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60-Year-Old Glass Technology Finds Its Market
In the 1950s, Corning developed a glass product for which it has been trying to find a market ever since. What is now being called "Gorilla Glass" is currently worth $170M/yr. and is poised to quadruple (potentially) in the next year or two. Gorilla Glass is used on many smartphones including Motorola's Droid. ("Whether Apple Inc. uses the glass in its iPod is a much-discussed mystery since 'not all our customers allow us to say,' said [the] general manager of Corning's specialty materials division.") "Because Gorilla is very hard to break, dent or scratch, Corning is betting it will be the glass of choice as TV-set manufacturers dispense with protective rims or bezels for their sets, in search of an elegant look. Gorilla is two to three times stronger than chemically strengthened versions of ordinary soda-lime glass, even when just half as thick, company scientists say. Its strength also means Gorilla can be thinner than a dime, saving on weight and shipping costs. Corning is in talks with Asian manufacturers to bring Gorilla to the TV market in early 2011..." The Christian Science Monitor elaborates on the theme of job growth outside the US, as Corning plans to invest several hundred million dollars to retrofit an LCD plant in Shizuoka, Japan to manufacture the glass. The company will also expand the workforce in the Kentucky plant that now manufactures Gorilla Glass.
What percentage of a library of congress is this? Damn it I need precise measurements!
Yeah dance Balmer
Gorilla glass for devices that cause gorilla arm syndrome. There must be a sarcastic tag somewhere in there.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I love the general manager's remark regarding some other invention: "We're not sure what we're going to do with it, but it's cool, isn't it?" This clearly shows that people in there truly enjoy their work :D And it also seems, they can at some point turn the coolness factor into profit.
you would think that there would be plenty of applications for a super strong thin glass. i'm guessing it's prohibitively expensive to use compared to other products. either that or corning needs a better marketing team.
the picture of the guy bending a small sheet in the article link is pretty cool.
It is rare these days to see companies devote 10% of their budget to R&D. Most tend to just not bother with R&D because it doesn't give ROI this quarter, and when they do, they gain the technology by buying a startup, or just copying someone else's work and improving on it.
60 year old glass? Most enterprises can't even think past the next couple quarters or to the next FY, much less this far. Almost any other company would have long since chucked the manufacturing process for it because it wasn't immediately profitable.
Now when they ship it poorly the corners of my TV will shatter?
Why not just say "four to six times stronger" while assuming the same thickness?... This information is considerably more apparent and easier to assimilate that way.
I like the "we know how to make this, we have the technology and expertise, and we're going to build a plant so that we can sell it to our customers" approach.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
("Whether Apple Inc. uses the glass in its iPod is a much-discussed mystery since 'not all our customers allow us to say,' said [the] general manager of Corning's specialty materials division.")
Does Apple use the glass? I can't tell you. Because when they started using it they told us we couldn't tell anyone.
muahahah
Why stick up for big business?
It is rare these days to see companies devote 10% of their budget to R&D. Most tend to just not bother with R&D because it doesn't give ROI this quarter, and when they do, they gain the technology by buying a startup, or just copying someone else's work and improving on it.
Isn't that an argument for patents, though? I mean, you're saying that R&D isn't profitable in the eyes of most companies and why is that? I mean, we complain about patents but then if you look at the amount of innovation going on in countries where intellectual property is not enforced it seems to be fractions of what goes on in countries that enforce IP law. I'm not arguing for this but your complaint that not enough companies dump 10% into R&D seems, in my mind, to be heavily linked to the lack of reward. I thought patents and licensing those patents were supposed to be that reward or recoup mechanism.
60 year old glass? Most enterprises can't even think past the next couple quarters or to the next FY, much less this far. Almost any other company would have long since chucked the manufacturing process for it because it wasn't immediately profitable.
Well, from the article, it sounds as though they had pretty much shelved it and "In 2006, when demand surfaced for a cell phone cover glass, Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla." Again, if you think about it, a patent is good for only ~20 years? So maybe when they 'tweaked' it they did that so they also could repatent it? They have a lot of patents related to glass composition.
Can their competitors just fire up a plant right now and start making Chemcor? You bet. Gorilla is probably repatented though to protect them from that and that illustrates why you don't see a whole lot of companies taking the Corning path.
My work here is dung.
and the guys making stuff with your IP use their profits to create the next wave of IP. so they don't need your IP anymore, they don't need your management, they don't need your technical knowhow. in fact, you have no factories or factory workers left, so you really don't have any more technical knowhow, you've outsourced absolutely everything
so instead, you, or your kids, are waiting tables at the cowboy theme restaurant for the asian tourists
and some people wonder what the problem with unregulated capitalism is, and why there is any need for pesky "socialist" government policies, like investing in education
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
60 year old glass? Most enterprises can't even think past the next couple quarters or to the next FY, much less this far. Almost any other company would have long since chucked the manufacturing process for it because it wasn't immediately profitable.
Alos Ground-breaking achievments sometimes are from misguided R&D, like post-it, or many medicines that were created poisonous bacteria and plantae.
How has nobody commented on the transparent-aluminum-like properties of this so-called "glass"?
--Edward Dassmesser
If it was invented in 1962 the patents will have expired. What's to stop the Chinese just making their own "PandaGlass" or whatever?
since when is 1962 in the 50s? rounding error?
of course all you nerds wouldn't have heard of this http://www.getgorilla.com/ it's just (usually) coloured pyrex glass for body piercing jewellery, mostly earlobes.
They stopped making the original Corning glass/ceramics because people wouldn't buy new often enough. Buy it once and keep it forever. So they released a new and more fragile product. Will this be the same story?
Come on guys.... where are all the transparent aluminum jokes?
apple obviously uses it, because they say "we created this glass specificly...blah blah..." meaning, they bought up the rights or are having someone manufacture something thats been around a while, and if corning wont say, that means apple probably has a deal
By my calculations, 1962 happened about 48 years ago, but I could be wrong.
What is this supposed to mean? If I have a piece of it, it's worth $170M per year? What, does money grow on it, or do I have to rent it to someone, huh?
...yet I still managed to crack the screen on my droid.
The article says it was invented in 1962. Surely the patent has expired by now?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/151786.pdf
Quite a few spend more, quite a few spend less. The average is ~5%. Given the ambiguous return it's not altogether surprising some skimp.
46 & 2
That bit is bullshit and should be removed - here's where the misconception comes from:
Lead pipe organ pipes flow over time and get thicker at the bottom, the reason being the weight providing stress and the temperature being close enough to the melting point that the stuff can flow - just like hot glass bends only a lot slower. It's called creep and it only really happens in simple pure materials when you are at least 2/3 of the way to the melting point of the material from absolute zero. Mix other stuff in and that pushes it to higher temperatures.
People heard about the lead pipes without understanding, saw that old windows were thicker and the bottom and thought that the glass must flow as well. The real answer is that until modern times it was very hard to make flat glass and that it was a common glaziers practice to put the thicker and stronger side of the glass at the bottom.
The melting point of glass is too high for there to be much movement over a mere thousand years at room temperature let alone two hundred years.
Slashdot, when you said "turn off ads," I didn't think you were prankin' me...
Maybe it's just their name, but anytime I see the "Christian Science Monitor" publish anything relating to science, I have to find a second source to verify they're not making it up.
Of refraction, that is. Wow did we have fun measuring the purities and indices of everything Corning and all-of-Germany could produce. And any optic material, from anywhere. In the '80's our materials science moved off-shore. What do we make now?
Must add: Don't trust any measurement in vacuo unless through diamond windows. Bought two 1cm x 2mm (D x t) and could barely melt them, except with that pulsed ruby. Sapphire is next best, but lacks extended IR.
Watch for brittleness.
Strong thin glass is nice. But so is anti-reflective glass. Apparently, some CRTs are better in this way than almost all LCDs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube#Superior_Anti-Glare_coatings
You'd honestly think there'd be more of a market for antiglare coats.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Get rid of the income tax, and make unions take LESS, along with CEO's taking LESS. When a CEO makes hundreds of times the "average" wage, and unions make hundreds of times the average wage, and then you have the punishing effects of EPA regulations, government taxes, why anyone would want to do business in America is beyond me. The only way to bring manufacturing & capital back to America is to get rid of the income tax! http://www.fairtax.org/
Just how is this "gorilla glass" any different from somewhat common borosilicate glass (Pyrex and other TMs)?
Borosilicate is very nice stuff. Is "gorilla glass" just another tradename?
Wait a fucking minute here... so they have had technology to keep glass from breaking - windows, drinking glasses, eye glasses for 48 years and are just NOW deciding it would be a good thing?
Great line from the article...
"In his office lobby, Steiner showed off a 400-foot-long spool of flexible, 16-inch-wide glass that's as thin as a sheet of paper.
"Kind of like Chemcor was back in the '60s," he said. "We're not sure what we're going to do with it, but it's cool, isn't it?"
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
How has nobody commented on the transparent-aluminum-like properties of this so-called "glass"?
Because Corning is not located in the SF Bay are, and there are no nuclear wessels near any of its plants or R&D facilities.
...but will it blend?
So basically they have a product. It's 60 years old so the patents have long since expired. The minute you move it to Asia you invite cut rate knock-offs. The only thing going for them is Japan is a bit more civilized. Cost of living is pretty high. So much that KY is likely cheaper wages.
The Christian Science Monitor elaborates on the theme of job growth outside the US, as Corning plans to invest several hundred million dollars to retrofit an LCD plant in Shizuoka, Japan to manufacture the glass. The company will also expand the workforce in the Kentucky plant that now manufactures Gorilla Glass.
Outsourcing to first world, industrialized countries should never be confused with outsourcing to third world countries. The former has many benefits, including socially, commercially, and politically. The later serves only to drive down labor rates while destroying collective knowledge.
Outsourcing to Japan, second only to outsourcing to your own country. Outsourcing to India, bad. They are not comparable in the least.
There must be a ton of awesome markets for this product, though I'm not to hot with thinking up clever new innovations . Just think of the potential in the gaming industry, combined with 3D or something mad like that. And there must be some artistic potential. Would love to buy some of this stuff, even off DubLi, just to see for myself how it feels and works. And why did they wait 60 years on this?!
On the basis that I've seen an iPhone 4 get dropped onto a kitchen tile from a height of about 3ft and the back glass shatter like a spiders web, I'd have to say no, they don't use it.
Either that or they do and it isn't as great as everyone makes it out to be.
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There are several tougher variations on glass. Borosilicate glass (once called "Pyrex", but the name has been sold and "Pyrex" today is not necessarily borosilicate) is tough and very tolerant of temperature stresses. There are various laminates of plastics and glass. A common combination is a thin layer of glass, for scratch resistance, on top of polycarbonate. That won't shatter; it dents or punctures if hit hard enough.
Cell phones should be using sapphire coated glass. Then you can put the thing in your pocket without a cover and not worry about it being scratched. The scanner glass at supermarkets is often sapphire coated, so it can handle years of canned goods being dragged across the scanner. Versace has shipped a "luxury cell phone" with this feature.
There's also a diamond-coated glass for that application. Diamond coating is much cheaper than sapphire, but not quite as scratch-resistant.
Gorilla is two to three times stronger than chemically strengthened versions of ordinary soda-lime glass, even when just half as thick, company scientists say.
So to put that in simpler terms, Gorilla glass is 4 to 6 times stronger than regular glass, at any given thickness.
Why didn't they just say that in the first place?
coding is life
when it finally does break, the blast radius and the radioctivity are quite impressive.
If there isn't already the will be soon a Chinese manufactured version of this glass. It may not be quite as good but it will be significantly cheaper. This is the case with most of these patented proprietary materials.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Why didn't they try advertising this before now? Put it into a suitcase, then toss that into a gorilla compound. Let them toss it around for a while, and play it as an advertisement about the toughness of your glass. Unless they only see the suitcase.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
compared to normal glass.
Seeing videos of it bending and all.
Won't that mean it's actually fairly "soft" ?
Strong and elastic it is, but don't think that will help against scratches though.
Nokia spent 14.8% of its last quarter revenue on R&D, and we've still not recovered from the recession.
Wish my $1300 Sony Bravia had a layer of this glass when my 4 year old bowled a wicked strike in WiiSports without the wrist strap on.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We":
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Of course it has. So if you want to make your own Gorilla Glass, you'll have to contact Corning and ask them to give you the formula for it and instructions on how to make it. Somehow I don't think you'll be hearing back from them.
From a brief nosing round the web, it looks like this is an alkali-aluminosilicate glass (whereas normal glass is soda lime glass, and Pyrex is borosilicate). It not tremendously stronger than normal glass before it's chemically treated to strengthen it.
The main trick other than the hardening (That I found. Obviously Corning wouldn't reveal all of it. I just found general info, not detailed info you'd need to duplicate it.) is that it's overflowed from a small trouch while in liquid form, and the two streams from either side of the trough fuse underneath which gives it a very smooth starting finish. They mention it's not usually neccesary to lap or polish it for its final finish.
I'm guessing that it's mostly worked into shape before the chemical treatment is done, as that would simplify the working.
The chemical treatment looks to effectively be a chemically mediated prestressing, by leeching out the existing sodium near the surface in the glass, and replacing it with potassium ions which are larger. This puts the surface into a stressed condition. This would also indicate that the strength would not stay linear with increasing thickness, as replacing the ions would be harder the farther they had to diffuse into the glass.
Further, it looks like a pretty expensive process as it involves soaking the finished glass in molten potassium salts at several hundred degrees for some period of time.
Offtopic; but to avoid the jarring "tens of" qualifier, try "dozens of". Generally you don't use "tens of" to describe anything less than 24 in quantity, so it almost always works, without sounding clunky. HTH!
(On-topic) After 40 years, shouldn't any patents have expired (it seems peculiar for them to have continued renewing the patent something they couldn't sell)? The only other alternative I can see is that it's a trade secret - but the article describes the manufacturing process for a similar product, so if there's any money in this, any competitors should be able to (legally and practically) reverse-engineer it.
Is this Gorilla Glass the same class of material as those cookingware made by corning that could be preserved under hash condition for tens of thousands of year?
"An ultra-strong glass that has been looking for a purpose since its invention in 1962"
2010-1962=48, !60
"Corning set out in the late 1950s to find a glass as strong as steel."
2010-1958=52, !60
"Then in 1964, Corning devised an ingenious method called "fusion draw" to make super-thin, unvaryingly flat glass."
2010-1964=46, !60
-- Boycott Shell
2010 - 1962 = 48. Why is it 60 years?
That is called a Trade Secret. Just like the formula for Coke is not patented, rather it is a closely-kept trade secret. Trade secrets may be kept for as long as the secret can be kept. This has nothing to do with patents.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.