Felix Mendelssohn composed The Wedding March (“Here comes the bride”) for a stage production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sixteen years later, it became a wedding must-have when Queen Victoria’s daughter Victoria chose it to be played at her wedding to a Prussian Prince. A pencil with an eraser on the other end was invented. Rowland Macy opened his first department store. James Buchanan was President of the United States. Minnesota, the northern terminus of the Mississippi River, was admitted to the Union as the 32nd state. The year was 1858. Meanwhile, back in New Jersey.
What Are Ball Jars?
A tinsmith named John Mason figured out how to place a round metal lid with a flat rubber seal atop a heat-resistant glass jar and use a threaded metal ring to screw the lid tightly to the jar, air-proofing it. For the first time, people could see the food inside a sealed storage container.
Mason jars immediately became a favorite of farmers and settlers
Some city folk thought it was a good idea, too, because Mr. Mason’s jars were:
- Easy to use.
- Inexpensive.
- Reusable.
- See-through.
The switch to glass jars
Glass jars preserved the foods inside as well as tin cans* did and had all the advantages listed above. Cans remained the primary choice of food manufacturers, though, because glass jars broke and tin cans didn’t.
Mason’s first product line extension
He applied his screw-on lid principle in miniature when he invented salt shakers with the screw-on tops that made them easy to refill.
Flashback
I wrote about canned foods last week because any story about food preserved in glass jars needs to begin with the story of Nicolas Appert inventing a method of preserving food by removing the air and sealing food tightly inside tin cans. The story was so interesting that I kept on writing. A day later, I decided that the tin can thing deserved a story of its own. It needed to go first because cans came 60 years ahead of glass jars, so I shifted the jar story into Park and wrote the can story instead.
Little House on the Prairie
Back in the days when people built their own homes without YouTube’s help, life was so different than how it is today that few of us can imagine it. As late as 1880 the total number of houses wired for electricity was zip, zilch, zed, nada.
How many of us can see ourselves living off the grid, building our own homes out of mud or wood if we can find any tree, and fighting wolves, bears, outlaws, and savages (their word, not mine)? At the top of nearly everyone’s mind was survival, something few of us are faced with today.
How many of us can see and feel ourselves hungry because we’re running out of food, going to the outhouse in a blizzard and shooting chicken thieves? How many of us would willingly choose to live day after desolate day with rattlesnakes, floods, droughts, and tornados that we don’t know are coming because we don’t have the Weather Channel?
Chores were assigned by gender
Boys are young men, and so were expected to help their fathers with manual labor, plowing fields, chopping wood, shoeing horses, and the like. If you remember when we were all hunters or gatherers, you know which were the men and which were the women.
Most of the time boys would grow to be bigger and stronger than girls, so the choice would seem logical hundreds of years ago because they did not have our modern sensibilities.
Sure, there was the occasional outlier
Here are four notables:
- Laura Ingalls Wilder.
- Martha Jane Canary (Calamity Jane, frontier wife to Wild Bill Hickok).
- Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed (outlaw Belle Starr).
- Phoebe Ann Mosey (sharpshooter Annie Oakley, who volunteered for the Spanish-American War but was turned down by the old Roughrider himself).
As soon as they could walk, girls began to train for wifehood
Mothers started teaching their daughters practical things as soon as they were able to handle chores. The youngest girls learned how to sweep the floor, feed the chickens, and collect the eggs. As girls grew older, they learned to pluck chickens, milk the family cow, wash clothes by hand, read from the bible, and build fires for cooking and heating.
Once the older daughters had learned how to put up fruits and vegetables in Mason jars, sew and knit, chop kindling, provide first aid, midwife human and animal births, and slaughter their own chickens, pigs, goats, rabbits, and squirrels, they’d be considered ready for marriage.
Mason’s patent expired
After 22 years as America’s most popular “canning” jar,” Mason jars had become a generic term for all glass canning jars. They became so well-known that people took to referring to any brand of glass jars with screw-on metal lids as Mason jars. It’s the same principle as how brand names like Kleenex, FedEx, and Xerox** became synonymous with tissues, overnight shipping, and copying.
Frank, Edmund, William, Lucius, and George
Buffalo, New York’s five Ball Brothers owned the Wooden Jacket Can Company. Made of tin cans wrapped on all sides by wood, their product was made to hold solvents and corrosives like paints, varnishes, and kerosene during shipping and handling.
The Ball Brothers switched over to glass containers when corrosion became too costly to manage
While they were at it, they changed the company’s name. With Mason’s patent expiring, the Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company looked to take market share away from Mason jars with their Ball jars.
- The Ball Brothers made their product stand out by putting the name Ball on their distinctively blue “Mason” jars
- The short name allowed them to make the letters on their jars larger to grab more attention.
- The jar’s unique color came from the special Lake Michigan sand they used in their glass-making process.
- Ball jars were made by hand for nearly 10 years until someone figured out how to replace people with machines.
- By 1900, the Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company was the largest fruit jar manufacturer in the world with a factory that made more than 200,000 fruit jars a day.
- Today the Ball Corporation is the world’s largest producer of aluminum beverage cans with a net income in 2023 of over $14 billion.
- Handmade Ball jars are collectors’ item that have sold for as much as $23,500.
Do not confuse a Ball jar with a Bell Jar***
The Ball Brothers moved their glassworks to Muncie, Indiana to be near natural gas deposits
Muncie’s Indiana State Normal School Eastern Division was broke. When it went under, the Ball Brothers bought the land and the buildings on them and donated them to the State of Indiana.
Next time you go through Muncie, check out the Historic Ball Jar Collection on the campus of Ball State University, where a maternal uncle of mine was head of the art department for many years. The collection includes ephemera, memorabilia, 3,000 jars, and anything with a Ball label.
It’s called canning foods, so why aren’t you using cans?
“The canning word, and the reference to the can itself, is kind of secondary,” explains Anna Zeide, author of Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry. “The term canning is used to describe the process of hermetically sealing food in tin cans and glass jars.”
Canning was the first method to remove the air and use heat to give foods an extended shelf-life, if you will
People would put up corn, tomatoes, cucumbers in brine to make pickles, and anything they could grow. Although glass jars took over from cans long ago for home canners, canning still refers to the process of preserving foods in canisters of various materials.
Sometimes canned foods have a tinny sort of taste
Foods inside glass jars do not have a glassy sort of taste. When foods is preserved behind clear glass, we still couldn’t smell or touch them, but we can at least see what’s inside. Once washed, glass jars are reusable, where tin cans go to the trash (60%) or the recycling bin (40%).
Bonus
Can you see yourself as one of the hardscrabble settlers braving the raw frontier? Can you really imagine going to the outhouse in a blizzard and shooting the coyotes stealing your chickens? Through floods and drought and tornados? Malaria, dysentery, cholera, typhoid fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, rabies, snakebite with no doctors or hospitals? How about living in a mud house dug into the side a hill? Me, either.
—-
*Can is shortmouth for canister and shortmouth is the vocal equivalent of shorthand.
**The story of why so many of these brand names that have earned generic status have the consonants X and K is one for another time.
***The Bell Jar is a novel featuring Esther Greenwood’s struggles with her mental health. I read it in an undergraduate class called Women’s Lib and Literature. The semi-autobiographical story was written by poet Sylvia Plath, who stuck her head in the gas oven at home and died at age 30.
