For the competitors at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, their hopes and dreams of winning can all be dashed with one sound: the sound of a bell. When they hear it, they know they got the word wrong.
"The very basic essence of this has never changed, which is young people learning to spell words and demonstrating their knowledge," Brooks said. The bell itself is old: A tiny engraving indicates it's from 1865. No one really knows where it came from, or what it was originally used for, but its distinct sound has now attracted its own fan club, as Brooks found out when she couldn't make it to the Bee in 2014.
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