Article of the Week - The Times Square Ball

The Times Square Ball
Since 1904, it dropped 77 feet each year!

The Times Square Ball is a time ball dropped each year during the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square, Manhattan, New York City. The ball is made by Waterford Crystal and electric lights is raised to the top of a pole on the One Times Square building at 6:00 pm and then lowered to mark the coming of the New Year. The ball descends 77 feet (23 m) over the course of a minute, coming to rest at the bottom of its pole at midnight, and a sign lights up with the digits of the new year, as the ball's lights turn off. Toshiba's Times Square advertising screen directly below the ball counts down to midnight as well alongside several other billboards in the area.

Every year up to one million people gather in Times Square to watch the ball drop, and an estimated 1 billion watch the video of the event, 100 million of them in the United States.

The first New Year's Eve celebration in the area was held in 1904. The New York Times newspaper had opened their new headquarters on Longacre Square (the city's second tallest building), and persuaded the city to rename the triangular "square" surrounding it for the newspaper. The newspaper's owner, Adolph Ochs, decided to celebrate the move with a midnight fireworks show on the building for New Year's Eve. Close to 200,000 attended the event, displacing celebrations held at Trinity Church. However, Adolph wanted a bigger spectacular at the building to draw more attention to the square — in 1907, the paper's chief electrician Walter F. Palmer constructed a lit ball that would be lowered from a flagpole at One Times Square. It was constructed with iron and wood, was lit with one hundred 25-watt bulbs, weighed 700 pounds (320 kg) and measured 5 feet (1.5 m) in diameter. At first, it dropped 1 second after midnight. Even after the Times moved its headquarters to 229 W. 43rd St., the celebration continued.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Time Square Ball"