Big Ben is still regulated with old pennies.
Placing one on the pendulum shifts its centre of mass slightly, and the clock gains about 0.4 seconds a day.
More amazing facts
- 1858 The first transatlantic telegram took 16 hours to send: Queen Victoria's 98-word greeting to the US president in 1858.
- 1859 · 1869 Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and Mendeleev's periodic law (1869) are just ten years apart.
- 1859 · 1872 The only casualty of the Pig War between the US and Britain was a pig. The border dispute that began with a farmer’s shot in 1859 dragged on for 13 years and was settled by an arbitrator: the German Kaiser.
- 1859 In 1859 telegraph operators sent messages without batteries; space supplied the power.
- 1859 In 1859 the aurora was so bright that gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke in the night and began making breakfast, thinking it was morning.
- 1859 · 1915 Having found Neptune on paper, Le Verrier used the same method to predict a planet that isn't there.