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.

Ball Aerospace & Technologies

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. (commonly Ball Aerospace) is an American manufacturer of spacecraft, components, and instruments for national defense, civil space and commercial space applications. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ball Corporation (NYSE: BLL), with primary offices in Boulder and facilities in Broomfield and Westminster in Colorado, with smaller offices in New Mexico, Ohio, Northern Virginia, Missouri, and Maryland.

Ball Aerospace began building pointing controls for military rockets in 1956, and later won a contract to build one of NASA’s first spacecraft, the Orbiting Solar Observatory. Over the years, the company has been responsible for numerous technological and scientific projects and continues to provide aerospace technology to NASA and related industries.

Ball Aerospace also has many other products and services for the aerospace industry, including lubricants, optical systems, star trackers and antennas. As a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ball Corporation, Ball Aerospace was cited in 2014 as the 88th largest defense contractor in the world. Both parent and subsidiary headquarters are co-located in Broomfield, Colorado.

Ball

A ball is a round, usually spherical but sometimes ovoid, object with various uses. It is used in ball games, where the play of the game follows the state of the ball as it is hit, kicked or thrown by players. In the context of sports, "ball" need not refer to a spherical object, as is the case in American football. Balls can also be used for simpler activities, such as catch, marbles and juggling. Balls made from hard-wearing materials are used in engineering applications to provide very low friction bearings, known as ball bearings. Black-powder weapons use stone and metal balls as projectiles.

Although many types of balls are today made from rubber, this form was unknown outside the Americas until after the voyages of Columbus. The Spanish were the first Europeans to see bouncing rubber balls (albeit solid and not inflated) which were employed most notably in the Mesoamerican ballgame. Balls used in various sports in other parts of the world prior to Columbus were made from other materials such as animal bladders or skins, stuffed with various materials.

Margaret Ball

Margaret Ball (1515–1584) was a prominent member of 16th-century Irish society, who, despite being the widow of a Lord Mayor of Dublin, was arrested for her adherence to the Catholic faith and died of deprivation in the dungeons of Dublin Castle. She was declared a martyr for the faith by the Catholic Church and beatified in 1992, one of a group of 17 Irish Catholic Martyrs.

Early life

She was born Margaret Bermingham<ref name=chapel / in Cobskill, a townland now part of the village of Skryne in County Meath,<ref name=Ballygall / where her father, Nicholas, had purchased a farm when he emigrated from England. The family later became politically active; her brother, William Bermingham, protested in London against Earl Thomas Radclyffe, when he imposed the Protestant Reformation on behalf of the boy-king Edward VI. When she was 16 years old, Margaret Bermingham married Bartholomew Ball, an alderman of the City of Dublin, whose wealthy family operated the bridge over the River Dodder, which is still known as Ballsbridge. She then moved to the city, where the couple lived at Ballygall House in north county Dublin and had a town house on Merchant's Quay. They had ten children, though only five survived to adulthood. Bartholomew Ball was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1553, making Margaret the Lady Mayoress of the city. She had a comfortable life with a large household and many servants, and she was recognised for organising classes for the children of local families in her home.