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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.
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.
I would say you can round it off to between 0-1%
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.
Why not just say "four to six times stronger" while assuming the same thickness?
Maybe it's strength doesn't scale linearly with thickness, and thus it wouldn't be a true statement?
That's the reporters' interpretation. I'm guessing the original statement from the scientists was more like "The glass is two to three times stronger, so we can make it half as thick." I would be surprised if the scientists said "it's 4-6 times stronger at the same thickness" and the reporter did the math to get to 2-3 times stronger at half the thickness.
Since when do they care about waiting for patents to expire?
I am surprised, though, that corning never managed to sell any serious quantity as a structural material. Glass-coated skyscrapers have been considered quite stylish for decades, and I'd imagine that "resists birdstrike, rocks, wind forces, and idiots leaning against the windows just as well as ordinary glass, at 20% the weight" would be a selling point.
Not to mention, if this had been around back in '86 Scotty could've used sheets of this to build the tank for those humpback whales; instead he had to reveal the formula for transparent aluminum in exchange for sheets of heavy, 6"-thick plexiglass!
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?
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