Why does a ball drop on New Year’s Eve?

Traditions mark time.

In the waning while of New Year’s Eve, whether curled up on the couch or partaking in a party, so many of us flick on a certain tradition as we flip over the calendar for a new set of days we hope hold for us—this time, this year—some better version of ourselves.

That is, if we haven’t already bid farewell to the past year—or given it the finger—and sent ourselves happily off to bed.

We flick on the ball drop at Times Square in New York.

I don’t know about you, but in my experience, no matter the manner of celebration, the Times Square broadcast in some way plays during New Year’s Eve.  

I recall times when my family tuned in to our timeless human timekeeper, Dick Clark. I recall times when the program ran in the background at the neighborhood bar or house party—the subject of judgy small talk in between chomps of dip-laden chips, or the occasion for reminiscences, wistful and drenched with booze. Times, too, when I hosted a year-end shindig, remembering with mere moments to spare to turn down the tunes and turn on the tube for the ball drop. 

Because it’s as if the drop of that ball, in its own crystalline countdown, makes the new year official. As if the old year doesn’t get its cue to exit stage right without it. As if it is the very tradition itself that—at least on New Year’s Eve—keeps time.

And yet, I am realizing now that the ball drop has been but a backdrop. That I never stopped to ask a key question: Why does a ball drop on New Year’s Eve in the first place?

In this post, I diverge from my usual business of word origins. Instead, I direct my gaze to the cultural—and technological—origins for why we ring in the new year by beholding a grand orb alight on One Times Square.

A brief history of time balls

Traditions mark time—as once did, it turns out, ball drops themselves.

These balls are known as time balls, and they were invented by Robert Wauchope, a Scottish naval officer, in the early 1800s to help ships set their clocks—because more accurate time ultimately meant more accurate navigation. Mounted on poles on naval observatories and operated with pulleys, time balls provided a clear signal of a standard time easily seen by ships off the shore. Each day, time balls would drop at a set time, against which sailors would check their ship chronometers.

Chronometers are a specialized timepiece that can keep precise time despite external forces, such as temperature and motion, which historically compromised maritime timekeeping. The devices, successfully designed by an English carpenter, John Harrison, in the 1700s, became instrumental in helping mariners calculate longitude.

Represented by horizontal lines circling the globe, latitude (as you may recall from your old classroom globes) measures distances north and south relative to the equator; seafarers could determine it using the sun or stars. Longitude, the vertical lines measuring distances east and west of a fixed point, was far harder to ascertain, but ships could reckon it by comparing their local time to a standard time at their home port. 

Small slippages in the accuracy of time, however, translated to far larger ones in the ship’s position. Wauchope’s time balls helped verify for marine chronometers that all-important standard of time—historically based on the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, overlooking that critical waterway, the River Thames, in London.

Greenwich was not the site of Wauchope’s first time ball; that was in Portsmouth, on England’s southern coast, in 1829. But Greenwich remains home to an iconic one, installed in 1833—and reference for the earliest recorded use to the term time ball in 1834, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It still functions today, as the Royal Museums Greenwich explains how:

Each day, at 12.55, the time ball rises half way up its mast. At 12.58 it rises all the way to the top. At 13.00 exactly, the ball falls, and so provides a signal to anyone who happens to be looking. Of course, if you are looking the wrong way, you have to wait until the next day before it happens again.

Watch the Greenwich time ball in its lovably anticlimactic glory here.

Wauchope’s time balls spread across England and abroad—not to mention influenced the development of railway time and, from that, the system of standardized time more generally. And they weren’t just useful for sailors: as watches became more affordable and prevalent, everyday people checked their personal timepieces against time balls. 

The big ball over the Big Apple

In the US, the first time ball dropped on the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC in 1845, set to noon, unlike the British convention of 1:00 pm. New Year’s Eve didn’t see its time ball until some decades later, however. 

Now, revelers have descended on Times Square since 1904, when Adolph Ochs put on a fireworks show to celebrate New Year’s Eve—and the new site of the paper he owned, The New York Times, at One Times Square. (The neon neighborhood still bears this namesake, though the Midtown Manhattan masthead has since moved around the corner.)

The first ball lowered from a flagpole on Times Square in 1907. Ochs may have boasted it as a bigger spectacle—the city, a safer one—but the stunt was engineered by Och’s head electrician, Walter Palmer, who was inspired by the time ball erected atop the one-time Western Union Telegraph Building downtown in 1877.

Over the years, the mechanism and design of the Times Square Ball has become increasingly sophisticated—now composed of thousands of crystals, weighing yet more thousands of pounds, and illuminated by even more thousands of lights. 

Time-ball-honored traditions

New technologies—like radio, not to mention advances in horology itself—eventually made time balls obsolete. And yet that most famous time ball of all is still used, in its way, to do just that: to mark time. 

We no longer use the New Year’s Eve ball to set any clocks, but as a tradition, it still helps us keep ceremonial time, a symbol of the past year winding down—and a signal to wind up the chronometers of our lives as we embark on the next.

Of course, unlike time balls of yore, if we happen to be looking the wrong way, if we miss the ball drop, we don’t have to wait another day to confirm our time. But on some days, at the start of some years, wouldn’t that be nice if we could?

Happy New Year!

Don’t you think I’ve dropped the etymological ball, though. For some relevant roots as you usher in 2025, check out my older pieces on acquaintance, new, and resolution—and discover how the treadmill originated as a prison punishment.