Have You Seen This? The history of the famous Times Square ball

Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The Times Square Ball drop began in 1907 by the New York Times.
Initially, it was a 700-pound iron and wood ball manually dropped by ropes.
The 2025 Constellation Ball features 5,280 Waterford crystals and weighs 12,000 pounds.

NEW YORK CITY — One of the time-honored traditions for New Year's Eve is staying up to watch the Times Square ball drop at midnight. But do you know the history of it?

If you're like me, you may have thought it was a strange thing to stay up late as a child, but you didn't question it because it meant staying up past your bedtime and drinking sparkling cider.

But if you enjoy a little history lesson every now and then, you might enjoy this video released by Times Square NYC. It's a couple of years old, so it doesn't have the latest about the new Times Square ball, but it still has some cool facts.

The ball drop was started by the New York Times, which had just moved its company headquarters downtown and it needed a way to promote itself. The company decided to throw a New Year's Eve party and instead of having fireworks, which would cause ash to fall on the partiers, they took inspiration from a longtime maritime tradition of time balls.

Time balls were used in coastal cities to allow navigators on nearby ships to sync their marine chronometers to the time of day, aiding in their nautical ventures. Since it was well known at the time, the New York Times decided to drop a ball at midnight from the top of its building, 1 Times Square, which was then the tallest building in the area.

The first ball drop was in 1907 with a ball weighing 700 pounds made out of iron and wood. The ball drop has continued for more than 100 years, with several iterations of the ball over the last century.

The ball was once dropped by hand, using ropes held by several workers. But in 1996, they changed it to an automatic drop after a person got tied up in the ropes and the ball drop had to be stopped halfway down its pole, according to the video.

In 2007, a new ball was made with LED lights that could create colors and patterns to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the drop. The next year, a 12-foot-in-diameter ball was created with the same technology. It was twice as large as previous balls, weighed 6 tons and had more than 32,000 lights.

The ball has remained atop One Times Square year-round since 2009. While the New York Times' video ends there, there is plenty more to discover about the quirky annual event that attracts millions of people to New York each year.

But the most exciting news is that there will be a brand new ball dropped: the biggest and most dazzling yet. The Constellation Ball is around 12.5 feet in diameter, weighs just over 12,000 pounds and features 5,280 circular Waterford crystals in three different sizes.

Wednesday night's ball drop is also planned to be sparkling in red, white and blue to usher in the 250th anniversary of America. The ball will also be dropped a second time in 2026, on the eve of July 3.

One Times Square is close to finishing a major renovation that will give the public access to the time ball through special tours, an observation deck and a museum.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.