Ball Corporation

Ball Corporation, originally Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company, is an American company famous for producing glass canning jars. Founded in 1880, it is currently headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado. The company has expanded into other areas such as avionics, space systems, metal beverage and food containers and aluminum aerosol containers. Ball is the largest producer of recyclable beverage cans in the world. The company exited the home canning business in 1993 by spinning it off into a separate company, Alltrista (since renamed Jarden).

Company history

In 1880, Frank C. and Edmund B. Ball, two of the five Ball brothers of fruit jar fame, borrowed $200 from their Uncle George Harvey Ball, founder and first president of Keuka College, to buy the Wooden Jacket Can Company (years later the brothers would reciprocate by providing financial support to their uncle's college). The wooden jackets encased tin cans which held kerosene. Because the acid used to refine kerosene caused corrosion in tin, the brothers decided to use glass for the inserts of the wood-jacketed cans. Initially, they bought the glass containers from a factory in Poughkeepsie, New York.