The building One Times Square was built in 1904 as the headquarters for the New York Times. It’s been home to the New Year’s Eve Ball Drop Celebration since 1907, when the first New Year’s Eve ball was made of iron and wood, one hundred 25-watt bulbs and weighed 700 pounds. Today’s ball is 12 feet in diameter and weighs almost six tons with 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles bolted to 672 LED modules attached to the aluminium frame.
100 Mind-Blowing Eve Facts
A woman once found her lost wedding ring growing on a carrot in her garden. In 1995, a Swedish woman lost her wedding ring while preparing a Christmas Eve dinner. 12 years later, the ring re-emergers in her garden wrapped around a carrot.
Mexicans normally celebrate New Year’s Eve by eating 12 grapes at midnight.
In Peru, it’s considered good luck to wear yellow underwear on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.
In 1992, after a record amount of snow, the government of Syracuse, NY, declared any additional snowfall before Christmas Eve illegal. Unfortunately, Mother Nature didn’t take the threat too seriously. It snowed two days after the move was announced.
Dancing mania. In July 1518, Frau Troffea began dancing in chaotic fervour on the streets of Strasbourg. She danced for a week straight, and soon others joined her. Within a month, the Dancing Plague of 1518 claimed between 50 and 400 victims. Historical sources make it clear the victims danced, but why they did so remains unexplained. Mysterious outbreaks had occurred before: in 1020s Bernburg, Germany, a Christmas Eve service was disturbed when revellers inexplicably danced around the church. In Aachen, 1374, a large-scale outbreak was recorded that spread to Cologne, Flanders, Hainaut, Strasbourg, Utrecht and other towns. In 1428 in Schaffhausen, a monk even danced himself to death.