Joyce Niemann, age 13, of Helena, Mont., for her question:
WHEN WAS THE FIRST BELL MADE?
A bell is a hollow instrument that vibrates and gives out a ringing sound when it is struck. It received its name from the Anglo Saxon word "bellan," which means to roar. The earliest bells were hammered into shape out of flat sheets of metal. Belie were used in ancient Chinese times as far back as 2600 B.C.
Primitive bells were in the shape of beehives and were usually made in sets of 12. Small bells, or tintinnabula, were used by almost all peoples of antiquity in religious services.
The Old Testament tells how a priest was commanded to wear bells back in 1200 B.C. And King Solomon hung bells on his temple. By 500 B.C. horse bells were being put on harnesses.
The oldest bells still preserved, and dated about 600 B.C., are 80 bronze hand bells that were discovered in the ruins of Nimrud in Iraq by an English archaeologist named Sir Austen Layard.
The Romans, Greeks and Etruscans all used bells. The expression "bearing away the bell" dates from the days of the Greek races, when the winner was awarded a silver bell. The loving cup of today is simply a bell turned upside down.
It was in about 400 A.D. when Paulinus, the bishop of Nola in Campania, Italy, put the first bell on a church roof. From this comes the word "campanology," which is the art of bell ringing.
By 450 early missionaries of the church gathered crowds by ringing iron bells about six inches high. They looked much like today's cow bells.
In the Western Hemisphere, the Aztecs were using bells as early as 500 A.D. When the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortex arrived in the new world in 1520, he found that bells were used from what today is southern Mexico to the area that is now called Arizona.
Many of the early mission bells in North America were sent from Europe.
In most of California's Spanish missions, the long metal bell was used. At Buenaventura Mission, however, the bells were made from a single section of oak, the inside hollowed out and an iron plate attached to either side of the inner rim.
These early wooden bells were held together by rawhide strips that were woven tightly around the outer circumference.
In Philadelphia's Independence Hall is the Liberty Bell, which was first hung in the State House in 1753. It was made by a London founder and was cracked while being delivered.
The Liberty Bell was then melted and recast twice in Philadelphia before its tone was satisfactory. It pealed in 1776 at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but cracked again in 1835 when tolling in memory of Chief Justice John Marshall.