Purdue's 'World's Largest Drum' claim a giant exaggeration

They parade it proudly through the campus on football Saturdays, roll it out during every halftime performance at Ross-Ade Stadium and thump it throughout each game — the giant percussion instrument that boldly proclaims, right on its face, that it is the "World's Largest Drum."

But is Purdue University's Big Bass Drum truly the biggest?

It seemed like a simple enough question, and one I got to wondering about recently while working on a feature about a Purdue research machinist who last summer spent his time repairing and remaking most of the 216 pieces of custom hardware on the 92-year-old drum.

During my interview with Michael Sherwood, I casually asked: "How big is this thing, anyway?"

Little did I know that I was asking him to spill a state secret. He squirmed at the question and deferred to the Purdue All-American Marching Band.

So I marched over to the Elliott Hall of Music to find the band's marketing director, Susan Xioufaridou. She promptly spurned my query, insisting the dimensions of the drum always have been a band secret.

Now my reporter DNA was starting to boil. Nothing makes a journalist more determined to find a fact than someone trying to keep it under wraps.

I scoured the Internet, figuring the drum's dimensions likely were buried on some obscure blog, as most pieces of trivia usually are, only to come up empty. There were lots of estimates for the diameter, but they were decidedly less than precise, ranging from 8 feet to 10 feet.

What I did discover right away was that there's a lot of competition for the title of "World's Largest Drum," which probably explains why Purdue keeps the actual dimensions under its hat, er, shiny steel helmet.

A few drums in Asia and Europe easily tower over the Boilermakers' drum, with the Guinness World Record holder in South Korea measuring in at a diameter of 18 feet 2 inches. Even the naked eye can see Purdue's drum doesn't come close.

What's less clear is whether Purdue's drum beats the competition closer to home.

The University of Texas has Big Bertha, which is 8 feet tall and 44 inches wide, and the University of Missouri boasts Big Mo, which measures in at 9 feet tall and 4 feet, 6 inches wide.

Perhaps, I figured, these competitors might know. So I called Neil Boumpani, a college professor who built Missouri's drum and who owns Georgia-based Boumpani Music Co.

Missouri, Boumpani explained, ordered up a drum that would thump Texas and Purdue's claims.

"You try to latch onto something you can call unique," Boumpani said. "It's a bragging rights thing. It is about having the biggest and the best."

Sadly, Boumpani did not know the exact dimensions of Purdue's drum.

My next call was to drum head manufacturer Remo Corp., which makes Purdue's heads. Surely they were keepers of the secret. But an associate there told me no dice.

So I took the logical next step for any journalist: I filed a public records request with Purdue on Sept. 23, officially seeking the dimensions of the Big Bass Drum.

Usually, public records requests take weeks for a reply. Lucia Anderson, who handles requests to Purdue under Indiana's Access to Public Records Act, answered within a day.

"I'm responding to your request for public records as it relates to the 'plans and drawings of the Purdue Bass Drum …' " Anderson wrote. "To the extent that these drawings exist, this request is denied under IC 5-14-3-4(a)(4) which exempts records that are 'records containing trade secrets.' "

At this point, I was determined not to be beaten on this story. I sought out Purdue's resident expert on calculating big things: Steve Wereley, the mechanical engineering professor who calculated the size of the massive BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill in 2010.

Wereley, who presumably had much better things to do, was good-natured about my odd request, and accomplished the task in all of 15 minutes. (He admits it took him a bit longer to figure out the size of the oil spill, which he accomplished with the help of an expert team and the U.S. government.)

He told me that if he could find a photo of the drum pictured next to something of known height and width, he could easily calculate it. A technique called photogrammetry would take care of the rest.

The photo that held the key was one Purdue itself published in 2008, after a football game against the University of Oregon. There was the drum, in all its glory, on the Ross-Ade Stadium football field during an All-American Marching Band performance.

Since the NCAA establishes uniform guidelines for the size of the markings on a football field, Wereley said the math was relatively simple. He used the 5-yard line to calculate the diameter and the field's hash marks to figure out the width.

"Basically, they're holding it up to a tape measure," Wereley said. "They're always pushing this thing across the football field, which is measured really nicely."

Wereley calculated the drum's diameter to be 7 feet 5 inches. He estimated the width to be 3 feet 10 inches. While he couldn't be completely sure of his accuracy, he estimated his calculations were correct within inches.

Even with a margin for error, that's smaller than the size of the University of Texas and University of Missouri drums. Purdue's claim to possess the "World's Largest Drum" was starting to look like what politicians delicately like to call a "stranger to the truth."

My epiphany came at last.

It turns out that the holy grail of my quest — the true size of Purdue's Big Bass Drum — was right under my nose the whole time.

City Editor Dave Smith had a hunch that the answer might lie in our own newspaper archives, stored on microfilm at the Tippecanoe County Public Library. So we took a short walk over there.

Inside an aging metal cabinet on the first floor was a square paper boxed labeled "Lafayette Journal & Courier — No. 474." We gently placed the roll of microfilm in a nearby reader.

Smith quickly scrolled through the film, slowing down when he reached the 1921 newspapers — the year the drum was built by Leedy Manufacturing Co. We glanced through Journal & Courier issues from May, June and July before coming to Aug. 6, the day after the Big Bass Drum was unveiled.

And there were the drum's dimensions, right on the front page: "Seven feet three inches in diameter and three feet nine inches wide."

Before Purdue decided to designate the dimensions a "trade secret," the university crowed proudly about the "mammoth instrument."

And thus ends this small story about a big drum.

(Okay, this story isn't really very small. But then again, the drum isn't really very big.)