Where Do They Drop the Ball in New York
"The Times Building will be especially illuminated to-night in honor of the birth of 1908," announced The New York Times on December 31, 1907. "The exact moment of the New Year's arrival will be signalized by the dropping of an electrically illuminated ball above the tower. The ball will be five feet in diameter, and light for it will be supplied by 216 electric lamps."
That ball, powered by its 216 electric lamps, was the first of what immediately became an annual tradition. But while New Year's Eve celebrants still flock to Times Square in New York City to see the ball drop, it's likely that few contemporary viewers know where the ritual comes from.
Times Square was already a mecca for New Year's Eve revelers by 1904, when hundreds of thousands of people chose to celebrate in Midtown Manhattan near the brand-new New York Times building (after which the square itself was named). At midnight, pyrotechnics were set off that made the building look as if it were literally on fire. The next day the Times reported that "from base to dome the giant structure was alight…never was a New Year's Eve more joyously celebrated." The same article described Times Square as packed by 9 PM, and by midnight "the crush was so great that progress was well nigh impossible in any direction."
The pyrotechnics made for an extraordinary show. But they also rained hot ash onto the New York City streets, a liability that worried city officials so much that fireworks were banned in 1907. Not to be deterred from putting on a fabulous show, the Times introduced a new gimmick to bring partyers to Times Square: the New Year's Eve Ball.
The first ball bore little resemblance to today's crystal one. Crafted in iron and wood, it weighed about 700 pounds (317 kg) and was decorated with 25-watt light bulbs. Its designer was Jacob Starr, an electric sign designer and manufacturer who supervised when, at the stroke of midnight, the ball was lowered by an elaborate pulley system. And though the ball's design changed over the years—from iron and wood to aluminum to Waterford Crystal—the tradition itself did not. With the exceptions of the World War II "dimouts" in 1942 and 1943, the New Year's Eve Ball hasn't missed a year since its 1907 debut. Since 2009 it's been the "Big Times Square New Year's Eve Ball" (or the "Big Ball," for short) that drops: an almost six-ton geodesic sphere covered in 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles.
Each iteration of Times Square's celebratory sparkling ball is modeled on a much older practice. Sometimes called time balls, the concept was originally a practical one: a ball descended from a pole or pulley system to alert passersby as to the time of day. One of the first time balls, installed at 1833 at the Royal Greenwich Observatory outside London, England, dropped daily at 1 PM so that captains of ships passing on the River Thames could verify the time on their chronometers. Since typically only the rich owned personal clocks and watches, the rest of the population relying on local sundials, time balls provided a solution to standardizing what time it actually was.
Other institutions followed the Royal Greenwich Observatory's example, and soon enough about 150 public time balls were installed worldwide. But, like the Sony Walkman bridging the gap between a record and a CD, the time ball wasn't necessary for long. As time zones became standardized and watches and clocks became less expensive, most of the original time balls were dismantled. Only a few remain today, including the Royal Greenwich Observatory's original model, a reinstalled time ball at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., and—once a year, at midnight—the ball in Times Square.
Where Do They Drop the Ball in New York
Source: https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-we-drop-a-ball-on-new-years-eve
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