GENE RANDALL, CNN ANCHOR: As people around the world ring in the new year, there is global focus on Times Square with its traditional ball drop. Our national correspondent Bruce Morton reports on the history behind the tradition.</s>BRUCE MORTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The Big Apple bedlam, New Year's Eve, they drop a ball, maybe an apple sometimes, basically a ball. In Atlanta, they drop a peach. It is the peach state of course. Mark Goldstrom (ph), in the Baltimore suburbs, drops a 100-watt bulb into a bucket. These are all just for fun, of course, but once upon a time -- so to speak -- time balls were serious stuff.</s>STEVE DICK, HISTORIAN, U.S. NAVAL OBSERVATORY: The time ball goes all back to 1829 in Portsmouth, England, and then the famous one is 1833 at Greenwich, and the first one in the United States is here at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington in 1845.</s>MORTON: Back then, they were not for fun, they didn't sink slowly, they dropped all at once, and ships used them to set their chronometers.</s>DICK: You had to know exactly what time it was to set your chronometer, and that's what was done with the time ball by this visual signal, and the chronometer of course was very important for determining your longitude at sea.</s>MORTON: Here in Washington, they drop time balls from the Naval Observatory and later from the Old Executive Office Building until 1936.</s>DICK: Of course, by that time, the time ball really was outmoded. It was superseded by radio time signals, which started at turn of the century.</s>MORTON: The Naval Observatory even cued the first New York City drop in 1877. That stopped years ago, of course. But, last year, millennia hoopla, and this year, the millennium really starts, the Navy will drop a time ball. They have been practicing to get it right.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Four, three, two, one, now!
Havin' a Ball on New Year's Eve