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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.
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.
("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.
How has nobody commented on the transparent-aluminum-like properties of this so-called "glass"?
--Edward Dassmesser
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 is 1962 in the 50s? rounding error?
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?
Damn it I need precise measurements!
It's less than 272,000 beard seconds thick.
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.
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.
That age-old technology known as "trade secrets", which protected artisans for thousands of years before IP came into existence.
Of course, there is a downside: it means no one but Corning knows the process for creating this stuff, and so no one can improve upon it, apply the same techniques to related fields, etc.
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
Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We":
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
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