Casinos, Yekaterinburg

The leaning tower, constructed with the sponsorship of the Demidov dynasty, is the symbol of Nevyansk and a monument of industrial architecture.The tower has several levels and floors. Earlier it hosted a lab for examining the content of manufactured iron, the factory's archives, the chancellor's office, and the lockup cell. Today it contains museum exhibits. Akinfiy Demidov's office, which served as a prison in Soviet times, was located on the second floor.To this day there is still a so-called «listening room». If you stand in one corner of the room, you can hear the tiniest whisper of people in the opposite corner. In addition, the Nevyansk tower has preserved its 18th-century clock tower. This chiming clock was manufactured in the 1730s by an English clockmaker, Richard Phelps, and had needed repairs only three times since. There was a time when the clock could play up to 20 musical pieces. Today, every 15 minutes the clock chimes the melody «Glory to You» from the opera «A Life for the Tsar».Another feature of the tower is the metal steeple with a weathercock, bearing the stamped coat-of-arms of the Demidovs. The steeple is grounded. It served as a lightning rod a quarter of a century before Benjamin Franklin invented the first lightning rod in 1725. https://eng.russia.travel/objects/306693/