Whether at home on the couch or among the crowds in Times Square, watching the New Year’s Eve ball drop symbolizes a fresh start. But as the ball descends to mark another year gone by, it also harkens back to an era when knowing the exact time was much more difficult. Before the 20th century, timekeeping was significantly less precise; most people noted the time thanks to church bells that rang on the hour, though the system was often inaccurate. For sailors and ship captains, knowing the exact time was key for charting navigational courses, and they used a device called a chronometer to keep track of time onboard ships. That’s why Robert Wauchope, a captain in the British navy, created the time ball in 1829. The raised balls were visible to ships along the British coastline, and they were manually dropped at the same time each day, allowing ships to set their chronometers to the time at their port of departure. At sea, navigators would calculate longitude based on local time, which they could determine from the angle of the sun, and the time on their chronometer. 

The Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball has dropped every year since 1907.

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Nearly, but not quite: The New York ball drop has a stunning record only dimmed by World War II. Revelers gathered in Times Square in 1942 and 1943, but no ball drop took place, thanks to wartime blackouts. Instead, the new year was marked by a minute of silence followed by chimes.

Time balls emerged as a timekeeping feature throughout the world, though evidence of them is hard to find today. The U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., installed one in 1845, which would later help history record the precise time of Lincoln’s assassination; it dropped daily through 1936. But the time ball’s reign was short-lived. The devices fell out of fashion by the 1880s, thanks to the availability of self-winding clocks. The concept would eventually be co-opted by The New York Times in 1907, when the newspaper’s formerly explosive New Year’s Eve celebrations were barred from using fireworks. Organizers took a chance by looking back at the time ball’s influence, and decided a lighted midnight drop was the perfect way to honor the occasion.

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Flight attendants make our journeys through the sky safer and more comfortable. Yet they do more than just serve peanuts and soda; they’re trained to respond to safety and medical emergencies, necessary skills for cruising at 35,000 feet. However, modern flight attendants don’t have to have in-depth medical training the way the first American in-air staff did — the earliest commercial airlines equipped with flight attendants required their staff to be registered nurses.

There are more nurses than doctors in the U.S.

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While doctors often make the diagnoses, it’s nurses who do much of the hands-on work of caring for patients — which is why it’s a good thing there are so many of them. The U.S. has three times as many registered nurses as doctors.

The first flight attendants to board U.S. commercial flights were led by Ellen Church, a nurse who was also a licensed aviator. Unable to find work as a pilot due to gender discrimination, Church found another way into the sky by pitching airlines the concept of the “flight stewardess,” who could use her nursing skills to aid sick or injured passengers while also easing nerves at a time when flying was still somewhat dangerous and often uncomfortable for passengers. Boeing Air Transport tested Church’s idea in May 1930, hiring Church and seven other nurses for flights between San Francisco and Chicago (with 13 stops in between). In air, the attendants were tasked with serving meals, cleaning the plane’s interior, securing the seats to the floor, and even keeping passengers from accidentally opening the emergency exit door. After a successful three-month stint, other airlines picked up Church’s idea, putting out calls for nurses in their early 20s to join the first flight crews — standard requirements until World War II, when nurses overwhelmingly joined the war effort, leaving room for more women of all backgrounds to enter the aviation field.

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Although poinsettias are a multimillion-dollar business in the U.S. today, these fiery plants have ancient roots — they were first cultivated by the Aztecs hundreds of years ago. Native to Mexico and Guatemala, the poinsettia, known to the Aztecs as cuetlaxóchitl (kwet-la-sho-she), was used for medicinal purposes: The milky white sap was thought to increase milk production, dyes derived from the leaves (or bracts) were used in textiles, and some war rituals involved the plant. Poinsettias were also believed to hold magical properties, with one Native legend saying just the smell of a poinsettia could cause infection of the reproductive organs. 

Mexico is home to the world’s largest pyramid.

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Egypt is known for its tombs, but Mexico has the largest pyramid in the world. Located in the Mexican state of Puebla, the pyramid measures 4.45 million cubic meters by volume (twice the size of the Pyramid of Giza). Its name, Tlachihualtepetl, means “artificial mountain” in Nahuatl.

So how exactly did these ancient Aztec plants become so closely associated with the winter holidays? Well, the first reason is biology. Poinsettias are typically (but not always) red and green — colors that have been associated with Christmas for millennia. The plant also often reaches full bloom in December. The second part of the equation arrived in the 17th century, when Spanish Franciscan friars used the plant to decorate altars and nativities. When the Vatican eventually used the plant for decoration, other Catholic churches throughout the world weren’t far behind. In the early 20th century, farmers in California began mass-producing the plant in the U.S., and the venerable poinsettia has been a modern holiday must-have ever since.

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Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is famous for his eponymous Christmas tune and for using his luminous nose to heroically guide Santa Claus through the dense snow and fog on Christmas Eve. But originally, Rudolph was created as part of an ad campaign to guide Chicago area customers into department stores. Montgomery Ward was a retailer known for releasing Christmas-themed promotional coloring books in the 1930s to attract shoppers. After years of buying and distributing books made elsewhere, it opted to cut costs by designing a book of its own in 1939. The retailer enlisted the help of copywriter Robert L. May to conceive a new story, and thus, Rudolph was born.

Reindeer eyes change color based on the season.

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In winter, a reindeer’s eyes change from gold to more of a deep blue. It’s believed that the pressure in their eyes builds until fluid squeezes out from a layer behind the retina, which causes the color change. This release of fluid makes reindeers’ eyes more sensitive to light during the winter.

According to the fact-checking site Snopes, May was inspired by the story of the “Ugly Duckling” and decided to create a character that was similarly ostracized for his physical appearance. He was also influenced by the fact that reindeer had been associated with Christmas as far back as the early 19th century. May settled on a reindeer with a glowing red nose, and at first considered names such as Rollo (which he later said in a 1963 interview was “too happy”) and Reginald (“too sophisticated”); Rudolph, however, “rolled off the tongue nicely.”

May’s story was a hit with both his young daughter and his employer, which distributed 2.4 million copies of the book in 1939 and another 3.6 million in 1946. Rudolph became a national sensation in 1949, when May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, composed a song about the character. That tune was recorded by Gene Autry and went on to sell 1.75 million copies in its first year, becoming the first No. 1 song of the 1950s.

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