Every year, we watch people on the New York streets wait for the annual ball drop, a long running tradition on New Year’s Eve to welcome the new year. But did you know that this tradition was inspired by a Victorian-era contraption? Royal Navy officer Robert Wauchope created the time ball for navigation. His goal was to give the exact time for mariners, as time would make shipping safer. BBC has the details:
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His ball, first demonstrated in Portsmouth, England, in 1829, was a crude broadcast system, a way to relay time to anyone who could see the signal. Typically, at 12:55, a creaky piece of machinery would raise a large painted orb halfway to the top of a pole or flagstaff; at 12:58, it would proceed to the top; and precisely at 13:00, a worker would release it to drop down the pole.
“It is a clear signal,” said Andrew Jacob, a curator who operates the time ball at the Sydney Observatory in Australia. “It’s easy to see the sudden movement as it begins to drop.”
Before the time ball’s invention, a ship’s master would typically come ashore and physically visit an observatory to check his watch against an official clock. Then he would quite literally bring time back to the ship. Wauchope’s invention let sailors calibrate their shipboard timepiece, called a chronometer, without leaving their boat.
As for the New Year’s connection, that came in 1907. The New York Times newspaper had instituted a midnight celebration in Times Square several years earlier, punctuated by dynamite and fireworks. After authorities banned the explosives, promoters needed something splashy to mark midnight and found inspiration in New York’s popular Western Union Telegraph’s time ball, which had been operating on the roof of the company’s Broadway headquarters since 1877.
The newspaper constructed an impressive orb weighing 700 pounds and covered with 100 25-watt lightbulbs. But in the spirit of showmanship, organisers altered time ball protocol, making the crucial moment of demarcation the moment the ball landed, not when it was released.
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Source: neatorama