The tradition goes back more than a century, but who decided that a ball had something to do with the New Year?
It was New Year’s Eve in 1907 and there was a party in Times Square. The revelers took to the streets from nearby theaters and hotels (some sports hats with the numbers “1908” that had coats of arms on small light bulbs) and by 11:50 p.m., tens of thousands had reached the Broadway junction and Street.
But aside from the record crowds, a new tradition would be born that night: a 700-pound steel and wood ball, adorned with a hundred light bulbs and built by a young immigrant metalworker named Jacob Starr, would retire from the flagpole. at the top of One Times Square. But wait, why a ball? And why Times Square?
The story of celebrating New Year’s Eve in Times Square began in 1905. (Earlier, New Yorkers gathered around Trinity Church in the city center as the bell tower “rang in the old and rang in the us ”). New York News, which had recently established its headquarters on location, and for two years the newspaper made fireworks and turned its building into the epicenter of all things on New Year’s Eve. Unfortunately, the city banned the fiery (and probably dangerous) display in 1907. Determined to find a new way to sound the new year, the paper’s owner, Adolph Ochs, arranged for the ball to fall. Check out these other New Year’s Eve traditions from around the world.
Ochs didn’t get the idea out of nowhere. It was inspired by the Western Union Telegraph time ball – a ball that was dropped from the top of the building exactly at noon each day. This ball was inspired by the time balls used by nineteenth-century sailors to calibrate their stopwatches. Until 1907 no ball had been used to sound the new year.
Luckily for Ochs, people loved the New Year’s ball. “The loud scream that came out drowned out the whistles for a minute,” the newspaper wrote the next morning. “The vocal power of the welcome rose even above the horns, the bells of the cows and the rattles. Above all there was the wild human hullabaloo of noise.
Since that first ball fall, the idea of dropping objects to count the new year has become synonymous with vacation. Maine drops a maple leaf, Georgia drops a peach, and Idaho drops a giant potato. Before this year’s download, read more fun information you never knew about the holidays.