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.

Comments

60 years?

[SpinningCone]

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.

Re:60 years?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not at all surprised that it hasn't show up in consumer electronics until quite recently, since LCDs were cost prohibitive until pretty recently, and touchscreens were not that big a deal(you can find examples going back at least to the 70's; but they weren't exactly mass-market items). Thin glass would have been counterproductive for CRTs, since, when your product basically involves pointing a small linear accelerator at the user's face, you want an adequate amount of leaded glass between it and them.

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.

Re:60 years?

[Thanshin]

To avoid possible whooshings... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Behavior_of_antique_glass

Phrasing

[dimethylxanthine]

Gorilla is two to three times stronger than chemically strengthened versions of ordinary soda-lime glass, even when just half as thick

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.

Re:Why can't more companies be like Corning?

[Midnight's Shadow]

Very true. It is good to see a company that plans for the long term and I applaud their R&D spending and holding onto something because it might be useful in the future. However I have to ask, if this process and glass is 60 years old shouldn't the patent have run out quite a while ago? Shouldn't we have been seeing this before now in uses that Corning couldn't think of?

Sounds Like an Argument for Patents

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:Sounds Like an Argument for Patents

[$RANDOMLUSER]

If it's been around for 60 years, any patents on it would have expired long ago, unless they've been keeping it "trade secret" all this time; and, given the amount of information in TFA, that doesn't seem likely. Personally, I'm wondering why other companies aren't competing on this (yet).

The new or old Corning glass?

[Marriedman]

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?

What would Zamyatin think?

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We":

We is set in the future. D-503 lives in the One State,[3] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which allows the secret police/spies to inform on and supervise the public more easily. The structure of the state is analogous to the prison design concept developed by Jeremy Bentham commonly referred to as the Panopticon.