New Year's Eve and Naval History

                                    Depiction of the USS Constitution under full sail                         Source

I came across this interesting piece of Naval history while at work this week. It's along the same lines as how several traditions in our culture or common phrases, can be attributed to the Navy, or at least maritime history.  For example:  Three Sheets to the Wind came from how a ship shakes at speed as it makes its way along a course when all three masts are at full sail, which is how a drunk might walk down the street after a long night of drinking. Or if a line (sheet) is loose, it will flutter in the wind.  "It's cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey" comes from how a stack of cannon balls laying on a curved brass plate, called a brass monkey, would contract in the cold and pop one of the cannonballs off the plate.

                                                                                                                  Source

There are plenty of others, such as "Shot across the bow," "My ship will come in," "All hands on deck," "He's a loose cannon," "Batten down the hatches," and one that could get you in trouble if used in certain company, "She's Broad in the Beam."

But did you know that the first ball drops were designed for ship captains, not New Year’s Eve?

"Whether at home on the couch or among the crowds in Times Square, watching the New Year’s Eve ball drop symbolizes a fresh start. But as the ball descends to mark another year gone by, it also harkens back to an era when knowing the exact time was much more difficult. Before the 20th century, timekeeping was significantly less precise; most people noted the time thanks to church bells that rang on the hour, though the system was often inaccurate. For sailors and ship captains, knowing the exact time was key for charting navigational courses, and they used a device called a chronometer to keep track of time onboard ships. That’s why Robert Wauchope, a captain in the British Navy, created the time ball in 1829. The raised balls were visible to ships along the British coastline, and they were manually dropped at the same time each day*, allowing ships to set their chronometers to the time at their port of departure. At sea, navigators would calculate longitude based on local time, which they could determine from the angle of the sun, and the time on their chronometer.

US Naval Observatory's Time Ball    Source

                              Greenwich UK Time Ball               Wiki Source

Time balls emerged as a timekeeping feature throughout the world, though evidence of them is hard to find today. The U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., installed one in 1845, which would later help history record the precise time of Lincoln’s assassination; it dropped daily through 1936. But the time ball’s reign was short-lived. The devices fell out of fashion by the 1880s, thanks to the availability of self-winding clocks. The concept would eventually be co-opted by The New York Times in 1907, when the newspaper’s formerly explosive New Year’s Eve celebrations were barred from using fireworks. Organizers took a chance by looking back at the time ball’s influence, and decided a lighted midnight drop was the perfect way to honor the occasion."

Source

Some NYE Trivia:

Number of Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball designs since 1907: 7

Weight (in pounds) of the current Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball: 11,875

Year “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” aired for the first time: 1972

Typical number of revelers packed into Times Square each New Year’s Eve: 58,000

The Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball has dropped every year since 1907.

I watched the last 60 seconds of the drop at 9pm Pacific, then went to sleep!

*Time balls were usually dropped at 1 p.m. (although in the United States they were dropped at noon). They were raised half way about 5 minutes earlier to alert the ships, then with 2–3 minutes to go they were raised the whole way. The time was recorded when the ball began descending, not when it reached the bottom.^[3] With the commencement of radio time signals (in Britain from 1924), time balls gradually became obsolete and many were demolished in the 1920s.^[4]