December 31 in History

Thomas Edison invited reporters, investors, and the merely curious to his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory on New Year Eve 1879 and showed them the future: a small glass bulb containing a carbonized bamboo filament that glowed steadily for hours without burning out. The demonstration was not the moment of invention, as Edison had been refining his incandescent lamp for over a year, but it was the moment of persuasion, the public proof that electric light was practical, reliable, and ready to replace gas. Edison had not invented the electric light. At least twenty-two other inventors had produced working incandescent lamps before him, including Humphry Davy, Warren de la Rue, and Joseph Swan in England. What Edison achieved was something more commercially decisive: a lamp that burned long enough to be economical, connected to a complete electrical distribution system designed to deliver power from a central generating station to dozens of customers simultaneously. He was not building a light bulb; he was building an industry. The Menlo Park demonstration featured Edison entire system in miniature. Thirty lamps lit the laboratory, the surrounding streets, and several nearby buildings, all powered by a dynamo-driven generator. Visitors could turn individual lamps on and off without affecting the others, a feature of the parallel circuit design that distinguished Edison system from the series circuits used by arc lighting. The New York Herald devoted its entire front page to the demonstration, and Edison stock in the Edison Electric Light Company soared. Edison opened the Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan in September 1882, powering 400 lamps for 85 customers. Within a decade, hundreds of central stations operated across America and Europe. The incandescent bulb was finally superseded by LED technology, but the distribution model Edison demonstrated that New Year Eve remains the foundation of how the world receives its power.

A 700-pound iron-and-wood ball studded with one hundred 25-watt light bulbs descended from a flagpole atop the New York Times building at midnight on December 31, 1907, inaugurating the New Year Eve tradition that would make Times Square the symbolic center of the American calendar. An estimated 200,000 people packed the streets below, watching the illuminated sphere drop as a signal to usher in 1908. The tradition has continued unbroken every year since, except for wartime dimouts in 1942 and 1943. The celebration had actually begun three years earlier. When the New York Times moved its headquarters to the newly constructed Times Tower at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue in 1904, publisher Adolph Ochs organized an extravagant New Year Eve party with a fireworks display that drew enormous crowds. Longacre Square, the old name for the intersection, was officially renamed Times Square in the newspaper honor. The fireworks were spectacular but proved too dangerous for the densely packed urban setting, and the city banned them after the 1906 celebration. Ochs needed a replacement spectacle, and the ball drop was born. The concept borrowed from maritime time balls, where a sphere dropped at a precise moment from a port tower allowed ship captains to calibrate chronometers. Greenwich had been dropping one daily since 1833. Ochs adapted it for entertainment, making the descent last sixty seconds to reach bottom at exactly midnight. The ball has been redesigned multiple times, growing progressively larger and more technologically sophisticated. The current version, installed in 2008, is twelve feet in diameter and covered with 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles illuminated by 32,256 LEDs. An estimated one billion people watch the drop on television each year. Times Square on New Year Eve remains the global symbol of collective celebration and the passage of time.

At noon on December 31, 1999, the Republic of Panama assumed full control of the Panama Canal, ending 85 years of American sovereignty over a ten-mile-wide strip of territory that bisected the nation and over the waterway that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso accepted the keys to the canal administration building at Balboa Heights in a ceremony notably absent of senior American officials. Neither President Clinton nor any member of his cabinet attended, a diplomatic slight that underscored the lingering sensitivity of the transfer in Washington. The canal had been American from its violent inception. In 1903, the U.S. backed Panamanian independence from Colombia and immediately signed a treaty granting permanent control of the Canal Zone. Construction cost $375 million and 5,600 lives, mostly from disease. The canal opened August 15, 1914, cutting the New York-to-San Francisco maritime journey from 13,000 miles to 5,000. Panamanian resentment of the American enclave grew steadily through the twentieth century. The Canal Zone operated as a de facto American colony, with its own police, courts, schools, and commissaries. Panamanians who worked in the Zone were paid less than American employees for identical work. Tensions exploded on January 9, 1964, Martyrs Day, when Panamanian students attempting to fly their flag alongside the American flag at a Canal Zone high school were attacked by American residents and soldiers. Twenty-one Panamanians and four Americans were killed in the ensuing riots. The Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977 established the transfer timeline. The handover was deeply controversial; Ronald Reagan had campaigned against it with "We built it, we paid for it, it ours." The canal has thrived under Panamanian management. A $5.25 billion expansion in 2016 doubled capacity, and annual revenues exceed $4 billion.

The largest corporation in the world ceased to exist at midnight on December 31, 1983, when the American Telephone and Telegraph Company completed the court-ordered breakup of the Bell System, divesting itself of its twenty-two local telephone operating companies and ending a monopoly that had controlled American communications for over a century. The dismantling of AT&T was the most significant antitrust action since the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 and reshaped the telecommunications industry in ways that made the modern internet possible. The Bell System traced to Alexander Graham Bell 1876 patent. AT&T controlled long distance, Bell operating companies handled local service, Western Electric manufactured equipment, and Bell Labs conducted research. A single corporation controlled every aspect of American telephony. Customers could not even own their telephones; they rented from AT&T. The Justice Department had pursued antitrust action intermittently since 1949. The case filed in 1974 alleged AT&T used its local network control to exclude competitors from long-distance and equipment markets. After eight years of litigation, AT&T chairman Charles Brown agreed to a consent decree, known as the Modification of Final Judgment, that required the company to divest its local operating companies in exchange for permission to enter the computer business, which had been prohibited under a previous agreement. The breakup created seven independent Regional Bell Operating Companies, immediately dubbed the "Baby Bells," which controlled local telephone service. AT&T retained long-distance service, Western Electric, and Bell Labs. The immediate effect was confusion and rising rates. But the competitive market produced an explosion of innovation. MCI and Sprint drove long-distance prices down 90 percent. The deregulated environment enabled internet providers, mobile carriers, and the broadband infrastructure underpinning the digital economy.

Continental Army forces under General Richard Montgomery and Colonel Benedict Arnold attacked Quebec City in a blinding snowstorm on New Year's Eve 1775, hoping to seize Canada before British reinforcements arrived in spring. The assault was the climax of a two-pronged American invasion that had begun in the fall. Montgomery advanced from Montreal along the St. Lawrence River after capturing the city in November, while Arnold led a separate force of over a thousand men through the Maine wilderness in an epic march that nearly destroyed his command through starvation, disease, and desertion. Arnold's column arrived at Quebec in November with barely six hundred men fit for duty. Montgomery joined him in December, and together they commanded approximately 1,200 soldiers against a garrison of roughly 1,800 defenders under Governor Guy Carleton. The attack was launched during a blizzard in the predawn hours, relying on surprise and simultaneous assaults from two directions. Montgomery was killed in the first minutes of the assault when grapeshot hit him as he led a charge against a barricade in the lower town. Arnold was shot through the leg early in the fighting and was carried to the rear. Without their commanders, the assault lost cohesion. Over four hundred Americans were killed, wounded, or captured, while British casualties were minimal. The defeat ended American hopes of making Canada the fourteenth colony. Arnold maintained a loose siege through the winter, but the arrival of British reinforcements in May 1776 forced a retreat that ended the Canadian campaign permanently.

Commodus was strangled in his bath by a wrestler named Narcissus on December 31, 192 AD, ending a twelve-year reign that historians regard as the beginning of Rome's long decline. Born in 161, the son of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, he was the first emperor in nearly a century to have been born to a ruling emperor, and expectations for his reign were enormous. He disappointed them catastrophically. His obsession with gladiatorial combat led him to fight in the Colosseum personally, slaughtering wounded gladiators and exotic animals in staged combats designed to make him appear heroic. He renamed Rome "Colonia Commodiana" and the months of the year after his own titles. He identified himself with Hercules and had statues erected depicting himself in a lion skin. His megalomania extended to governance: he delegated administration to a series of favorites and praetorian prefects while he spent his time in the arena, and the resulting corruption and instability eroded the institutional framework that Marcus Aurelius had preserved. His assassination was organized by his closest associates, including his concubine Marcia, his chamberlain Eclectus, and the praetorian prefect Quintus Aemilius Laetus, all of whom had discovered their names on a list of people Commodus intended to execute. Narcissus, his wrestling partner, was recruited to do the actual killing after a first attempt by poisoning failed when Commodus vomited the tainted wine. His death triggered the Year of the Five Emperors, a succession crisis that produced civil war and demonstrated how dependent the Roman system had become on the character of individual rulers.