The Copper Weather Choir

Overview

In 1934, the Orsund Harbour Board wanted a weather warning that every fisherman could hear, whether or not he could read a barometer. Benedikt Saarinen-Holt, a bell founder from the north coast, offered to build a choir of twenty-three bells that would sound fair weather in a bright major key and storms in a low, uneasy minor.

The choir hung in a wooden frame above the harbour office and rang every morning at six. For several seasons, it was the most reliable forecast in the region.

How it worked

Each bell was cast with a hollow rim partly filled with oil. A large set of barometric bellows, connected to the bells by thin copper pipes, pushed the oil up or down inside the rims as air pressure changed. More oil in the rim lowered a bell's pitch, so falling pressure made the whole choir sink towards a darker chord.

A drum of pegs played the same melody every morning, but the melody never sounded the same twice. Fishermen learned to hear the difference between a choir that was merely gloomy and one that meant they should stay in port.

The harbour master kept a printed key in the office window that matched common chords to forecasts, from settled to rough sea, stay ashore. Within a year, most fishermen no longer needed it. Children in Orsund learned to sing the storm chord as a warning to each other, long before they could read the key.

Why it disappeared

The choir was accurate but fragile. Oil leaked from the rims during cold snaps, and once it rang a cheerful major chord on the morning of a severe gale because half the oil had frozen. Nobody was lost at sea that day, but the Harbour Board lost confidence in the bells.

Radio forecasts reached Orsund in 1939, and the board voted to keep the frame as a monument while removing the bellows. Without them, the bells rang only one chord, the one Saarinen-Holt had tuned for an ordinary, slightly cloudy day.

What survives

The frame and nineteen of the bells still hang above the old harbour office. They are rung on the first morning of the fishing season, always in the same neutral chord, and locals joke that the choir now forecasts nothing but tradition.