Ball Corporation

Although the Ball Corporation is best known for its distinctive home canning jars, that business was just one segment of the diversified company in the 1990s. Glass packaging constituted only 29 percent of Ball's annual sales by that time, while metal packaging--including aluminum beverage containers, and food and aerosol cans--brought in about 60 percent of yearly revenues. The firm ranks as one of America's top beverage-can manufacturers. Ball's emphasis on quality has helped it compete well in the highly competitive can market: by 1994, the company was the third largest supplier to the combined U.S.-Canadian food can market. The remaining eleven percent of the corporation's annual income came from aerospace and communications subsidiaries. Ball has secured numerous U.S. Defense Department contracts and participates in the Space Shuttle Program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Ever since the five Ball brothers discovered that John Mason's patent on canning jars had expired in the late 1800s, the Ball Corporation has been making the preferred canning equipment in America. Five generations of Americans have preserved everything from pickle relish and apricots to cherry jam and tomatoes in the well known jars, whose design has gone virtually unchanged for over 100 years. Though Ball finally went public in 1972, 60 percent of the company's stock is still owned by the family. The Ball Corporation began in 1880 when the Ball brothers went into the business of making tin-jacketed glass containers for kerosene lamps. From this type of operation it was an easy shift to the manufacture of canning jars and lids. Moreover, it was wise business strategy: Thomas Edison's recent invention of the incandescent light bulb had antiquated the kerosene lamp. The glass jar, on the other hand, had a great future. Until the end of World War II, Ball was primarily a jar and bottle manufacturer with few other interests. In the late 1940s, however, a problem had to be confronted--nearly 70 percent of the company's glass production facilities were in need of modernization. Ball had either to diversify and grow in order to underwrite necessary modernization costs or liquidate the company. The family decided to diversify the company because a 1947 antitrust ruling prohibited Ball from purchasing more glass subsidiaries. Under president Edmund F. Ball, they made a number of key acquisitions outside the glass container field. Before the company ventured too far afield, Ball hired a New York management consulting team to help establish a long-range program. In the words of Edmund Ball's successor, John Fisher, 'We wanted to plan for growth, not just hope for it.' The significant changes at Ball, those which have molded the company's future, took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The launching of Sputnik by the Soviets in 1958 ushered in the Space Age and created many new opportunities in the field of aerospace. Ball decided to take advantage of the situation. 'We got into the space field because it was the beginning of the biggest scientific effort in our nation's history,' said Fisher. 'We knew it could be profitable for us, and that we could get commercial 'fall-out' from it.' The Ball management proved itself correct on both counts. A substantial portion of the company's business presently comes from the sale of computer components, pointing controls for NASA satellites, electronic data display devices, and many related items such as Sound-Guard, a preservative for phonograph records that is a derivative of a lubricant developed for spacecraft. The company also built the cameras for the Viking I and II spacecraft that were used to determine the landing site on Mars; the Space Shuttle tether system, which allows small payloads to trail up to 65 miles away from the parent ship; and the telescope on the Infrared Astronomical Satellite launched in 1983 that has helped scientists to determine more precisely the size of