Few people counted down to anything until the 1960s -- and yes, that included the new year. Celebrations and midnight kisses on Dec 31, of course. Countdowns, no. How, then, did the countdown go from almost non-existent to ubiquitous in the latter half of the 20th century? And why are we so drawn to them now, especially to mark one year's end and another's beginning?
Countdowns as we know them today serve many purposes. The New Year's Eve countdown might be characterised as a "genesis countdown": After time runs out, it starts over again. The wait for the new year -- with its predictions, resolutions, and parties -- is typically generative, optimistic, and hopeful. But there are also "apocalyptic countdowns", in which after time runs out, disaster ensues. Today, we wonder how much time we have until the next Covid-19 variant, natural disaster, or terrorist attack.
Both of these countdown types took form during the Atomic Age.
In 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists introduced the Doomsday Clock, which to this day provides a visual reckoning of how close we are to apocalypse. These same scientists also brought the term "count down" to the American lexicon. A 1953 San Francisco Examiner article reported on an atomic bomb test in Nevada: "A designated official on a loudspeaker and short-wave radio hookup announces at intervals the time remaining before the explosion.
"At the very end he intones 'minus 10 seconds, minus five seconds and minus four seconds' and so on down to the moment of the explosion." In 1957, Alfred Hitchcock domesticated the atomic countdown in the made-for-television movie Four O'Clock, transplanting it into a suburban basement wired with explosives in the minutes and seconds before the eponymous time.
But on May 5, 1961, the countdown got its first major positive association. Some 45 million Americans watching the national nightly news heard the countdown to the successful launch of America's first manned space flight. The blast-off was followed by astronaut Alan Shepard saying, "Roger, liftoff and the clock has started".
The countdown associated with rocket launches had its origins in the Weimar Republic, where Fritz Lang's 1929 film Woman in the Moon featured an extended countdown to a moon rocket launch.
The science-fiction multi-reel film had an outsized impact on Germany's rocket scientists, who after World War II became central to the American space programme. One of film's advisers was early space travel enthusiast Willy Ley, who later immigrated to the United States and worked for Nasa. Through the 1960s, the countdown accumulated more and more positive associations, building to the historic countdown to Apollo 11, which took a crew of three men to the moon.
During the 1970s, the countdown moved beyond atomic test sites and space missions -- and onto radio and TV shows. The popular Australian music show Countdown, debuting in 1974, inspired similar shows in the United States and Europe. By counting down to the latest greatest hit, these shows slowed the rush of time and demarcated the recent past. Their terrain was not time, but rather "the top" or "the most popular," organised sequentially and leading not to "zero" but to "number one".
Americans celebrated New Year's Eve publicly in various ways beginning in the 1890s, including with the ringing of bells at midnight. But the first countdown I have identified was in the late 1950s. During the last few seconds of 1957, broadcaster Ben Grauer proclaimed to a national radio audience from a perch overlooking Times Square, "'58 is on its way, 5-4-3-2-1. The ball is starting to slide down the pole, and it is the signal that '58 is here". He didn't get much traction: The extant recording features a crowd making merry but definitely not counting down.
Through the 1960s, Grauer tried to introduce New Year's Eve countdowns on TV. Still, while you can hear the crowd cheering on these broadcasts, they don't join him in the countdown. Picking up on Grauer's innovation, Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, which debuted to welcome 1973, featured confected countdowns staged on its dance party set.
But my research into extant radio and television broadcasts and newspaper reports shows that it was not until seconds before the arrival of 1979 that a Times Square crowd counted down to the new year. By the end of the 1980s, countdown clocks were installed in Times Square, TV graphics began to show the amount of time remaining until midnight, and hosts guided enthusiastic audiences through the count.
As the year 2000 approached, something different happened. Millennium countdown clocks proliferated, accompanied by apocalyptic fears about the end of time.
The first two decades of the 21st century have careened between genesis and apocalyptic countdowns; take the countdown clocks to Olympic Games and the latest Climate Clock, found online (and in New York City's Union Square). Countdown clocks are everywhere today, from the personalised digital "Countdown to Your Big Day" clocks on social media before your birthday, to the bus countdown clocks that tell everyone when their ride will arrive.
The clock's goal is to mitigate impatience, to replace uncertainty with anticipation.
I suspect that some countdowns, as 2021 gives way to 2022, will be inflected with a tinge of hesitancy and doubt. Still, many of us will want to join in the hopefulness of the genesis count, as that Times Square crowd did in 1979 with their triumphant "Happy New Year" cheers -- rejoicing when the clock starts again. ©ZÓCALO PUBLIC SQUARE
Alexis McCrossen is a historian on the faculty at Southern Methodist University who studies the history of timekeeping. Now finishing a history of New Year's observances in the United States, she is also the author of 'Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday' and 'Marking Modern Times: Clocks, Watches and Other Timekeepers in American Life'.
