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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.