Ball Steeltin

Since its founding, Ball has grown from a small producer of wooden-jacketed tin cans to an international manufacturing company. Ball is recognized around the world for its high-quality metal and for its leading aerospace technology products and servi...

Since its founding, Ball has grown from a small producer of wooden-jacketed tin cans to an international manufacturing company. Ball is recognized around the world for its high-quality metal and for its leading aerospace technology products and services. The five founding Ball brothers started the company in 1880 in Buffalo, New York. Two of the brothers, Frank and Edmund, borrowed $200 from their Uncle George, a minister, to go into business selling wood-jacketed tin containers to hold paint, varnishes and kerosene. They named their business the Wooden Jacket Can Company. Their product was so successful they expanded their line. Soon, the brothers had refined their original product to tin-jacketed, glass-lined containers. In 1884, the renamed Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company began manufacturing yet another new product – the home canning jar, which would one day make Ball a household name. Our company is still probably best known by the public for its home canning jars, which we no longer make. In 1887, the five Ball brothers – Edmund, Frank, George, Lucius and William – moved their business to Muncie, Indiana, to take advantage of a natural gas boom in the Midwest. Great quantities of natural gas were necessary to make glass. Ball acquired the first of several small glass companies in 1898, and printed the first Ball Blue Book – featuring home canning recipes and techniques – in 1909.