Palace of Westminster & Big Ben

What you see rising before you, the Palace of Westminster, has been the beating heart of British political life for centuries. But it almost never looked this way. The original palace was a royal residence dating back to the eleventh century, and it burned almost entirely to the ground in 1834 when workers made a spectacularly bad decision: burning old wooden tally sticks, the notched rods that were once used to track tax records, inside the building's furnaces. The fire raged through the night and destroyed most of the palace.

The disaster led to a design competition, won by architect Charles Barry and his collaborator Augustus Pugin, a brilliant designer obsessed with Gothic detail. Together they created the landmark you see today. Pugin poured himself into the intricate stonework, spires, and decorative flourishes, but tragically died in 1852, six years before the Clock Tower was completed.

That tower, now universally known as Big Ben, holds a famously stubborn bell. The first bell cracked during testing, and so did the second. Engineers simply rotated it and reduced the hammer's weight, and it has been chiming ever since, first ringing in 1859.

A bag of old pennies, placed on the clock's pendulum, adjusts its speed by fractions of a second each day. Precision engineering, solved with loose change.