You know the drill—the New Year arrives when the ball drops on Times Square in New York City. It has been a tradition since 1907, and we hardly give a thought to the annual spectacle. It just doesn’t seem like the New Year has been properly announced until we see that luminous ball drop.
Courtesy of the Cincinnati Observatory
No one asks, “Why a ball?” Why not a champagne flute or an avocado? Why have anything drop at all? Why not a bell? Or a skyrocket? Why not a giant calendar page torn away?
The tradition of a time ball goes way back, to the time of the ancient Greeks. The first modern time ball was erected at Portsmouth, England, to help standardize time in the Royal Navy. In England, because the English are just that way, time balls were dropped each day at 1 p.m. When the system was imported to America, the daily drop took place at noon.
At that time, there was no standard time. All time was local. So, Cincinnati time was several minutes different from Chillicothe time or Lawrenceburg time. It was not until the railroads lobbied for something resembling standard time that municipalities begrudgingly gave up their own unique time zones.
In Cincinnati, the obvious source of accurate time was our Observatory, originally located atop Mount Adams and later moved to Mount Lookout. Over the years, The Observatory employed various methods to deliver accurate time to the jewelers of the city, who maintained the accuracy of their customers’ watches. The Observatory was the only source of accurate time in Cincinnati until around 1910.
When the Observatory moved into its new facilities on Mount Lookout in the 1870s, Astronomer Ormond Stone had a time ball installed to distribute accurate time to anyone with a view of the hilltop Observatory. The five-foot diameter time ball was mounted on a 60-foot pole behind the Observatory. Each day at 11:45 a.m., the ball was raised halfway up the pole. At 11:55 a.m., it was hoisted to the very top. At noon, the ball dropped back to its base.
Cincinnati’s time ball was used to broadcast precise noon into the mid-1880s. For a while, there was a reciprocal time ball located downtown on the Carlisle Building at Fourth and Walnut Streets, connected to the Observatory by a telephone line.
As electrical connections improved, and as the trees grew up to blanket Mount Lookout, the city’s jewelers found better mechanisms than line-of-sight time balls to spread correct time. The Observatory’s time ball was dismantled, though there is talk of reconstructing it, just for historic interest.
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