Ball Corporation

From the Ball website

Five brothers founded Ball in 1880, with a loan of $200 from their Uncle George. At first they made wood-jacketed tin cans for products like paint and kerosene, but soon they expanded their offerings to glass- and tin-jacketed containers. In 1884 the brothers began making glass home-canning jars, the product that established Ball as a household name. The brothers—Edmund, Frank, George, Lucius and William—moved the company from Buffalo, New York, to Muncie, Indiana, in 1887, to take advantage of abundant natural gas reserves essential to making glass.

Ball grew rapidly in the ensuing decade, and has been in more than 45 businesses since its founding. Ball no longer manufactures the ubiquitous canning jars, but we've expanded and grown into a worldwide metal packaging company that makes billions of recyclable metal containers and a unique aerospace business that designs one-of-a-kind solutions to answer scientific and technical challenges. We manufacture on four continents

From the Jarden website

The company was renamed in June 2002. The company's previous name, Alltrista, was created by dropping the "B" from Ball and the "Minne" from Minnetrista, the street on which the Ball family had grown up in Muncie, IN. Between 1993 and 2001, as a public company, Alltrista did not perform well and after new management joined, the Board then decided we should change the name of the company to something that represented not only our heritage, but also our future. The company did not hire any consultants to assist with the naming process as management believed that the employees understood the DNA of our company better than any outsider could. In the end Martin Franklin, our Chairman, came up with the Jarden name by combining the heritage of the Ball "Jar" with the concept of our products being used in the home (den), which also had the connotation of the garden (French jardin) as we planned to expand our product range outside the home.

http://www.jarden.com/phoenix.zhtml?c...