Beautifully engraved specimen certificate from
Ball Brothers Company Incorporated printed in 1966. This historic document was printed by American Bank Note Company and has an
ornate border around it with a vignette of the company's logo. This item has the signatures of the Company's President and Secretary and is over 40 years old.
Certificate Vignette
Ball Corporation
Founded: 1880 (Buffalo, New York); 1887 (Muncie)
Location: Meridian Street, Muncie (Indiana factory, 1888–1970s); Meriweather Avenue
near Blaine; Macedonia Avenue and Ninth Street (later 1509 South Macedonia Avenue);
345 South High Street (corporate headquarters, 1976–98)
In 1880 Frank and Edmund Ball established the Wooden Jacket Can Company in
Buffalo, New York. With a two-hundred dollar loan from their uncle, the Ball brothers
purchased some tin, wooden jackets, a set of hand tinner’s tools, and patent rights to
certain can designs from A. W. Aldrich, a local manufacturer of copper tea kettles.
Aldrich was happy to sell his unprofitable wood-jacketed oilcan division to the young
men. The Balls soon developed a better and cheaper method of applying the wooden
jackets to the tin cans, and Frank obtained orders from throughout the Midwest. A fire
destroyed the brothers’ first factory, but they reestablished themselves at a new location
on Main Street. In 1883 Frank and Edmund’s three brothers—George, William, and
Lucius—joined the business. As the popularity of tin oilcans declined, the brothers
began to manufacture glass oil containers. By 1885 they were producing their own glass,
and in February 1886 they incorporated as the Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing
Company, with Frank as president. In 1884 or 1885 Ball Brothers began manufacturing
the threaded-top glass jars for home canning first designed by John Mason; Mason jars
became an important basis of the company’s prosperity.
In 1886 fire destroyed the Ball Brothers glass manufacturing plant in Buffalo. At
the same time the discovery of midwestern natural gas fields launched a boom in western
Ohio and eastern Indiana. As the brothers considered building a new plant, they were
courted by midwestern civic leaders ready to offer land, gas, and moving expenses to
companies willing to locate factories in their communities. The Muncie natural gas
boom began in 1886, and its business leaders, led by James Boyce, raised $120,000 to
attract factories to the city. In the summer of 1887 they offered the Ball Brothers
company $5,000, free land, free gas, and a private rail link connecting the factory to
Muncie’s main rail line. The brothers accepted the offer and opened their plant on
Meridian Street in March 1888.
By 1894–95 the workforce at the glass manufacturing plant grew to 1000 men
who were producing 22 million fruit jars for home canning. The company grew through
technological innovation and aggressive expansion. In 1898 Ball Brothers perfected an
automatic glass jar machine, the only practical machine for manufacturing widemouth
jars and bottles. A 1910 Indianapolis newspaper article claimed that the Muncie plant,
which covered 35 acres and produced 90 million jars in one year, was making half of the
world’s supply. The firm vertically integrated, not only producing a wide variety of glass
jars but also acquiring factories to produce straw paper and corrugated cardboard for
packing the jars, zinc mills to produce materials for the screw caps, and rubber plants in
order to manufacture rubber sealing rings.
Ball Brothers acquired fourteen glass companies between 1898 and 1936. As the
company expanded and acquired plants throughout the United States, the Ball family
came to dominate Muncie society. The brothers built elegant homes on a strip of land
along the White River, which they called Minnetrista Boulevard, and became major
benefactors of the city. They backed the city’s hospital and donated the campus and
buildings that became Ball State University. The Ball family was, as sociologists Robert
and Helen Lynd noted critically in Middletown in Transition, almost synonymous with
Muncie.
The Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company prospered, becoming the Ball
Brothers Company in 1922. Between the 1930s and early 1950s, however, it faced a
series of crises that resulted in its restructuring. Sales of the company’s fruit jars dropped
by half between 1931 and 1932 and the precipitous fall in profits caused the company to
slash the prices of its fruit jars. The effects of the Great Depression also prodded the
company to expand, and after the end of Prohibition in 1933 the Ball Brothers Company
began producing alcoholic beverage bottles. The company’s participation in industrywide
patenting agreements for glass-producing machinery made it a party to an antitrust
suit launched by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in 1939. In that year Ball
Brothers was manufacturing almost 55 percent of all the fruit jars in the country. The
case of United States v. Hartford-Empire et al. was finally ended in 1947 when the
United States Supreme Court disallowed the industry’s patenting system and enjoined the
Ball Brothers Company from any further expansion in the glassware industry.
The period from 1946 through 1954 marked, a significant change in the Ball
company and in the Ball family generational leadership. Frank Ball, the founder and
president for sixty-three years, died in 1943. The company was in crisis—it faced the
demands of a newly unionized labor force, it lacked controls on production, costs,
personnel, inventory, and sales, and its organization and planning were inadequate. In
addition, production capacity had outstripped marketing, and production costs were
eating into profits, forcing the cash-strapped company to negotiate a vital $1 million loan
from the John Hancock Life Insurance Company of Boston in 1948. In response to these
challenges, the company brought in outside managers, altered its profile, and diversified,
expanding, for example, into the plastics and aerospace industry. In 1955 it established a
research and development department.
Gradually, the privately owned firm loosened its attachment to Muncie and the
glass-jar business that had been the foundation of its prosperity. Due to declining profits,
Ball Brothers Company closed its Muncie plant, much to the shock of the local
community and 600 displaced workers. It did, however, retain its corporate headquarters
in the city, opening a new office building in 1976. In 1969 the company became the Ball
Corporation and in 1972 went public. Over the years the company had expanded into the
production of metal and plastic containers and zinc products. By the 1990s it produced
most of the copper-coated zinc penny blanks used by the U.S. Mint. Metal beverage cans
became its leading product by the 1980s. In 1992 the corporation produced 14 billion
aluminum and steel beverage cans and 33 billion metal food containers for the United
States and Canadian markets and was expanding into Pacific Rim markets, including
Japan and China. Ball Corporation’s wholly owned subsidiary Ball-InCon Glass
Packaging Corporation was North America’s third-largest supplier of commercial glass
containers.
In 1993 Ball Corporation spun off seven of its divisions, including its metal
cans, zinc products, and plastics divisions, into the Alltrista Corporation, an independent
company based in Muncie. By the mid-1990s the company boasted annual sales of $2.3
billion and employed more than 14,000 workers in 22 states.
In February 1998 Ball Corporation announced that it would move its headquarters
from Muncie to Broomfield, Colorado. Two years before the announcement Ball
Corporation had sold its interest in Ball-Foster Glass Container Corporation and had
closed its metal food container plant in Columbus, leaving the company without any
manufacturing sites in Indiana. The move to Colorado was intended to reduce travel
costs and improve communications within the company. Alltrista and Ball-Foster
continued to produce the items traditionally made by Ball Corporation and remained in
Muncie.
In 1999 R. David Hoover became Ball Corporation’s president, succeeding
George A. Matsik. Hoover had been the chief financial officer for the firm and an
employee since 1970. Hoover and Leon Midgett, the company’s new chief operating
officer, had overseen the $746 million acquisition of the North American manufacturing
assets of the Reynolds Metals Company in 1998, making Ball the largest manufacturer of
aluminum beverage cans in North America. In 1999 the Ball Corporation stood as a $2.9
billion company with over 12,600 employees. George A. Sissel retained the post of
chairman of the board.
History from Wikipeida and OldCompanyResearch.com.
About SpecimensSpecimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".
Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.
These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.