The flag was originally designed to unfurl grandly from a ship’s mast. Attributed to 19th-century sea captain William Driver, who was originally from Salem, Massachusetts.
Driver received the homemade flag with 24 stars in 1824, sewn for him by his mother and a group of young Salem female admirers to celebrate his appointment, at the age of just 21,
as a master mariner and commander of his own ship, the Charles Doggett. According to legend, when Driver raised the flag up the main mast,
he lifted his hat and declaimed, “My ship, my country, and my flag, Old Glory.”

However, Salem historian Bonnie Hurd Smith has found “no evidence whatsoever” that Driver made such a stiffly grandiose pronouncement.
He more likely named the flag when reflecting on his adventurous 20-year career as an American merchant seaman who sailed to China,
India, Gibraltar and throughout the South Pacific, at one point ferrying survivors of the HMS Bounty from Tahiti to Pitcairn Island under the flag.
"It has ever been my staunch companion and protection,” he wrote. “Savages and heathens, lowly and oppressed, hailed and welcomed it at the far end of the wide world.
Then, why should it not be called Old Glory?”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-flag-came-to-be-called-old-glory-18396/#0QPXfOvRkjL0yPdg.99