WASHINGTON — Why drop a ball? Of all the ways mankind could mark one turn around the sun and the beginning of the next, why do we feel compelled to drop a big globe from the top of a pole? “Yeah, dropping a ball is a little random,” Don Wisniewski agreed.
That’s why at the stroke of midnight tonight, he and the city of Annapolis, Md., will drop a sailboat.
No, not the polished wooden kind — sockless sailors everywhere would cringe — but a 3-foot steel frame outlined in bright lights. And the Annapolitans are not alone.
In Georgia, they will drop giant peaches and chicken nuggets. In Maine, a sardine. In Key West, Fla., revelers will lower an elegantly dressed drag queen named Sushi wearing 8-foot-long ruby stilettos.
But what people don’t appreciate these days, with the cornucopia of objects plummeting around us, are the logistics and artistry that go into a halfway decent drop, Wisniewski said.
As novice droppers, he and other Annapolitans had to learn the ropes this year. Wisniewski had two buddies from a local power plant weld a stainless steel sailboat model, complete with keel and rudder, onto which they taped a string of Christmas lights.
He has practiced a few times using a flagpole in his front yard, but the pressure has mounted as tonight’s main event at the Annapolis City Dock draws closer. Timing is crucial, he has been told, as are details such as the lowering mechanism.
“No one wants to start the new year with a steel sailboat landing on them,” he said.
Academics say the history of the ball-drop stretches to the 19th century.
It began as a time-telling tool to allow ships in harbor to set their chronometers. The earliest balls built in English ports in the 1820s and ’30s began their descent every day at exactly 1 p.m.
From there, the idea spread to Washington, where the Naval Observatory began dropping a noon ball in 1845. But, as often happens in matters of fashion, New York took hold of the idea in 1907 because of a ban on fireworks and has had a lock on the business ever since.
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