bell

Hollow vessel, usually of metal, that produces a ringing sound when struck by an interior clapper or a mallet. In the West, open bells have acquired a standard “tulip” shape. Though the vibrational patterns of such open bells are basically nonharmonic, they can be tuned so that the lower overtones produce a recognizable chord. Forged bells have existed for many thousands of years. Bells were first cast, or founded, in the Bronze Age; the Chinese were the first master founders. Bells have carried a wide range of cultural meanings. They are particularly important in religious ritual in East and South Asia. In Christianity, especially Russian Orthodoxy, bells have also been used ritually. They have tolled the hours from monastery and church steeples, originally to govern monastic routine and later also to fill a similar role for the secular world.

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(born Feb. 15, 1797, near Nashville, Tenn., U.S.—died Sept. 10, 1869, Dover, Tenn.) U.S. politician. He represented Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives (1827–41) and Senate (1847–59). Although a large slaveholder, he opposed efforts to expand slavery to U.S. territories and voted against admitting Kansas as a slave state. His defense of the Union brought him the 1860 nomination for president on the Constitutional Union ticket, but he carried only three states. He later supported the South in the American Civil War.

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or Ida Bell Wells-Barnett

(born July 16, 1862, Holly Springs, Miss., U.S.—died March 25, 1931, Chicago, Ill.) U.S. journalist and antilynching crusader. The daughter of slaves, she was educated at a freedmen's school in Holly Springs and later at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn. She was a teacher until the late 1880s, when she turned to journalism, writing articles for African American-owned newspapers on issues such as the limited education available to African American children. In 1892, after three of her friends were lynched by a mob, Wells began an editorial campaign against lynching that quickly led to the destruction of her newspaper's office by whites. She continued her antilynching campaign as a lecturer and founder of antilynching societies and African American women's clubs throughout the U.S. In 1895 she married Ferdinand Barnett and began writing for his newspaper, the Chicago Conservator. In 1910 she founded the Chicago Negro Fellowship League. She also founded Chicago's Alpha Suffrage Club, perhaps the first African American woman-suffrage group.

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(born July 14, 1868, Washington Hall, Durham, Eng.—died July 12, 1926, Baghdad, Iraq) British traveler, writer, and colonial administrator. After graduating from Oxford, she journeyed throughout the Middle East. After World War I she wrote a well-received report on the administration of Mesopotamia between the end of the war (1918) and the Iraqi rebellion of 1920 and later helped determine postwar boundaries. In 1921 she helped place a son of the sharif of Mecca, Fayssubdotal I, on the Iraqi throne. In helping create the National Museum of Iraq, she promoted the idea that excavated antiquities should stay in their country of origin.

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(born Feb. 15, 1797, near Nashville, Tenn., U.S.—died Sept. 10, 1869, Dover, Tenn.) U.S. politician. He represented Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives (1827–41) and Senate (1847–59). Although a large slaveholder, he opposed efforts to expand slavery to U.S. territories and voted against admitting Kansas as a slave state. His defense of the Union brought him the 1860 nomination for president on the Constitutional Union ticket, but he carried only three states. He later supported the South in the American Civil War.

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(born July 14, 1868, Washington Hall, Durham, Eng.—died July 12, 1926, Baghdad, Iraq) British traveler, writer, and colonial administrator. After graduating from Oxford, she journeyed throughout the Middle East. After World War I she wrote a well-received report on the administration of Mesopotamia between the end of the war (1918) and the Iraqi rebellion of 1920 and later helped determine postwar boundaries. In 1921 she helped place a son of the sharif of Mecca, Fayssubdotal I, on the Iraqi throne. In helping create the National Museum of Iraq, she promoted the idea that excavated antiquities should stay in their country of origin.

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(born March 3, 1847, Edinburgh, Scot.—died Aug. 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, Can.) Scottish-born U.S. audiologist and inventor. He moved to the U.S. in 1871 to teach the visible-speech system developed by his father, Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905). He opened his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf (1872) and was influential in disseminating these methods. In 1876 he became the first person to transmit intelligible words through electric wire (“Watson, come here, I want you,” spoken to his assistant Thomas Watson). He patented the telephone the same year, and in 1877 he cofounded Bell Telephone Co. With the proceeds from France's Volta Prize, he founded Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., in 1880. His experiments there led to the invention of the photophone (which transmitted speech by light rays), the audiometer (which measured acuteness of hearing), the Graphophone (an early practical sound recorder), and working wax recording media, both flat and cylindrical, for the Graphophone. He was chiefly responsible for founding the journal Science, founded the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf (1890), and continued his significant research on deafness throughout his life.

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(born Sept. 16, 1881, East Shefford, Berkshire, Eng.—died Sept. 17, 1964, London) British art critic. He studied at Cambridge University and in Paris. In 1907 he married Vanessa Stephen, sister of Virginia Woolf; with Virginia's husband, Leonard Woolf, and Roger Fry, they formed the core of the Bloomsbury group. Bell's most important aesthetic ideas were published in Art (1914) and Since Cézanne (1922), in which he promoted his theory of “significant form” (the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other objects). His assertion that art appreciation involves an emotional response to purely formal qualities, independent of subject matter, was influential for several decades.

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(born March 3, 1847, Edinburgh, Scot.—died Aug. 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, Can.) Scottish-born U.S. audiologist and inventor. He moved to the U.S. in 1871 to teach the visible-speech system developed by his father, Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905). He opened his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf (1872) and was influential in disseminating these methods. In 1876 he became the first person to transmit intelligible words through electric wire (“Watson, come here, I want you,” spoken to his assistant Thomas Watson). He patented the telephone the same year, and in 1877 he cofounded Bell Telephone Co. With the proceeds from France's Volta Prize, he founded Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., in 1880. His experiments there led to the invention of the photophone (which transmitted speech by light rays), the audiometer (which measured acuteness of hearing), the Graphophone (an early practical sound recorder), and working wax recording media, both flat and cylindrical, for the Graphophone. He was chiefly responsible for founding the journal Science, founded the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf (1890), and continued his significant research on deafness throughout his life.

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Cloche (French for bell) may refer to the following:

• Bell (instrument), especially in music directions
• Row cover, a covering for protecting plants from cold temperatures
• Cloche hat, a close-fitting women's hat;hat worn by flappers in the 1920s
• A restaurant's bell-shaped cover for a plate of food, to retain warmth
• A dome-shaped clay oven used for baking a single loaf of bread