Today in History—December 31: The Ball That Started It All

On New Year’s Eve in 1907, the first ball was dropped in Times Square. It was made of iron, bedecked with 25-watt lightbulbs, and weighed 700 pounds. It took six men to lower it.

People loved it.

New Year’s Eve in Times Square is now watched around the world. But before countdowns and confetti, there was real estate strategy. The first subway line opened in 1904 and stopped at that intersection—West 42nd Street, Seventh Avenue, and Broadway. Sensing an opportunity, Adolph Ochs, owner of The New York Times, moved his newspaper there. Times Square soon became the location’s official name.

The paper ran an ad inviting people to ring in the new year there on December 31, 1904, and more than 200,000 gathered. The hosts shot fireworks from the roof and blasted dynamite to make it look as if the building were alight. In the Times the next day, the spectacle was described as “a torch to usher in the newborn, a funeral pyre for the old which pierced the very heavens.”

But making it look like a 412-foot tower was on fire proved disconcerting. (Go figure.) By 1907 the city banned fireworks. Ochs asked the Times’s chief electrician, Walter Palmer, to come up with something festive but less flammable. Palmer presumably took inspiration from the Western Union Telegraph Building clock, which dropped a ball each day at noon, harkening back to the mariner’s tradition of onshore timekeeping balls that sailors used to adjust their instruments.

The first Times Square ball drop was a hit—with the ball cascading down at exactly midnight. Decades later the time increased to three seconds, then five, and finally, the 60-second countdown we know and love today.

Wardrobe changes for the ball followed: It was recast in aluminum in the 1950s, restyled as an apple in the ’80s, and bedazzled in the ’90s (like everything else). Later versions were motorized and computerized. The millennium model incorporated high-tech lighting, and the 2007 version could generate 16 million colors. This year brings another new ball—the ninth—covered in energy-efficient LED crystals. It weighs 12,350 pounds.

When the first ball dropped, only about half of American homes had electricity. Those 25-watt bulbs read as night-lights to us now, but back then they dazzled brightly enough to spark a tradition.