1885 – The New York Clipper reports that Paul Hines has canceled his Washington Monument ball-drop exhibition. “The experiment of trying to catch a ball thrown from the top of the Washington Monument has proved to be a failure. The ball reaches the ground with such great speed that it indents the ground almost as much as a heavy cannon ball would dropped from a proportionate height. The fact is that, independently of the difficulty of judging the ball falling from such a height, the speed is too great to allow of any one holding it when it nears the ground.”