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]

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.

Maybe the manufacturing process grows exponentially beyond a certain, very small, size; making it only useful for the tiniest of skyscrapers, where highly paid squirrels take important decisions from their very high offices with Central Park views.

There are not as many of such clients as you might think.

Re:60 years?

[natehoy]

Obviously they did find a market for it, albeit a small one, since there's a plant in Kentucky that manufactures it. I think the point is that the market for it is about to expand significantly.

Why didn't cell phone makers use it before? Simple - regular chemically-enhanced soda-lime glass is cheaper, and manufacturers used bezels to protect the edges, so it worked fine. The cost of LCDs was already high, so I doubt manufacturers felt much need to add sexy by dropping the bezel, given that many people were impressed enough with the concept of it being flat and lightweight compared to their CRT. And the cell market has, until recently, been mostly comprised of low-end feature phones that cell carriers can give away for free. Now people tend to want smart phones, and they have to look good, and they'll drop hundreds of dollars AND commit to a 3-year contract to get the latest shiny. So a few extra bucks to make 'em a little shinier will move more units, more quickly.

Now everyone wants to go exposed-edge because bezels are apparently now the work of the devil (his other name is Bezelbub, dont'cha know), I heard it from Pope Steve so it must be true! So it's worth spending the extra on Gorilla Glass so they don't have users complaining that their cell phones shatter when gripped and cause shards of glass to fly out of the remains of the screen and slice their jugulars wide open, which might interrupt their call when the conductive blood touches the antenna. If you think sweaty hands are bad, wait until you see the signal drop from blood-covered hands.

Why can't more companies be like Corning?

[mlts]

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.

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?

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

[arth1]

But if this technology is now 60 years old, one would assume it is out of patent. How long before (if not already) every manufacturer is capable of making it? If it becomes profitable, then Pyrex and Co will be shipping it out at lower cost than Corning.

Er, Pyrex is a Corning brand...

Re:Ha! So apple DOES use it

[Ogive17]

They definitely didn't use it for the iPod nanos!

wait... what?

[bsDaemon]

since when is 1962 in the 50s? rounding error?

Re:It's cool, isn't it?

[Ice Tiger]

I don't know what's more amazing, the glass or the fact a modern company invests 10% of its revenue into R&D with the patience to wait tens of years until their is a market and then quickly capitalises on that.

Might have to buy some stock!

That is a myth from poor observation

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Christian Science Monitor

[Grishnakh]

CSM is really weird. It's actually a very good source of journalism, but it comes from a religion that basically ignores modern medicine and believes in healing through prayer alone.