know what it’s made of. But opening the battery will ruin the experiment to know how long it will ring. So there it sits, in the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University and has been ringing incessantly for the past 175 years.
You can constantly see the bell’s clapper move back and forth, and it’s said to have rung 10 billion times. It seems unlikely that the bell started as an experiment. It was started by instrument makers Watkin and Hill, with a handwritten note reading, “set up in 1840”. There are theories that the bell might have been manufactured as early as 1825. Today it’s power source is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s most durable battery”.
And the bell continues to ring. A.J. Croft, a former researcher at the lab said that it’s unlikely that the electrochemical energy might run out, but the clapper of the bell might wear out. That’s when the bell will stop ringing and we will know how this thing exactly functions. Here’s a video: