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Old 01-01-2017, 04:59 PM
  #3667  
J330
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https://www.bustle.com/p/why-do-we-d...ts-start-27272
people had been dropping balls to indicate the passage of time since the 1800s. The first "time-ball" was installed in 1833 in Greenwich, England, on top of the Royal Observatory. Every afternoon at exactly 1pm, the ball would lower so that captains in nearby ships could sync their chronometers (basically, a tool for measuring time that helped determine longitude — very important, in other words).
Eventually, time-balls were set up in cities other than Greenwich and would descend from flagpoles at noon. (A few places, like the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. still continue to do so.) Somewhere along the line — I guess in 1906 – somebody got the bright idea to drop a ball from Times Square not at noon, but at midnight to signal the arrival of a new year. And I guess people liked it so much that the tradition stuck.
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