Last weekend, I got curious about the idiom ‘to ring in the new year,’ and was moved to do some digging.

Major events have long been acknowledged by the ringing of church bells, but curiously, the practice was waning by the end of the nineteenth century. The Third Great Awakening had led to a proliferation of new churches across America, but a growing number of Christian denominations built their places of worship without bells. The Quakers, famously, exercised a quieter form of worship that found expression in the design of their churches, with consequences for the sound of the public square: in 1885, a Rhode Island newspaper coolly noted that in many Quaker communities around Narragansett Bay, the death of Ulysses S. Grant went unmarked by the traditional ringing of bells.

In the years leading up to New Year’s Day, 1900, a Providence man named W. C. E. Cleland saw an opportunity. Certain that Americans would want to mark the arrival of new century, Cleland sought to secularize the celebratory bell, relocating it from church to home, while capitalizing on the diminishing cost of manufacturing and the sharp uptick in consumer spending. The ‘Century Bell’ that he patented in 1898 was positioned as a keepsake of the new era, a family heirloom meant to be rung for the very first time at midnight on December 31, 1899, and once a year after that. Polished nickel $3.25, silver $8.00, per their advertisement in The Providence Journal on July 5, 1899.

Inevitably, the letters arrived, correcting Cleland that the new century would not in fact begin until the following year, on January 1, 1901. In their correction, the Journal added that ‘midnight, December 31’ is in fact the first minute of that day, not the last, and that the year properly begins at midnight, January 1. That the holiday was punctuated as New Years’, not New Year’s, stoked further controversy, and provoked further unwelcome correspondence, causing the Journal to discontinue carrying Cleland as an advertiser, with calamitous results for his enterprise.

Published January 6, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.