By Martin Gleeson

The residents of New York City have their own unique way of celebrating the New Year. Each New Year’s Eve, at one minute before midnight, from the roof of One Times Square in Midtown, Manhattan, a crystal ball descends on a special flagpole to reach the ground at the instant the New Year commences.

This inaugural New Year’s Eve bash, held in 1904, commemorated the official opening of the headquarters of The New York Times with a fireworks display at midnight. Two years later, when the city banned the fireworks display, The Times arranged to have a large, illuminated seven-hundred-pound iron and wood ball lowered from the tower flagpole precisely at midnight to signal the end of 1907 and the beginning of 1908.

Since that time, hundreds of thousands of people have gathered around the Tower, now known as One Times Square, for the famous New Year’s Eve ball-lowering ceremony, as millions nationwide and nearly a billion watching throughout the world unite to count down the final seconds of the year.

The raising of the crystal ball from the ground starts at 6 pm and is followed by six hours of street entertainment from New York’s most talented artistes.

The first New Year’s Eve Ball, made of iron and wood and adorned with one hundred 25-watt light bulbs, was 5 feet in diameter and weighed 700 pounds. It was built by a young immigrant metalworker named Jacob Starr, and for most of the twentieth century the company he founded, sign maker Artkraft Strauss, was responsible for lowering the Ball.

The Ball has been lowered every year since 1907, with the exceptions of 1942 and 1943, when the ceremony was suspended due to the wartime ‘dimout’ of lights in New York City. Nevertheless, the crowds still gathered in Times Square in those years and greeted the New Year with a minute of silence followed by the ringing of chimes from sound trucks parked at the base of the tower – a harkening-back to the earlier celebrations at Trinity Church, where crowds would gather to ‘ring out the old, ring in the new’.

However, the actual notion of a ball ‘dropping’ to signal the passage of time dates back long before New Year’s Eve was ever celebrated in Times Square. The first ‘time-ball’ was installed atop England’s Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1833. This ball would drop at one o’clock every afternoon, allowing the captains of nearby ships to precisely set their chronometers – a vital navigational instrument.

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