Creative History

  On December 31, 1907 editor of the New York Times Alfred Ochs organized a New Year’s Eve celebration in front of his newspaper’s renowned headquarters at Times Square in midtown Manhattan. Thousands gathered that frigid winter’s night to watch a ball drop down a specially designed flagpole at 11:59 p.m. to welcome in the new year of 1908.   Millions of people from around the world have gathered at almost exactly that same spot every year for one-hundred and fifteen years to do almost exactly the same thing ever since. Though the ball itself has been updated many times over the course of the last century in accordance with advances in lighting technology-- the original ball was made of wood and iron and was covered in incandescent filament “Edison”light bulbs, and the current ball that will be dropped to welcome in 2023 in front of an estimated 1.1 million people is made entirely from Waterford Crystal and is covered in  over 32,000 LED lights--the actual event of...

     “Scientists now declare that the many lines and spots on Mars represent...a most wonderful canal system which the inhabitants have constructed for the purposes of irrigation.” - Quote from the Los Angeles Times 1907 It is 1877 and forty-two year old Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli is preparing to observe the planet Mars through a powerful new refractor telescope that has just been installed at the Brera Observatory in the city of Milan. In a sense, Schiaparelli has been training for this moment for months.  To effectively operate the refractor telescope and to accurately observe the Red Planet Schiaparelli needs steady hands and he has abstained for weeks from, “everything that could affect the nervous system, from narcotics to alcohol, but especially from the abuse of coffee,” he later writes, all in an effort to improve his observations. Through the telescope Schiaparelli sees deep trenches, in the form of straight lines, criss-crossing the su...