Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Brain junk. I'm Trace Gurr.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: And I'm Amy Barton. And today we're going to talk about companies that are known for one thing, and they have taken a big left turn in their manufacturing careers. Manufacturing careers that didn't come out well. You get it. You're with me, right? This is starting well, and it's going to get even better.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready to be amazed. Wowed.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Okay, we are largely talking about the ball jar company. I saw a fella talking on the Internet.
This is one of those where we're like, there was a guy, and he said a thing, and I didn't believe him, so I looked it up, and it is true.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Oh, is it the TikTok guy? He, like, talks about companies doing terrible things.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: This guy did not talk about terrible things, which is nice.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Good. Okay.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: He just talked about an interesting thing, and he was saying, they were at the ball stadium. That was ball stadium. And they're like, why do the jar people own a stadium? And his wife is like, well, they're not the jar people anymore. They're in aerospace engineering. And he's like, that's probably not true. And like me, he says he looked it up. And so I thought, let's talk about that story. So we're gonna go all the way back to 1880, when Frank C. And Edmund B. Ball, two of the five ball brothers, they borrowed, it's fun to say, they borrowed $200 from their uncle George Harvey Ball because they wanted to buy the wooden jacket can company of Buffalo, New York. Oh, and then, of course, the other three brothers are like, you're doing that thing. Is there a job for us? And there was so five ball brothers involved in this company, and I don't know if you stayed with me, but it was the wooden jacket can company, and they did indeed make cans, tin cans encased in wooden jackets to sell kerosene, paint, varnish, because those are corrosive. And so they.
They had that wooden casing to protect it a little. So ball did not start out in glass jars.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Okay, so wooden.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Wooden, yeah.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: Can wooden.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Wait, tin cans encased in wooden jackets.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Wooden jackets on cans. Nope. That is not what I wanted at all.
Oh, there's like a. There's a whole poster, too, of their ball corporation's natural progression.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Yes. For ball and Mason jars both. I think you can find a poster and look up what your logo on your particular jars, if you have an old one, and you can narrow down the manufacturing era for your particular, very old jar so if you have a ball glass jar, those would be coming. They entered the glass jar manufacturing business in 1886, so that would be the oldest. And they were. They had a stamping works and a one story glassworks. And they started out there, and by the 19 hundreds, they became the largest producer of fruit jars in the country. Based on the 1900 census.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Huh.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: They were able to determine that. So they clearly do census on more than just people.
In 1922, they anticipated growth and diversification, so they simplified their name. They used to be the Ball brothers glass manufacturing company. Wow. It's a lot. It is a lot. Yeah. So they're now at 1922, Ball Brothers company. There they stayed until 1956, when they took another switch and became.
They formed. So they've still got Ball Brothers company, but now they're going to enter into the space age, and they have Ball Brothers Research Corporation. What? Yeah. So this is their pivotal moment, 1956. And there's an interesting quote on their website that says 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. They just had this moment of realizing they could make a big app impact in this amazing new thing. So that launched them from. From jars to space. Systems engineering products, telecommunications, electro optics and cryogenics materials. And they do this for government and commercial use.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: I kind of like how they said it has molded us like glass. You know, you're molding. It's like, oh, somebody really thought about.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: That well crafted statement.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: Yeah. All this, all the while, as we go in through the sixties and seventies, they're still growing, and they're getting back into the metal container business of cans. And once again, name change. Ball corporation. I like that. That's the late sixties. Okay. Keeping it simple. So sad day, 1996. No more jars, just space.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: But, like, I still get jars to.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Do Canning, but it's not the original company. So they spent 110 years in the glass business, but they have taken a really big turn. So what are they up to? What is their impact in the world, you ask? Would you like to know what they've been up to?
[00:05:41] Speaker A: I would. I desperately need to know what they're. What they've been up to. Yeah.
[00:05:45] Speaker B: Well, they're still making aerosol cans and metal stuff, so that's exciting.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: No wooden.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: No wooden coatings now housings. They. In 2009, they built the Kepler spacecraft, the ball aerospace built Kepler spacecraft carrying the largest camera ever sent by NASA beyond Earth's orbit. So they were a part of that.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: They were a part of the joint polar satellite system now known as NOAA 20, which was launched in 2017 and is currently collecting critical data for civil and military forecasting. So they're storm trackers, which is super great. Yeah. They are part of the James Webb telescope. In 2021, they designed and built the advanced optical technology and their lightweight mirror system. So that. And the site said that that will enable Webb to look 13.5 billion years back in time, which is wild, that.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Huh.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: They've built a telescope for a project called New Horizons.
They were part of a high rise camera project which took the first high resolution images from Mars surface.
Deep impact was the first spacecraft to intersect a comet. They worked on that.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: I just thought that was really interesting. They're like jars, jars, jars. Yes. And then they're like, you know, it's the fifties. Let's branch out, everybody.
And they did in a big way. Do you know who else did? Honeywell? The thermostat people. Also autopilot systems, which that one actually makes sense to me because thermostats do a lot of automated work, and so I can see that being a natural extension. But your home thermostat and air conditioning unit are also made by the people who are probably putting autopilot systems in jets.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: Huh. It is so interesting, the interconnectedness of technology and where companies go.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: GE. There's a scene in 30 rock where one of the main characters works for GE, too, and he comes up with these. It's a photo printer and a shredder by GE. And. And it's like a lot of wacky products in the show. And apparently that might not be the craziest thing, because they are. In addition to home appliances, they're into power generation. Think gas. Steam turbines. Gas or steam. Hydroelectric power, aviation engines and systems, healthcare and pharmaceutical diagnostics and oil and gas production equipment.
Here's my favorite one.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: And this is more of a mashup. John Deere and Roomba created the irobot r gator. And if you're imagining, like, a self propelled John Deereba, you are right. It looks more like a tractor. It is not small and round. It is autonomous. It has levels. So it's this sort of tractory looking thing that has. It's in use now by the us military.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Did you say r?
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Like the letter r and then r gator.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: Oh, it is. Okay. Wow.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: It's good. Perimeter patroller. It can follow a map or do waypointing to reach a predetermined destination. It can do follow the leader operations, they call it, so it can keep up with troops. It can be teleoperated or driven manually, so you could override and take control. So it must have some sort of camera system. They can see what it's doing to. Or a gps tracker.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: It's a funny little. It almost looks like a flat jeep. I know that.
[00:09:21] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. Like, they don't need people in it, so why have a roof?
[00:09:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Ha. And I see, I know that the ball corporation thinks they're super fancy, but we use ker jars in my house, so.
[00:09:35] Speaker B: Nice.
So that's my wander down product road. I just, my favorite is that robot. But just the idea that, you know, they're just making jars and spacecrafts.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Like what? I mean, so they had glass, and they had manufacturing technology, and then somebody said, okay, yeah, I know you have preserves, but, like, I would. I would like to make a satellite.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: I do feel like sometimes I feel like people with a ridiculous amount of money that they've established, and they're going gangbusters. They don't do good things with it or interesting things, and I feel like someone was inquisitive here and had the means to pursue something else. So I do like that.
Thank you for letting us see space jar guy.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: Thank you for fixing Hubble's warped mirrors.
Yeah. And see, this is much better, because there is a fellow on TikTok that he talks about different companies.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Oh, is there something villainous that we should know?
[00:10:35] Speaker A: I'll have a link in the show notes to this fellow's TikTok, and it's, hey, you make these fun children's toys and also toxic gas that people used in World War Two. Wow, that's great. And it's just like, what happened?
[00:10:50] Speaker B: The byproduct of our toxic gas makes super terrific children's toys. Is that kind of the vibe?
[00:10:56] Speaker A: Oh, no.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Oh, man.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Well, like I said, ball jars are nice, but curtain jars are better. And if you want something even better, go to the merch store, get yourself a mug. Get yourself a cup. The beer mug, although you could put soda in it. We're not gonna tell anybody. Is also made.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: You could put hot tea in it. Trace puts hot tea in it, you guys.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: I do. Amy was deeply disturbed. She's like, but there's no handle. And I'm like, yeah, you just don't pick it up until it's not too hot.
It's okay. No, one is going to see. The nice thing is, when you're adult, you can do that, you know, you can get cake anytime you want. So brainjunkpodcast.com, check that out. That's where you can get to the merch store. Also, we're on Facebook, we're on Instagram. We post stuff. Amy and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know, and I guarantee you will not be bored.
