Happy New Year!!!!
Naval Observatories, Time Balls and Telegraphs - a History of New Year's Eve Ball Drops
In American pop-culture, no New Year’s Eve is complete without the New Year’s Eve Ball drop at One Time’s Square in New York City; an annual tradition (with the exception of two black-out years during World War II) since 1907.[i]But it was not the first; an electrically illuminated “time ball,” marking the New Year, first dropped in Washington DC on New Year’s Eve leading into 1903.
In 1903, the “time ball” concept itself was already about seven decades old. Traditionally, however, it was dropped at noon, every day, as a visual means of synchronizing clocks on naval vessels; accurate time-keeping being a crucial component of safe navigation. The Royal Navy had been using “time balls” since 1829, and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich had been dropping them daily at 1:00 p.m. since 1833.[ii]
In the United States, the Naval Observatory[iii]had been triggering time-ball drops at noon every day since 1844. Starting in 1877, they telegraphed a daily signal to New York City, triggering a “time ball” drop from the top of the Western Union Building. By 1903, thousands of clocks across the country were hard-wired to the telegraph system and could be synchronized daily by the noon time signal broadcast across the country. Synchronized clocks helped regulate business affairs, and improved communication, railroad safety, and maritime navigation. The daily signal was a five-minute procedure, starting at five-til, and ending at “official” noon.
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| The Washington Times, August 23, 1903, page 21. |
In 1903, the Naval Observatory introduced a new, annual time signal, to mark the start of the new year:
An interesting part of the transmission of correct time is the plan, which was first put into operation last winter and will doubtless be followed hereafter, of sending out telegraphic signals to mark the exact instant of the beginning of the New Year. In Washington the time ball was illuminated by an electric scarlet light as it fell. The Western Union Company took up the plan with enthusiasm and five minutes before 12 o’clock a series of signals was sent out omitting certain seconds to mark clearly each thirtieth and sixtieth second, the final click, after a ten second interval, marking the exact instant of midnight. The series was repeated at 1, 2, and 3 a. m. as a midnight signal for those using central, mountain, and Pacific standard time. In this way every portion of the country received the signal directly from the Naval Observatory. It stirs the blood to think of these successive series of signals flashing over thousands of miles of wire to every telegraph office in the United States. One-tenth of a second[i]was the time the electric current required to pass from Washington to the Lick Observatory in California. As Admiral Chester said, in describing the event to the Times man: “The electric current made audible from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico every swing of the pendulum of our standard clock as it counted out, in its quiet, solemn way, the last moments of the dying year.”[ii]
Four years later, New York City took the hint and celebrated the New Year with its own illuminated “time ball.”
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| The Topeka State Journal, January 1, 1912, page 10. |
Happy New Year!!!!
[iii]The United States Naval Observatory was also involved in the discovery of the moons of Mars; and some of the earliest uses of the word, “Martian,” as a noun, meaning a being from Mars. See my earlier post, The World’s First Martians – and First Martian Invasion.
[iv]An earlier report put the time for transmission to the Lick Observatory in California as 0.06 seconds. See The Washington Times (DC), June 24, 1903, page 4 ([T]he midnight signal sent out last New Year Eve was accurately timed at the Lick Observatory, California, and found to have taken but 0.06 of a second in transmission.).
[v]The Washington Times, August 23, 1903, page 21.