On this day in history...

Big Ben rang for the first time

Big Ben has universal significance as it keeps the world in time and many Londoners, myself included, could not imagine the city without it. It is a cultural icon and a survey of 2000 people agreed that it was the most popular lankmark in the capital city. This widespread popularity results in filmakers only needing to show the clock, perhaps with a London bus in the foreground, to let people know where the a film is set. One of the most famous uses of Big Ben is in The Thirty Nine Steps, when Richard Hannay attempts to save the day by hanging from the outside of the clock.

Big Ben started working on this day in 1859, and Edmund Beckett Denison, the designer of the clock, could not possibly have known what an legacy he was creating. Denison was chosen to create it after much of the Palace of Westminster was destroyed by fire in October 1834 and they wanted the standout feature of the new building to be a great tower with a clock on top.

However, Big Ben's performance was not always as stellar as it is today. The longest stoppage started on 5 Agust 1976, when the speed regulator of the chiming mechanism broke and the clock had to be shut for a total of 26 days over nine months and Radio Four had to use the pips instead of the chiming of the bell.The clock also chimed New Year ten minutes late in 1962 due to snow slowing it down, but they had a white Christmas, so they can hardly complain.

So Happy Birthday to the icon that is 153 today, it is much loved after surviving two World Wars and all the problems in between, and looks set to keep us in time for many years in the future.

60% of us would give someone a potentially lethal electric shock just because we were told to.

The Milgram Experiment

This seems an unlikely statistic, and before the experiment was carried out, psychologists didn't belive it either as they thought that only a small minority, less than 3%, would deliberately harm someone for a psychological experiment.

The studay carried out in the early 1960's proved very different results which have since been repeated with similar conclusions. The test subjects were told that they were taking part in an experiment about punishment and learning. They were to be the experimenters with the subjects in another room. They asked the 'subject', who was really an actor, a series of questions and each time the actor got a question wrong, they were told to press a switch. They were told that the switches delivered an increasingly painful electric shock to the subject, whom they could hear was in pain from the sounds coming from the other room. On beginning the experiment the actor told them that he had a weak heart, yet almost two thirds of people carried on giving the shocks until the highest level, even when the switches became labeled, 'danger:severe shock' and lastly, 'XXX'.

Most people became extremely distressed during the experiment and showed a wish to stop, but when the supervisor told them that they must continue, they kept going. There are several possible reasons for this blind obedience, such as the trust the subjects had in the safety of the experiment as it was conducted at Yale Univerity and the supervisor was supposed to be an expert. Furthermore, as the shocks went up in 15 volt jumps, it was hard for people to draw the line as the next shock was only slightly more than the one before. One of the biggest factors encouraging obedience was the physical presence of the supervisor telling them to continue and many participants found that they couldn't say no. 

At the time, this experiment had even more terrifying significance as the trial of WWII criminal, Eichmann had just begun, whose main defence was that he was just following orders. Looking at the results of this experiment was that simply the bottom line? and would any of us have done the same?

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." –Stanley Milgram, 1974

On this day in history...

The Empire State Building was opened.

On this day, exactly 81 years ago, President Herbert Hoover opened the Empire State Building to the public by symbolically turning on its lights from a switch in the White House. Constuction had started on 17 March 1930 as part of a competition between Walter Chrysler and John Jakob Raskob to see who could build the highest tower. The project was extremely important to the American economy after the Wall Street crash in 1929 had left huge numbers of people unemployed. At its peak, the project employed 3000 people per day and due to this vast workforce, the structure could rise by an amazing 4 1/2 stories every week!


Health and safety was clearly more relaxed then today's mind blowing standards, however, only five people died during the construction, and only one from falling from the scaffolding, lets hope it was none of these luchtime daredevils.

 

Of the other four who died, one was hit by a truck, one fell down an elevator shaft, another was hit by a hoist and the last was in a blast area and was killed by an explosion. So maybe less health and safety would have evolutionary benefits by weeding the unlucky and those devoid of common sense from the gene pool.

The Empire State Building did win the competion, measuring in at 1454 feet compared to the Crysler Building which was 1047 feet tall. It has a staggering 102 floors and if you took complete leave of your senses and decided that you were going to walk all the way up there, you would be taking on a mammoth 1860 steps.

Since it has been built the Empire State Building has been a cultural icon, featuring in over 250 films, possibly the most famous being King Kong. It is clearly a much loved building, being voted 'Americas Favorite Architecture' by the American Institute of Architects in 2007 and I think that it represents to people the great things that can be achieved through inspirational thinking, hard work and brining people together.