New Year
How big is the Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball? Weight, size and what is it made of?
The dropping of the Times Square ball on New Year’s Eve is one of the most famous celebrations to mark the passing of an old year to make way for the new.
Millions of people witness the dropping of the ball in Times Square in New York to celebrate the coming of the New Year, whether in person, on TV, or online.
This tradition has been around for more than a hundred years. The first-ever New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square was held in 1904 to mark the opening of the new offices of The New York Times at One Times Square. The festivities included fireworks, but the ball had yet to make an appearance.
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The evolution of the Times Square New Year’s Eve ball
In 1907, a fireworks ban was in place due to safety concerns, and the ball-drop was conceptualized as a replacement for the New Year’s Eve celebration.
The original ball weighed 700 pounds, was made of iron and wood, and lit up with 100 incandescent light bulbs.
In 1920 the ball was replaced with a smaller, 400-pound version made entirely of wrought iron, then was made even lighter in 1955 with a 150-pound aluminum sphere.
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This style endured for decades, until it was updated in the 1980s and converted into an apple for the city’s “I Love New York” campaign. After a few years, the stem was removed and the sphere became just a ball once again.
It has since been redesigned to accommodate lighting technology to enhance the brightness and color capabilities of the ball, aside from increasing its energy efficiency.
The dimensions of the ball have grown massively since the ball drop was first conceived. According to the Times Square official website, the current model measures 12 feet in diameter and weighs almost 12,000 pounds. It has an aluminum frame to which Waterford crystals and LED lights are attached. There are over 2,600 crystal triangles illuminated by more than 32,000 LEDs.
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