Every year, Ball Corporation manufactures more than 40 billion containers, including metal cans, food containers, and plastic containers. (The company doesn’t make glass jars any more.) If you want to know how many the company has made this year, you can watch the numbers change every second on the company’s website, www.ball.com. Check often because the numbers change quickly.

Of course the company has seen a lot of other changes over the years, especially in the last decade or so. While Broomfield-based Ball Corporation makes food and beverage packaging, its Boulder-based subsidiary, Ball Aerospace, makes remote sensing solutions for the aerospace and defense markets.

That means the company sends out press releases about crashing into a comet, developing a 20-ounce can, and laser-incising advertisements on soda can tabs, all in the same month.

In 1880 the five Ball brothers borrowed $200 and launched the Wooden Jacket Can Company in Buffalo, New York. The glass fruit jars were first made in 1884. (If you want to try to sell that mason jar you bought at a garage sale, try eBay. Ball sold off that business years ago, and no longer fields “How much is this jar worth” calls.)
By 1887 the brothers had moved manufacturing to Indiana to take advantage of the natural gas boom in the Midwest. Colorado operations began in 1955, when the brothers acquired a company in Boulder.

Today 90 percent of the business is packaging, says Scott McCarty, director of corporate relations. The company has changed to keep up with market trends. Since 1993, Ball has spun off seven businesses, including the home canning business. That business is now part of Jarden Corporation, which also makes Fruit Fresh. Ball sold its glass business in 1996, exiting glass entirely. In 2000 Ball shut down two manufacturing facilities in Canada and cut 180 jobs.

Ball started its PET plastic business in 1994. It acquired the metal beverage can plants of Reynolds Metals Company in 1998, and became the largest metal beverage can maker in North America. Ball became the largest beverage can maker in the world when the company bought a can maker in Europe in 2002.

“So, in a ten-year period, Ball transitioned away from declining markets and focused instead on markets and regions where we could grow. During the past three years or so we have added muscle to our new product development capabilities, building a marketing department almost from scratch and emphasizing working with our customers to develop new products they want and need,” McCarty said.

The aerospace subsidiary is also growing. In July 2005 the company announced the success of Deep Impact, a program in which one Ball spacecraft crashed into a comet while another Ball spacecraft recorded the collision and took data.

The company has also kept up with consumer trends. For example, in January Ball presented its new PET wine bottles at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in California, saying that consumer sometimes want to bring wine to outdoor venues where glass is not allowed.

The company has also kept up with the need to reach out to the charities that its employees value. “Several years ago Ball formed an employee committee that organizes three to five volunteer events a year,” McCarty says. In 2005, Ball sponsored three homes as part of National Rebuilding Day, where 80 Ball employees volunteered, and also rebuilt three trails. Ball also offers employees a matching gifts program.

While McCarty declines to give dollar figures, he says Ball donated to the September 11 relief, Tsunami relief, and Hurricane Katrina relief through employee matching donations. “Our company culture is to do good while not necessarily talking about it. It's just the way we are,” he says.

To keep those billions of containers out of the landfills, Ball supports recycling programs, including encouraging employees to recycle where food and beverages are purchased and consumed.

Ball officially moved its corporate headquarters from Muncie, Indiana, to the 84-acre facility in Broomfield in 1998. The building had been known as Ball’s Colorado Engineering Center. Today the headquarters has 200 employees, a level that McCarty says has stayed the same over the past few years. Worldwide, the company employs 13,200 people in 75 locations.

In 2005 Ball celebrated its 125th anniversary by sending weekly nostalgic messages to employees. One message points out the media’s longtime fixation on the jars-to-aerospace theme, including “Ball from the Kitchen to Outer Space” (1973, in Nation’s Business) to “From Canning Jars to Aerospace” (2002, in ColoradoBiz). Another message lists the original shareholders: the Ball brothers, two businessman, one blacksmith, and five glassblowers. Another notes the glass jars weren’t the only spinoff: over the years the company also made pressure cookers, Christmas ornaments, and zinc roofing.

“When you have been around for 125 years,” says the weekly message, “you leave a long and varied trail through history.”