Dropping Balls

Once again, we will miss the New Year’s Eve festivities in Times Square — there’s absolutely nothing — nothing! — appealing about waiting seven hours in the cold without access to even a porta-potty much less alcohol! In lieu of that unfulfilled experience, there’s this helpful Times op-ed about the history of balls dropping. Fascinating stuff:

New York City’s annual ball drop is probably the greatest single moment of public timekeeping in the world. Yet the Times Square ball is not the world’s most important time ball – nor was it the first. It wasn’t even the first time ball in New York. Oh, and it isn’t even dropped right.

A little history first. Public time-telling began in church. In 1335, the bells of the church of San Gottardo (then Beata Vergine) began tolling the hours in Milan, ringing once at 1 a.m. and culminating in 24 chimes at midnight. It was the first time church bells had been used to announce time regularly. The idea spread rapidly through Europe, and for the first time in history, large groups of people knew the time. The Milan clock could be off by as much as 1,000 seconds a day, but that wasn’t really a problem, because if nobody knew exactly what time it was, how could anyone really be late?

Measurement of time improved as the centuries passed, but even into the early 18th century most people had no need for precise time. (The minute hand shows up on watches, for example, around 1700). The bells tolled hourly and that was plenty.

Accuracy improved vastly during the industrial revolution and was honed at sea: ship captains needed extremely precise clocks to coordinate their celestial readings with the time those readings would occur at a known point – usually Greenwich, England (the city that later lent its name to Greenwich Mean Time, the world’s standard time). John Harrison, the famous clockmaker, developed a chronometer accurate and portable enough to do the job in 1761, and ultimately changed the world.

But once clocks were capable of precision time-telling, the question was, what to set them against? In the early 19th century, enter the time ball. Robert Wauchope, a Royal Navy captain, had an idea: a large signal in a harbor would, at a specific moment, indicate the exact time – sailors could view it through a telescope and set their chronometers precisely.

In 1829 the Admiralty gave it a shot, setting up the world’s first time ball in the harbor at Portsmouth, England. It worked so well that in 1833 they set one up at the Royal Observatory in Flamsteed House, on a Greenwich hilltop. The ball, which was visible to ships at anchor, would be dropped every day at 1 p.m. At 12:55 p.m., the red, wood-and-leather ball was raised halfway up a 15-foot mast atop the building; at 12:58 it went to the top; and on the hour the ball began to drop, the start of its downward motion signaling exactly 1 p.m.

The ball idea caught on. The United States Naval Observatory began dropping a noon time ball in Foggy Bottom in 1845 and kept it up until 1885, when the ball drop moved to the State, War and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) next to the White House, where it kept dropping until 1936. Starting in 1877, the Navy telegraphed a daily signal to the Western Union Building in New York, atop which an automatic time ball then dropped. (Twelve minutes early, to account for the difference in longitude; we didn’t get time zones until the telegraph and railroads made them necessary, in the 1880s.)

Which brings us to the famous Times Square ball:

And as for New York, in December of 1904, this newspaper celebrated the move to its new Times Square building with a New Year’s Eve party, which thereafter grew year by year. When, in 1907, a ban on fireworks prompted The Times to find a new celebration finale, a time ball was brought in, and the tradition began.

The Times Square ball isn’t quite a true time ball. The eye can easily pick up motion, so precise time balls mark time by starting to move, not by stopping. The Times Square ball marks time with the end of its motion – hard to perceive and inexact, but presumably more fun for counting backward.