Back in the days before anyone had heard of a tech startup, a handful of brainy scientists and engineers at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1956 unassumingly started the company that would become Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
R.C. “Merc” Mercure Jr., who grew up in Loveland and got his Ph.D. in physics from CU-Boulder, was one of the early employees of what was then called Ball Brothers Research.
“It was great, great, great, great fun,” said Mercure, now 75 and co-founder and chief executive of CDM Optics Inc. in Boulder. “The word today is passion – that’s probably a good way to describe all of us that were involved at the time.”
“Nobody had done these things before,” Mercure said. “Aerospace was very, very new.”
Boulder-based Ball Aerospace, a subsidiary of Broomfield-based Ball Corp., now has 3,000 employees and posted $694.8 million in sales in 2005, making everything from antennas to spacecraft.
It was a defective electronic scale that led to the creation of the company called Ball Brothers Research Corp. 50 years ago.
Ball was making glass jars and other products, but after World War II, “our economy, I guess, was still trying to come out of a wartime economy to a peacetime economy and the glass business had just not been doing very well,” said Don Hicks, who also was one of the early employees of Ball Brothers Research and now lives in Granby.
Ball was looking for new technology and acquired a small Boulder company called Control Cells Inc., which was working on an electronic weighing device. Ball turned to a group at CU-Boulder to evaluate the device, who found it didn’t work.
The group at the CU laboratory was already working on a pointing control for the Aerobee-Hi rocket. CU wanted to get out of that business. Ball Brothers Co. became interested in the pointing control – so the company decided to take over the CU group and create the Ball Brothers Research Corp.
That era was “the discovery of the space age, you might say,” said 79-year-old Otto Edwin “Pete” Bartoe, who was one of the first employees. “All of us involved there in the early years were just interested in the technical challenge of what we were doing. Nobody paid a lot of heed to rules or politics.”
At one point, the company rented out a grocery store for extra space for people to work.
“There wasn’t a lot known about flying in space, so we had to do a lot of experimentation in the labs,” Hicks said. “There wasn’t a lot of negative knowledge floating around management saying, ‘No, you can’t do it that way because. …”‘
Hicks also remembers the thrill of space work.
“To have something that you built launched on a spacecraft is a very emotional thing,” he said. “I’m not a very emotional guy, but there’s something of you that leaves this planet when that happens and it’s just exciting.”
They worked long hours, and sometimes came into the office on weekends and, once in a while, worked through the night.
“I can remember at least three occasions when the next thing you know, the sun was up and the birds were chirping,” Hicks said. “It was that kind of environment. It was wonderful.”
Staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi can be reached at 303-954-1488 or kyamanouchi@denverpost.com.
