My dad worked as an engineer at Corning in the 80s and 90s. In addition to their general glass expertise (the museum is really incredible and I highly recommend it) Corning’s importance in the early days of the internet is pretty amazing and I think not as well known. They basically built all the earliest fiber optics cabling for communication networks. We lived in the town of Corning and had a fiber internet connection in our house that my dad was testing back then. They are a super cool company and I will always appreciate them as an example of one that does one thing, really well (glass) but managed to grow by finding more and more uses for their speciality.
> Corning’s importance in the early days of the internet is pretty amazing and I think not very well known
After the fiber optics, they repeated the performance with the Gorilla Glass. See, we don’t understand it anymore today but having glass screens on “smartphones” was a revolution - we didn’t do touchscreens earlier because screens were plastic, like in the Palm Pilot; they were plastic because people pushed insensitively, people did that because the touch wasn’t sensitive at all (cursor would always land at the wrong place, or not be sensed at all).
What Corning built for Apple was a glass screen, almost unbreakable, and thin enough to have an amazing touch resolution.
Having broken many smartphone screens, I have to disagree with the characterization of "almost unbreakable." Sure, the screens are tougher than, say, house glass but that doesn't make it unbreakable. The number of screen repair stores at the mall pretty much testify to the accuracy of this phrase.
In earlier smartphones fractured screens were indeed very rare, because the glass did not reach so close to the edges of the phone, i.e. to the impact zones.
My "Razr i" took a hell of a beating. The iPhone 3 was also quite robust. Galaxy S4, iPhone 4 were probably the turning point in terms of robustness vs aesthetics.
Yeah, I felt that earlier phones had more flex in the shell vs innards, which absorbed the impact; my Galaxy S2 and S5 were also famous for scattering parts all over the floor upon impact (case, battery, etc:), which was hilarious but I also felt (perhaps wrongly) it helped dissipate the energy of the impact. They also tended to have a very very tiny "lip" where the shell of the case would touch surface rather than screen if you put them upside down.
Before the era launched by Gorilla Glass, phones weren’t even made out of glass. So, yes, I broke several phones (Android, never iPhone despite having been less careful about those), but it’s still better glass than before.
Corning and Apple should have a glass screen on iDevices users can replace as easy as operating a laminating machine, fax machine or photocopier. They pop the iDevice in that and 60 seconds later the screen is new again.
I recall visiting the museum many years ago and seeing a demo where they heated a glass rod and pulled a fiber. This was probably when fiber optics was in its infancy. It was definitely a highlight for a young science nerd. I would love to go back some day.
Along those lines I highly recommend the episode of the show “How we Got to Now” about glass [0]. It tells the story of how clear glass was developed, something I always took for granted, but early glass was not clear and took a major effort to create. The show then goes into how Corning took it to a new level for fiber optics. The whole series is excellent and similar to James Burke’s excellent series “Connections”. [1]
I did some consulting for Corning back in the late 2000s and took an afternoon to visit the museum. I can't recommend it enough.
Corning is an exceptional company and so much of our technology, from fiber-optics to monitors and screens to Gorilla Glass, is thanks to the brilliant minds at work there.
I had a great time a while back visiting the museum with a friend who works for Corning, trying my hand at glass blowing for a couple hours, and then wandering around some of the cool places in the Corning buildings, before going to have some drinks at the appropriately named "Glory Hole" pub on Market Street, but I think that one is long gone now.
