Lifestyle
Why do we drop a ball on New Year's Eve? The Times Square tradition, explained
Revelers celebrate the new year on Jan. 1, 1942, in Times Square. Its New Year’s Eve ball drop attracts millions of viewers — at home and in the streets of New York City — every year.
Matty Zimmerman/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Matty Zimmerman/AP
On the evening of Dec. 31, as in many years past, millions of people around the world will stop what they’re doing to watch a 12-foot, 11,875-pound crystal ball slowly descend a New York City flagpole to announce the start of a new year.
The Times Square ball drop has been a fixture of New Year’s Eve since 1907, when the original wood and iron orb made its maiden journey. It remains a beloved tradition over a century and half a dozen ball redesigns later.
The storied ball has been lowered every year — except 1942 and 1943, due to lighting restrictions during World War II (which didn’t stop crowds from gathering in Times Square).
The New Year’s Eve celebration has grown to include a long roster of musical performances and corporate sponsorships, with onlookers returning to the streets in growing numbers after the COVID-19 pandemic forced it online in 2020.
It’s even inspired offshoots around the U.S., with various cities dropping everything from a giant pine cone and an oversize pickle to a monster-sized Moon Pie and high-heel-riding drag queen.
But the Big Apple’s big crystal ball has managed to stay at the center of it all. Here’s a look at how the spectacle came about and how it’s evolved over the years.
Times Square has long been synonymous with New Year’s Eve
A scene of Times Square circa 1908, a year into the ball drop tradition.
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
New Yorkers have celebrated New Year’s in Times Square — the bustling intersection of Seventh Avenue, 42nd Street, and Broadway in Midtown Manhattan — since it got its name in 1904.
That year, the New York Times moved its headquarters to the new Times Building (now known as One Times Square). The paper’s owner, Adolph Ochs, successfully lobbied the city to rename the area, previously known as Longacre Square.
As legend — aka the Times Square District Management Association — has it, Ochs “spared no expense” throwing a New Year’s Eve celebration to commemorate the headquarters’ opening, with an all-day street festival and extravagant fireworks display.
The party was a smashing success, cementing Times Square’s status as the place to ring in the new year. But two years later, the city banned the fireworks display.
Undeterred, Ochs looked for a way to outdo himself for the 1907-1908 event — and found it.
The ball drop draws on a maritime tradition
An estimated 350,000 revelers gathered to welcome the new year in New York’s Times Square on Jan. 1, 1958.
AP/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
AP/AP
Ochs asked the Times‘ chief electrician, Walter Palmer, to come up with a New Year’s Eve spectacle that didn’t involve ashy firework debris raining down on revelers.
According to a 1965 piece in Newsday (Nassau Edition), Palmer was inspired by the clock on the downtown Western Union Telegraph Company building, which for decades had dropped an iron ball from its rooftop every day at noon.
That harkens back to a longstanding maritime tradition of ports dropping a ball at a specific time every day, allowing ship captains to precisely adjust their navigational instruments.
England’s Royal Observatory installed the first known “time ball” in 1833, inspiring over a hundred other locations around the world. Only a few still use them daily, including the Royal Observatory and the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.
Palmer devised an even bigger production, ultimately covering a 700-pound ball of iron and wood with 100 light bulbs to descend a pole that stood 50 feet above the 400-foot tower.
The ball was built by a young immigrant metalworker named Jacob Starr, whose company, Artkraft Strauss, would go on to lower the ball for most of the 20th century — a process that was done by hand using more than half a dozen men and a length of rope.
The New York Times detailed its debut on Dec. 31, 1907:
“At 10 minutes to midnight, the whistles on every boiler in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and the waters thereof began to screech. Tens of thousands stood watching the electric ball. And then — it fell. The great shout that went up drowned out the whistles for a minute. The vocal power of the welcomers rose above even the horns and the cow bells and the rattles. Above all else came the wild human hullabaloo of noise, out of which could be formed dimly the words: ‘Hurrah for 1908.’”
Interestingly, the final 10-second countdown didn’t become part of the tradition until many decades later. As NPR has reported, it wasn’t until the 1960s that some TV announcers started a countdown, and the Times Square crowd only joined them in 1979.
The ceremony — and the ball itself — have evolved over the years
Workers prepare the 180 halogen lamps and 144 Xenon glitter strobes on the 500 pound Times Square New Year ball in 1997.
Jon Levy/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Jon Levy/AFP via Getty Images
A lot has changed since that first ball drop, including the ball itself.
The original orb was replaced with a 400-pound iron ball in 1940. In 1955, it was upgraded to a 150-pound aluminum ball with 180 light bulbs. Red light bulbs and a green stem transformed the ball into an apple for the “I Love New York” campaign for seven years in the 1980s.
🍎From 1981 to 1988, the Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball was transformed into a ‘big apple,’ complete with red lights and a green stem and leaves in honor of the ‘I Love New York’ marketing campaign pic.twitter.com/yWH9hLbf8t
— RetroNewsNow (@RetroNewsNow) December 29, 2023
The ball got aluminum skin, rhinestones, strobes, and computer controls in the late 1990s, and its now-signature crystal triangles (courtesy of Waterford Crystal) at the turn of the millennium.
The ball was lowered by hand until the mid-1990s; now it is timed electronically using an atomic clock based in Colorado (but New York City’s mayor and other special guests still get the honor of pushing the ceremonial button).
“My first year, we decided to go computer controls, electronic winch, tied into the atomic clock in Colorado and unfortunately the ball was about three seconds late … first screwup of 1996,” Jeff Strauss, president of Countdown Entertainment, told member station WBGO in 2017. “Since then, I gotta say, we’ve been doing it really well.”
On its 100th anniversary in 2007, the ball’s incandescent light bulbs were replaced with LED lighting, allowing for more brightness and color capabilities. The following year One Times Square put its permanent “Big Ball” on public display, making it a year-round fixture.
The New Year’s Eve ball is pictured in Times Square on Saturday, Dec. 30, 2023. There have been a half dozen iterations since the tradition started in 1907.
Julie Walker/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Julie Walker/AP
The ownership and occupants of the 26-story building have also changed since the tradition began.
The New York Times relocated nearby in 1914, and sold its former headquarters to a developer in 1961. The Allied Chemical Company bought and renovated the building shortly after, and the office building changed hands multiple times over the following decades.
One Times Square is currently owned by real estate investment and management company Jamestown L.P., which in 2022 announced a $500 million plan to modernize the building into a “21st century visitor center for New York City,” including a museum and viewing deck.
Construction is expected to end in 2025 — all the more reason to look forward to the new year.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
-
Maine5 minutes agoPilots aboard hydrogen balloon are attempting to cross Atlantic Ocean from Maine
-
Maryland7 minutes agoMaryland troopers attend high school graduation of student whose dad died in line of duty
-
Michigan13 minutes agoMichigan football beats out Alabama, Texas for 4-star DB Blake Jenkins
-
Massachusetts20 minutes agoCheers! Mass. House passes proposal to extend bar hours to 3 a.m. during World Cup, putting bill on fast track. – The Boston Globe
-
Minnesota22 minutes agoThe Scoop – June 4
-
Mississippi27 minutes agoMississippi lawmakers talk school consolidation, closures in state
-
Missouri35 minutes agoArapahoe County Mounted Unit heading to Missouri for the 2026 FIFA World Cup
-
Montana38 minutes agoMontana Republican Party called on to end GOP fighting • Daily Montanan
