Today, counting down to midnight is a time-honored feature at New Year’s Eve gatherings. It’s usually a happy occasion, with revelers excited for a fresh start in the new year.
But this light-hearted tradition is thought to have originated during a dark period, during the Cold War. As the threat of atomic bombs was top of mind for many Americans, who expected nuclear war to break out at any time, the hope for peace and harmony in the new year was real.
The first NYE countdown can arguably be traced to the final seconds of 1957, when prominent radio correspondent Ben Grauer counted down the New Year’s Eve ball drop in New York City’s Times Square, according to Alexis McCrossen, a professor of history at Southern Methodist University.
“’58 is on its way, 5-4-3-2-1,” Grauer said. “The ball is starting to slide down the pole, and it is the signal that ’58 is here.”
Back then, Americans were accustomed to counting down rocket launches and atomic bomb blast tests. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had introduced the Doomsday Clock in 1947. Countdowns permeated pop culture, too. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1957 made-for-TV program Four O’Clock, a deranged man holds a woman hostage in a basement and is counting down to four o’clock, when he’s going to blow her up. McCrossen also believes the 1929 Fritz Lang film Woman in the Moon, which features a countdown to a moon rocket launch, influenced the German rocket scientists who came to the U.S. to work on the space program after World War II.
Prior to 1957, people sometimes gathered at midnight to welcome the new year. Germans, in the 19th century, would wait until midnight to celebrate the new year, and some Christians would attend a New Year’s Eve prayer service called a Watch Night. There may not have been news coverage of participants counting down, though it’s of course possible that people did their own countdowns privately. McCrossen’s research is based on scouring extant newspaper, radio, and television broadcasts on New Year’s Eve.
Grauer would continue his countdowns throughout the 1960s, and Dick Clark’s “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” started featuring countdowns in the 1970s. McCrossen didn’t find crowds joining in until 1979. “I think the crowd starts counting because so many people had watched it on TV or the radio, and that’s how they had, sort of come to think about it,” McCrossen tells TIME.
Nowadays, there are all kinds of countdowns. New York City’s “Climate Clock” on East 14th street counts down to a deadline to reach zero emissions, which is about four years from now. Whether they are about bombs or birthdays, people launch into countdowns whenever they are marking something “transformative,” as McCrossen puts it.
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