Every New Year’s Eve our family would gather and play a wild air hockey tournament, watch a movie, and then cheer as the ball dropped in Time’s Square. However, did you know that the ball dropping has a long and illustrious history?

By 1833 every sea-going ship’s captain had a watch accurate enough to be used to determine longitude, however, you still had to “set” the watch. How to do that? The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England is visible to ships anchored in the Thames River. The Master Clock of the world in 1833 was located at the Observatory.

A large ball sits on the staff of a weather vane atop the building. The ball is pulled up halfway to the top at 12:55 p.m. each day. This gives the captains and any visitors a chance to get ready to set their watches. Three minutes later the ball ascends to the top of the staff and at 1:00 p.m. on the dot, it drops. The captains could then set their watches to Greenwich Mean Time. The Greenwich ball still drops every day, even though it is no longer necessary.

While the Greenwich ball drop was the first, every other major port in the world, including an observatory in Crete, Nebraska, adopted something similar. In 1845 the U.S. Naval Observatory, which at that time was visible from the Potomac, started doing the same thing along with the firing of a canon. The ball drop in Washington D.C. occurred at noon and to see that it did so accurately was one of the functions of the Secretary of the Navy. The Observatory was moved in the 1880’s, just about the time the Crete Observatory was built, and the “ball drop” began there. The Crete “ball” is still on display in the Doane College Observatory.

The New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square is a spinoff of the naval ball drop and it was first held in 1907. The drop has been held there every year since except for 1942 and 1943, when lights were dimmed at night due to the fear of bombing raids. Interestingly enough the “controller” of the Times Square ball drop is still the Secretary of the Navy.

So enjoy this New Year’s Eve ball drop and the luxury of knowing the exact time, to within a millionth of a second, any time you look at your phone or the atomic clock on the wall of your kitchen. Time wasn’t always such a conveyance.