Times Square sure knows how to leave it ‘til the last minute.
What a strangely compelling thing it is to watch The Ball at 11:59 P.M. each New Year’s Eve. Look! It’s moving, it’s moving! No, wait, it’s just the wind, I think. No, no, there it goes! We could all just stare down at our phones and watches, but there’s something much more satisfying and affirming about sharing the physical spectacle of a giant ball whose descent spans the year’s final minute.
But why a giant ball? Where did this come from?
The short answer is that it’s inspired by other giant balls whose function was to indicate time. I say “was”, because the purpose of a “time ball” is now pragmatically obsolete, and almost all of these are gone. But one of the very earliest time balls, atop the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, has been dropped each and every day since 1833. It is raised halfway up its post a few minutes prior, to give notice, and then it is dropped at exactly the stroke of 1 P.M. Bongggg!
Again, just a ball, but you can’t not watch it and anticipate its fall. This is a tourist attraction and part of the legacy of Greenwich now, but this ball and others like it were once vitally important.
In 1833, there were no time zones, and there were no wristwatches, either. Time was kept locally, so for example when it was noon in New York, it was 11:48 A.M. in Washington. By then there were decent and widespread mechanical clocks, which had overtaken sundials as the main method to keep time, but they weren’t very consistent. We complain even today about clocks that run fast (like the one in my family room) or slow (like the one in my car). Of course it was much worse in 1833, and so there had to be some official standard that everyone could reset their clocks to. There was no radio communication or even a telegraph, so you just had to observe something directly. Hence the time ball.
Once we got telephones, you could call up a service that would tell you that “at the tone, the time will be...”. If you take just a moment, you’ll find that you can still do that! Call (303) 499-7111 to hear the time service provided by radio station WWV in Colorado. I did, and it works! Even now, the service receives about 1,000 calls per day. When using a landline from within the continental United States, the time will be off by no more than 30 milliseconds. Of course, you can also do it with the internet. Like the ball dropping in Times Square, there is something very reassuring about that.
Now, it’s one thing for you and me to miss our doctor’s appointment by two minutes, but in 1833 at sea, if your clock was off by two minutes, you could make a mistake worth about 30 miles.
This brings us to the role of the time ball in figuring out your longitude at sea. It’s not so hard to calculate your latitude: here in the Northern Hemisphere, you just look for the North Star, and whatever angle it is above the horizon, that’s your north latitude.
But how can you know what longitude you’re at? Let’s say I know my latitude exactly; I’m standing right on the Tropic of Cancer. The problem is that everybody along the Tropic of Cancer, over the course of a day, rotates through exactly the same sky show. None of us can use those observations alone to tell what our longitude is.
The guys you see below are lucky, because they know their rough longitude by visual cues. But if they were instead out on the open ocean, without these contextual clues, they would both observe exactly the same times for sunrise, sunset, etc., and they’d have no way to use things they could observe to figure out their longitude.
So they’d instead have to establish where they are relative to somewhere else. A great way to do that is to know what time it is somewhere else. To keep it simple, let’s put them on the same boat, let them set a watch, leave a port, and sail due west. After they’ve been gone a couple weeks, they want to find out how far they’ve gotten. They know, by their almanac, that the Sun is supposed to set at 5:28 P.M. today, so right at the moment when it does, they check their watch and see that it’s now 8:28 P.M. at the port they left.
That means there’s a three-hour difference, so they must have gone 3/24 of the way around the world, or about 45 degrees of longitude. Let’s slip them my family room clock, so it’s a minute fast by now, and let’s also say they called sunset a minute early, maybe because of a little haze on the horizon, putting them off by a total of two minutes. The Earth rotates at 15 degrees an hour, and two minutes is 1/30 of that, or half a degree. The Earth’s circumference (360 degrees around) at the Tropic of Cancer is 22,847 miles, so half a degree is 1/720 of that, or 31.7 miles. Two minutes doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but 30 miles is enough to cause you to start making significant navigational errors.
A tragic example of this kind of mistake took place on May 30, 1815, when the British ship Arniston, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, got separated from its group in a storm. The Arniston had no chronometer (a clock that could withstand the movements at sea and still keep accurate time), though other ships in its group did. Now unable to simply follow the other ships, the Arniston had to use visual cues from land formations, dead reckoning (estimating position by average speed over time), or perhaps it had an hourglass — not very accurate — on board. It made the turn north about 100 miles too soon and crashed into a reef not far offshore from Waenhuiskrans (now also known as Arniston), killing 372 out of 378 people aboard.
As a result of wrecks like this, by 1825 all British ships were equipped with chronometers, and American ships soon followed suit.
Thus it was crucial that captains be able to set their chronometers precisely in port, and a time ball would allow them to do it at a scheduled time with relative ease, without having to come ashore.
So the first time ball went up in 1829 at the Admiralty in Portsmouth, England. Its history is a little sketchy, and it it may not have been permanent or regular, but it’s recognized as the first and is attributed to former Royal Navy captain Robert Wauchope, who’d been prodding for such a notification system for over a decade. Other time balls followed around the world, and of course one of those went atop the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in 1833, where it still operates today. The U.S. Naval Observatory got one in 1845, and it is still there, though they don’t seem to claim that it functions regularly these days.
In 1904, The New York Times moved its headquarters to the tall building at One Times Square. In November of that year, the Times made full use of the tower as a public notification device, when a floodlight pointing west from the top of the tower was used to indicate that Teddy Roosevelt had been elected President.
Fireworks followed to mark the arrival of 1905, and giant illuminated “letters of fire” spelled the onset of 1906. But to welcome 1908, a new attraction made the scene:
Time balls were functionally obsolete by that time, but as it turned out, a clever repurposing of an old tool, seemingly on its way to being forgotten, meant that a brand new life for the good old time ball was just beginning.
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Goodbye, 2021. It wasn’t entirely the reprieve from 2020 we may have been hoping for, but each of us will have fond memories from it. It’s the year my son became taller than his mother, and it’s the year my daughter drove a car for the first time. It wasn’t perfect, but we need to hold onto the good, because we can never go back.
To everyone at Daily Kos, to whom I am indebted year after year for so many hours of enlightening reading and compelling discussion, I sincerely wish you health, wealth, and much happiness in the year to come.
Happy New Year 2022