Dropping the party ball

Every year, at 11.59 pm on December 31, the iconic New Year’s Eve ball drops down from atop a flagpole at New York’s Times Square, as thousands of revellers gather to celebrate the beginning of the ye
Technicians eye the new improved New Year’s ball in New York in 1978 | The Times Square Alliance
Technicians eye the new improved New Year’s ball in New York in 1978 | The Times Square Alliance

Every year, at 11.59 pm on December 31, the iconic New Year’s Eve ball drops down from atop a flagpole at New York’s Times Square, as thousands of revellers gather to celebrate the beginning of the year

The New York Times HQ bash

The inaugural bash in 1904 was a commemoration of the official opening of the new headquarters of The New York Times. The area, which was called Longacre Square, was renamed Times Square thanks to the newspaper’s owner Adolph Ochs

The German immigrant spared no expense for the New Year party and “at midnight the joyful sound of cheering, rattles and noisemakers, it was said, could be heard from as far away as Croton-on-Hudson, thirty miles north along the Hudson River,” according to timessquarenyc.org

Years when the ceremony was suspended

But the famous New Year’s Eve ball made its maiden appearance only in 1907. The first ball was made of iron and wood and adorned with a hundred 25-watt light bulbs. The ball has been lowered every year since 1907, with the exceptions of 1942 and 1943, when the ceremony was suspended due to the wartime “dimout” of lights in New York City, the website adds

Not just in Times Square

The ball-drop, which signals the passage of time, is a ritual that dates back long before the celebration of New Year’s eve in Times Square. The first “time-ball” was installed atop England’s Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1833. Captains in the nearby ships would set their navigation instruments as the ball dropped at one every afternoon

Around 150 public time-balls are believed to have been installed around the world after the success at Greenwich, though few survive and still work. The tradition lives on in few places including the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, where a time-ball descends from a flagpole at noon each day

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