The Washington Post, December 5th, 2000
It's a party for the century. The U.S. Naval Observatory will officially ring in the new millennium with an open-house celebration capped off by dropping a replica of its historic "time ball" from the observatory's Main Building at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. The Washington time ball dates back to 1845, when the city's inhabitants and the ships on the Potomac needed to know the precise time. Then, the observatory was located at Foggy Bottom, and it was easy to see from the river. Every day, precisely at noon, the ball would drop. In the mid- 1880s, the observatory moved to its p...
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