Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  EIS has been around for a century, but didn’t take off until the 1970s, when potentiostats became reliable. Since then, the technique has been used to study everything from semiconductors to protein reactions. Ingeniously, the technique was perfected over years and then taught, during a weeklong course in Thorton Hall, by a pair of professors at the University of Virginia. Ray Taylor designed, and still privately teaches, the annual course. John Scully was one of Taylor’s lecturers. Taylor now runs the National Corrosion Center, at Texas A&M University. Scully, still at UVA and by his own admission on a corrosion crusade, has since become the editor of the journal Corrosion.

  Laperle didn’t take Taylor’s course, but his colleague Jack Powers did. He was Ball’s manager of chemistry. This was in 1987. It was the first EIS course that Taylor taught, and among the thirty-two attendees were as many employees of battery companies as employees of can-making companies. Taylor, not recognizing the animosity between the makers of steel cans and aluminum cans—they can hardly stand to be in the same room—had invited both. Powers, though, must have liked what he saw, because he contracted Taylor to research corrosion issues in cans. “People don’t realize that the survivability of a can is almost entirely a product of its lining,” Taylor told me. He was contracted to develop a test that could assess that survivability in a week. “It’s really a brutal industry,” he recalled. With test packs, “You’ve gotta wait twelve months to find the answer. By that time your competitor has surpassed you, and you’re stuck there waiting.” He continued: “The margins are just ridiculous. They’ve gotta make a billion things, and they’ve gotta be perfect. It’s just mind boggling.” Soon enough, Taylor reported to Ball that, in a blind test, his quick newfangled results rivaled Ball’s slow old-fashioned results. A quarter century later, they’re still the standard.

  These days, employees of Ball’s Packaging Services lab test fifty new products a month for corrosiveness. This is four times the work they did a decade ago, mostly on account of what Laperle called mom-and-pop shops, selling “Bob’s Energy Drink,” which was most likely created by a flavor house unfamiliar with corrosion. According to Laperle, chances are about one in seven that Bob’s Energy Drink, created this way, will fail. Major suppliers such as Coke and Pepsi, on the other hand, claim a perfect, untarnished record—“bright green/yellow battery acid” notwithstanding.

  Ball doesn’t manufacture cans by the billions until after the beverage and the coating and the interaction between the two have been examined. After the company’s engineers examine package-product interaction chemically, they double-check with their tongues. After all, you don’t want your perfectly designed container to impart any flavors on the beverage within. For these studies, there’s the flavor room. During Can School, Laperle gave a tour.

  The flavor room sits across the hall from the corrosion lab. The cabinets on one wall made it look, ostensibly, like a kitchen, but on the way in, I passed a door with a chemical hazard sign: 4s all around. Full of extremely hazardous concoctions, it was no broom closet. There was also a minifridge, with a bar tap, and forty tiny brown vials on a table. The vials contained six scents that required the full range of nasal observational powers. Each was denoted by a little colored dot on the lid. Laperle, who has a quiet, scratchy voice, instructed me to name the smells. I slid a handful of vials in front of me, and began sniffing. The first was a mystery. I recognized it, but couldn’t nail it. As I sniffed, Laperle said there was no such thing as a container that doesn’t change the flavor of the product. Cans, plastic, even glass, he said, had an effect.

  As Laperle explained the need for flavor testers, judging various PPIs, I began sniffing a second vial. It also seemed familiar, but locked away in a remote part of my scent-memory. The third was even more familiar: it turned out to be pine, but someone else said it before I figured it out.

  Neither boasting nor bored, Laperle stood in the corner. He said that to be eligible for hiring as a flavor tester, I’d have to get seven out of ten such samples right. After that, it would take eighteen months to train me. It turned out that the vials contained almond, banana, and an antiseptic that smelled like Band-Aids. I didn’t get a single one.

  Laperle said that flavor testers at Ball learn to detects parts per million, then parts per billion, and eventually, parts per trillion. He figured that if his flavor testers couldn’t taste something, nobody could. The one exception may be cats. On account of felines’ extreme organoleptic capacities, wet cat food is packaged in cans with “particularly low levels of taint.” (This, according to the book Metal Packaging: An Introduction, by an English beverage-can consultant named Bev.) Laperle, who has a dry sense of humor, later referred to this particular talent of cats as a type of idiot savantness, but I bet that if cats drank beer and their meows could be interpreted, Laperle would hire them.

  Refining nasal senses is hard, Laperle explained, because we associate smells with experiences. For a while, he said, he’d do it at home over dinner, to his wife’s annoyance. “Oh, I smell ketones, aldehydes, and fatty acids,” he said, widening his eyes. Laperle made no wild or quick gestures; he moves deliberately. He said he did it at restaurants, scribbling on napkins. He said eventually you teach yourself how to turn it on and off, to enjoy eating without getting all technical about smells.

  Laperle started working at Ball in 1980, after earning a master’s degree in microbiology from the University of Massachusetts. He started the corrosion lab that he now directs. It’s not like corrosion was calling him, though. Before graduate school, he’d worked as a cook, as a carpenter, and in a few factories, doing what he called “numerous and sundry things.” For his bachelor’s degree, he studied food science, because he thought he wasn’t smart enough to be a chemical engineer. As he stood in the corner, he seemed comfortable, amiable, like a proud father. He suggested that Ball start the lab after growing frustrated by slow-working consultants who charged millions of dollars to solve the mysteries of Ball’s field failures—leaks or explosions. The lab was born in 1983. Since then, Laperle’s learned a lot about subtle flavors, especially in beer. Laperle knows what he’s talking about; his tongue can detect one part per million of oxygen. He’s a judge at the Great American Beer Festival. I once asked him if he had any favorite beers. His favorite, he said, is the one he was currently drinking.

  Describing unappealing flavors, he said that the bad notes are always hidden on the gas chromatograph behind other bumps. He’s better than the machine. He said that beer was very susceptible to “flavor scalping” if it comes into contact with too much coating. The cost alone persuades Ball; the smell just rubs it in. Beer, Laperle explained, is actually so mild that the can does not require a coating. He called beer a “nice oxygen scavenger,” describing how proteins in beer consume dissolved oxygen, keep it from accessing and corroding the aluminum. It’s the same for orange juice, in which vitamin C consumes oxygen—which is why canners were able to package it so long ago. It turns out that cans were made for beer, and beer was made for cans. In fact, the only reason beer cans have a coating at all is so that the carbon dioxide doesn’t escape at once. The coating smooths out the surface of the metal, so that the gas has no microbumps from which to propagate, as it does on beer steins designed for that purpose. Nobody wants a can of flat beer. The coating keeps it tasty.

  And if the taste of “bright green/yellow battery acid” is particularly appealing to you, the coating tested in Laperle’s flavor room also deserves some credit.

  The name Ball probably makes you think of glass jars. Technically, they’re Mason jars, stamped with the name Ball. Your mother probably had some in the pantry.

  Ball jars go back to 1882, when the five Ball brothers—Frank, Edmund, George, Lucius, and William—started making glass jars in Buffalo, New York. For marketing purposes, they began growing their mustaches shortly thereafter. Both took off.

  Within five years, they were making more than two million glass jars a year. They relocated to Muncie, Indian
a, and with natural gas rather than coal, figured out how to quintuple production. By 1893, they had a thousand employees. In 1895 they made 22 million fruit jars. The next year, they made 31 million. The year after that, 37 million. In 1898 the brothers patented a semiautomatic glass-blowing machine, which tripled productivity. Two years later, they invented the first automatic, a.k.a. electric, glass-making machine, which meant they could crank out seven times as many jars as they had a dozen years before. They were limited only by how fast they could bring glass to the machines, and in 1905, they automated that, too, nearly doubling production. By 1910, they were producing one jar per capita. That was 90 million jars. The jars were stored outdoors, on a field, in long rows, leaning sideways. The field was so vast that migrating ducks tried to land there, mistaking the glimmering glass field for a lake.

  As business grew, so did their mustaches. Frank’s mustache was thick, and covered his whole mouth, Teddy Roosevelt style. George’s was thin, and tapered to fine points, like a French connoisseur. Lucius had handlebars, extending to his ears. Edmund had the humblest mustache, à la Pancho Villa. William had my favorite: a horseshoe connecting to the lower half of a beard, and long, straight sideburns. As they became successful, each, in his own way, revealed panache, bravado, flamboyance, and fortitude.

  Business was phenomenal. Food canning took off during the Panic of 1893, and bloomed between the Great Depression and the Second World War. It was good for the country. It seemed the brothers were making the perfect container. The jars were tapered, rounded, square, rounded square, tall, and squat. The glass was amber, aqua, clear, blue, yellow, green. The brothers built a rubber plant. They bought a zinc mill, moved it to Muncie, and expanded it until it was the largest rolling mill in the world. To ship their jars, they bought a paper mill, and then two more. They already owned a railroad company. The brothers all built mansions—William’s a Georgian, Edmund’s a Tudor, Frank’s a Victorian—on the same boulevard in Muncie. They founded Ball State University.

  By 1936, the Ball brothers had 2,500 employees and were making 144 million jars a year—more than half the country’s fruit jars. Ball displayed such phenomenal growth during its first fifty years that it wasn’t unlike Standard Oil or Carnegie Steel. In fact, that’s how Roosevelt saw it. As Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s empires had been dismantled, so too was that of the Balls’. In 1939 FDR’s administration launched an antitrust lawsuit against Ball and eleven other glass manufacturers, alleging they were monopolizing the glass-making industry. In early 1945 the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio found Ball in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the Supreme Court, a few months later, affirmed the decision, which meant the end of the Ball brothers’ expansion. The brothers’ mustaches had gotten too big.

  The ruling made modernizing glass factories pointless; Ball’s only choice was to diversify. So Ball diversified, and how. The company got involved in every age: the plastics age, the computer age, the space age. Ball made display monitors, pressure cookers, Christmas ornaments, roofing, nursing bottles, prefab housing, battery shells, and a chemical for preserving vinyl LPs. In the early 1980s, Ball made about 12 billion pennies—or rather, 12 billion copper-plated zinc penny blanks for the US mints in San Francisco, Denver, Philadelphia, and West Point. Ball cranked them out at 22,000 per minute. Having made a few thousand four-cylinder cars, and six WWI tanks, Ball built antennas on F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, and instruments that went to Mars. Ball built irrigation systems in Libya and got into petroleum processing in Singapore. Ball made engraving plates for newspapers. Ball helped fix the blurry vision of the Hubble Space Telescope. And Ball got into cans.

  By the late 1980s, Ball’s stock price was stuck around $7 per share, and over the next five years, after a small blip, it sunk lower. The company had diversified and expanded so dramatically that sales had increased, while profits had not. In 1993, things turned especially bad: flooding on Midwest vegetable farms and a poor Canadian salmon catch reduced demand for cans. The plastic market further invaded the glass market; only Snapple bucked the trend. Ball closed factories in Oklahoma and California, which meant $58 million lost in tax benefits. Then, because of delays and quality problems in the start-up of a huge new glass furnace in Louisiana, the company lost some old customers. On top of that, changes in accounting practices burdened the company with a $35 million bill. Share prices sunk lower, and earnings that year were below Wall Street estimates every quarter. By the end of the year, Ball reported a loss of $33 million. The next year, dividends dropped below four cents—half of what they’d been. It was time to consolidate and refocus. It was in that climate—annoyed that Wall Street investors refused to see Ball as anything other than jar maker—that Ball spun off its glass jars under a company named Alltrista. Its Nasdaq ticker: JARS. Ball jars are still made by Jarden Corporation, which bought Alltrista and uses the Ball name under license. Ball, in the meantime, had figured out how to crank out cans 250 times faster than it ever produced glass jars.

  If you stacked up all of the aluminum beverage cans produced in a year, the stack would be 13.5 million miles long. That’s long enough to make a tower that reaches the moon and to have enough cans leftover to make fifty-five more such towers. Of course, since an empty can is only capable of supporting 250 pounds, and each can weighs about a half ounce, you couldn’t stack up more than 7,353 cans before their own weight would crush the bottommost can, toppling the whole thing. So, practically, you’re limited to building a tower 2,757 feet tall, which is 40 feet taller than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper. With all those cans we pump out every year, you could make 20 million such towers, which means you’d have to build more than 50,000 of the highest man-made structures ever built every day just to keep up with production.

  With the cans produced at Ball’s plant in Golden, Colorado, which I visited on the second day of Can School, you could build 816 of those towers daily. Every day except Christmas and Thanksgiving, the plant spits out 6 million cans. That’s a semitruckful every twenty-two minutes. The plant—Ball’s biggest beverage can plant in North America, employing a few hundred people around the clock—is in an industrial part of town, down the road from a few auto repair shops, across from a paving company. Covering fourteen acres, the plain building sits only five miles from the center of town, where Coors (in partnership with Ball) also makes cans, making Golden the can capital of the world.

  Erich Elmer, the plant’s tall, spectacled, and scholarly assistant manager, led a small group of us on a tour. From start to finish, it only takes about an hour to make the most-engineered product in the world. Of the twenty steps involved in can making, I was most excited about the twelfth step, where machines spray the internal coatings. But because we’d be passing by many powerful machines, and because a manager once broke all of his toes when a forklift carrying a three-thousand-pound coil of aluminum ran over his foot, Elmer had us put on ear protection with built-in headsets, safety glasses, and bright green vests before going onto the factory floor.

  The plant was tritonal. All of the machines were green. All of the moving parts of the machines—the gates and presses—as well as safety marks on the floor, were yellow. The floors were a uniform, shiny gray. It was therefore easy to tell where to go and where not to; where to put your fingers and where not to. But because a line, as it’s called, is all about efficiency and speed, much transpired so quickly that it was impossible to see it.

  Elmer led us past massive coils of aluminum sheet, about the thickness of a piece of paper. The coils, almost 15 tons and a body-length wide, looked like giant rolls of toilet paper. Unrolled, some are a mile long. Dozens were stacked on the polished concrete. One coil fed into the cupping press, a 150-ton cookie-cutter machine that stamped out sixteen circles at a time and sounded like a locomotive. Not far away, a conveyer belt delivered the cups to the bodymaker, an enormous three-stage ram. Another conveyer belt, like a giant toy train, then took the cups to giant trimmers.


  At this point, most of the mechanical work forming the metal into cans was done. From the trimmers, the cups made their way to a six-stage washer, more or less a giant carwash. When the cans emerged, at 300 degrees, they were specular, meaning mirror bright. In that condition, they made their way to a printer, where ink and a clear coat were applied to the outside of each can, and to a bottom coater, where a tiny bit of Teflon-laden clear coat was slapped onto each can’s footprint, the better to protect the can while it slid along. Then the cans were ferried through an oven, where they were cured for about a minute at 400 degrees.

  At this point I began to get a headache, on account of the overwhelming noise. The noise rivaled the loudest cheering I’ve ever heard, and the headache felt like jet lag. The combination was overpowering. Even with a headset, I couldn’t understand half of what Elmer was saying. Meanwhile, millions of cans zipped along on conveyer belts at such speed that the motion was impossible to detect.