Corning Inc.

Based on Wikipedia: Corning Inc.

The Company That Taught the World to See

In 2007, Steve Jobs had a problem. Apple was about to release the iPhone, a device that would change how humanity communicates, but the plastic screen they planned to use scratched too easily. Jobs called Wendell Weeks, the chief executive of a glass company most people had never heard of, and asked for the impossible: a glass thin enough to fit in a pocket, strong enough to survive being dropped, and scratch-resistant enough to handle keys and coins. Oh, and he needed it in six months.

Weeks told Jobs that Corning had developed exactly this kind of glass in the 1960s. They had called it Chemcor. It had been a commercial failure.

Jobs didn't care about past failures. He wanted the glass. Weeks explained that Corning had shut down the Chemcor project decades ago. They didn't even make the stuff anymore. "Get your mind around it," Jobs replied. "You can do it."

Six months later, the first iPhone shipped with Corning's glass. Today, more than eight billion devices worldwide use what Corning rebranded as Gorilla Glass. That single phone call transformed a 156-year-old company from a supplier of fiber optic cable into the invisible backbone of the smartphone revolution.

A Glass Company from the Age of Whale Oil

Corning's story begins in 1851, the same year Herman Melville published Moby-Dick and the Great Exhibition opened in London's Crystal Palace. Amory Houghton founded the Bay State Glass Company in Somerville, Massachusetts, when the primary use for glass was oil lamps and windows. Electric light was still a dream. The telephone hadn't been invented. The very concept of a "technology company" didn't exist.

The company bounced around—first to Brooklyn, where it operated as the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works, then finally in 1868 to a small town in upstate New York's Southern Tier region. The town was called Corning, named for a railroad financier, and the company took the town's name as its own.

Here's what makes Corning unusual: it never left. While nearly every other major American corporation has relocated its headquarters to a major metropolitan area—chasing talent pools, prestige, and proximity to customers—Corning stayed put in a town of about 11,000 people. The company has assured community leaders repeatedly that it intends to remain headquartered there permanently.

This isn't sentimentality. Corning's research and development facilities sprawl across the hillsides surrounding the town. Moving the company would mean abandoning specialized furnaces, one-of-a-kind testing equipment, and a workforce with generations of glassmaking expertise. The knowledge of how to work with molten glass at temperatures exceeding two thousand degrees Fahrenheit doesn't transfer easily to a spreadsheet.

What Industrial Research Actually Means

In 1908, Corning established one of the first industrial research laboratories in America. This sounds unremarkable today, when every major corporation has a research and development budget, but at the turn of the twentieth century, the idea was radical.

The prevailing business wisdom held that basic research was the province of universities. Companies existed to manufacture and sell things, not to discover new knowledge. Why would a business pay scientists to experiment with materials that might never become products?

Corning's answer was that glass itself was poorly understood. Glassmaking had been practiced for millennia, but the underlying chemistry remained mysterious. If you wanted to make better glass—lighter, stronger, more heat-resistant, more optically pure—you needed to understand what glass actually was at the molecular level.

This investment in basic research produced Corning's first blockbuster product: Pyrex.

The Glass That Changed Kitchens

In 1915, Corning introduced an improved heat-resistant glass formula and launched it as a consumer product. The brand name was Pyrex, and it solved a problem that plagued every home cook: thermal shock.

Ordinary glass shatters when exposed to rapid temperature changes. Take a cold glass dish and put it directly on a hot stove, and the uneven expansion of the glass creates stress that fractures it. The shards spray everywhere. Before Pyrex, glass cookware was impractical and dangerous.

Pyrex used borosilicate glass, a formulation that incorporates boron oxide alongside the silicon dioxide that forms ordinary glass. The boron changes the crystal structure in ways that dramatically reduce thermal expansion. A Pyrex dish can go from freezer to oven without cracking.

The product became so ubiquitous that the name became generic—people still call heat-resistant glass bakeware "Pyrex" regardless of who manufactured it. But here's the twist: Corning no longer makes Pyrex. In 1998, the company spun off its entire consumer products division, including Pyrex, CorningWare ceramic cookware, and Corelle dinnerware. The subsidiary eventually became Corelle Brands and has since changed hands multiple times.

Corning decided that consumer products weren't its future. It had bigger glass to make.

The Largest Piece of Glass Ever Made

In 1932, the astronomer George Ellery Hale approached Corning with an audacious challenge. Hale wanted to build the world's largest telescope at Palomar Mountain in California. The primary mirror needed to be two hundred inches in diameter—that's more than sixteen feet across—and it had to be made from a single piece of glass.

Nothing like this had ever been attempted. A previous effort to fabricate the mirror from fused quartz had failed entirely. Corning agreed to try using low-expansion borosilicate glass, a material similar to what they used for Pyrex but formulated for even greater stability.

Their first attempt failed. The cast blank had voids—bubbles and gaps where the molten glass hadn't flowed properly. This was not a minor setback. Casting a mirror this size meant heating tons of glass to its melting point, pouring it into a specially designed mold, and then cooling it so slowly that the process took months. Every attempt consumed enormous resources.

The second attempt, cast between 1934 and 1936, succeeded. The blank then spent a full year cooling. During that year, a flood nearly destroyed it. When the cooling was complete in 1935, Corning had produced the largest piece of glass ever cast.

The blank then traveled by train from New York to California—a journey made at thirty-five miles per hour to prevent vibration damage—where it was ground and polished into the primary mirror of the Hale Telescope. That telescope, completed in 1948, remained the world's largest effective telescope for decades and is still in use today.

The failed first blank now resides in the Corning Museum of Glass, a reminder that breakthrough innovation usually requires accepting expensive failures along the way.

The Windshield That Time Forgot

Corning's biggest commercial failure taught the company its most valuable lesson.

In 1962, the company developed Chemcor, a chemically strengthened glass designed for automobile windshields. The technology was genuinely superior to existing products. Traditional laminated windshields—two layers of glass with a plastic interlayer—could hold together during impact but often caused injuries from large glass fragments. Chemcor shattered into small granules, like modern safety glass, but it was thinner, lighter, and stronger.

The manufacturing process was complex. Corning built special furnaces at a facility in Christiansburg, Virginia. The glass underwent an ion exchange process—atoms of potassium replace atoms of sodium in the surface layer, and because potassium atoms are larger, this creates compression that dramatically increases strength.

Chemcor debuted as factory-installed side glass on a limited run of 1968 Plymouth Barracudas and Dodge Darts, then appeared on the windshields of 1970 Javelins and AMXs from American Motors Corporation. The technology worked exactly as designed.

But there were no mandatory safety standards for windshields at the time. The major automakers—General Motors, Ford, Chrysler—had no financial incentive to adopt a more expensive product when their existing windshields met regulations. Corning terminated the project in 1971, absorbing what the company later described as one of its "biggest and most expensive failures."

That failure sat dormant for thirty-five years. Then Steve Jobs called.

The Phone in Your Pocket

The ion exchange process Corning developed for Chemcor turned out to be perfect for smartphone screens. The same properties that would have made excellent windshields—extreme scratch resistance, high strength, and the ability to be made very thin—were exactly what touchscreen devices needed.

Corning resurrected the technology, reformulated it for the specific requirements of consumer electronics, and branded it Gorilla Glass. The first iPhone in 2007 used it. Within a few years, virtually every major smartphone manufacturer had adopted it.

This pattern—developing a technology for one application, failing commercially, then repurposing it decades later for an entirely different use—has repeated throughout Corning's history. The company's research laboratory generates innovations that may not find markets until long after the original scientists have retired.

Apple has invested heavily in Corning's continued glass innovation. In 2017, Apple contributed two hundred million dollars to Corning's manufacturing capabilities. In 2019, Apple added another two hundred fifty million. The iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad all depend on Corning's glass, and Apple apparently wants to ensure that supply remains secure.

The Invisible Infrastructure of the Internet

While Gorilla Glass gets the headlines, Corning's other major business is even more consequential: fiber optics.

In late 1970, Corning researchers Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, Peter Schultz, and Frank Zimar achieved something that had been theoretically predicted but never practically demonstrated. They created an optical fiber with low enough attenuation—signal loss over distance—to make fiber optic communication practical.

Light naturally scatters and absorbs as it travels through any material. Earlier optical fibers lost so much light over short distances that they couldn't compete with copper wire for telecommunications. The Corning team, by doping silica glass with titanium, reduced attenuation to seventeen decibels per kilometer. A few years later, using germanium oxide instead, they got it down to four decibels per kilometer.

To put this in perspective: those numbers meant that light signals could travel tens of kilometers through the fiber before needing amplification. Copper wire required repeaters every few kilometers. Fiber could also carry vastly more information than copper—not a little more, but thousands of times more.

Corning became the world's leading manufacturer of optical fiber. The internet backbone that connects continents runs largely through Corning glass. Every time you stream video, make a video call, or download a file, the data almost certainly passes through fiber that Corning manufactured.

The Dot-Com Crash

In the late 1990s, during the dot-com boom, telecommunications companies couldn't install fiber fast enough. Corning expanded aggressively, acquiring telecommunications company Oak Industries, building new plants, and investing heavily in photonics—the technology of using light for computing and communication.

Then the bubble burst. In 2000, the demand for fiber collapsed. Telecommunications companies that had been laying cable frantically suddenly had no need for more capacity. Some went bankrupt. Corning's stock, which had soared during the boom, plummeted to one dollar per share.

The company nearly didn't survive. But by 2007, it had posted five consecutive years of improving financial performance. The recovery had a name: Gorilla Glass.

The smartphone revolution created demand for Corning's specialty glass that dwarfed anything fiber optics had produced. A company that had bet everything on communications infrastructure found salvation in the devices people carried in their pockets.

What Glass Actually Is

Understanding Corning requires understanding something non-obvious about glass itself.

Glass is not a solid in the conventional sense. At the molecular level, solids have organized crystal structures—atoms arranged in repeating patterns. Glass has no such structure. Its atoms are arranged chaotically, like a liquid, but frozen in place. Physicists call this an amorphous solid.

This unusual structure explains many of glass's properties. It's transparent because light passes through without scattering off crystal boundaries. It's brittle because there's no organized structure to absorb and distribute stress. It's infinitely customizable because you can change its properties by adding different elements without worrying about disrupting a crystal lattice.

Corning's expertise lies in understanding exactly how different additives change glass behavior. Add boron and you get thermal stability. Sodium makes glass easier to work with but weaker. Aluminum increases durability. The combinations are nearly endless, and the interactions between elements are complex enough that even with modern computational chemistry, extensive experimentation remains necessary.

Beyond Glass

Corning today calls itself a technology company specializing in glass, ceramics, and related materials. The ceramic part matters.

The company is a major manufacturer of ceramic substrates for catalytic converters—the emission control devices in gasoline vehicles. When exhaust gases pass through a catalytic converter, they flow through a honeycomb structure made of ceramic material. The ceramic provides surface area for the chemical reactions that convert toxic emissions into less harmful gases.

Corning also produces ceramic filters for diesel engines, which face increasingly strict emission standards worldwide. As governments tighten regulations on particulate emissions, demand for sophisticated filtration systems grows.

Through its Life Sciences division, Corning supplies specialized glassware and plastic products to research laboratories worldwide. If you've seen photographs of scientists pipetting liquids in a lab, the plastic plates they're working with may well have come from Corning.

The Houghton Dynasty

One more unusual aspect of Corning: although the company has been publicly traded for generations, descendants of the founder maintained significant involvement well into the twenty-first century.

James R. Houghton, great-great-grandson of Amory Houghton, served as chairman of the board of directors from 2001 to 2007—spanning the company's near-death experience after the dot-com crash and its resurrection through Gorilla Glass. Over the years, family ownership has declined to about two percent, but the Houghtons shaped the company's culture of long-term thinking and commitment to basic research.

That culture may explain why Corning kept the Chemcor technology alive internally for thirty-five years after its commercial failure. A company managed for quarterly earnings would have written off those furnaces and fired those researchers. Corning kept the knowledge institutional, available for resurrection when the right application appeared.

Four National Medals

Corning has won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation—the highest honor the United States government bestows on technological achievement—four times. Few companies have won it more than once.

The awards recognize contributions including fiber optics, which transformed telecommunications; optical materials for applications ranging from space telescopes to semiconductor manufacturing; and glass substrates for liquid crystal displays, which enabled flat-panel televisions and computer monitors.

Each of these technologies required years or decades of basic research before commercial applications emerged. Each built on Corning's accumulated knowledge of glass chemistry and manufacturing. And each transformed industries far beyond glassmaking itself.

The Investigation

In November 2024, the European Commission announced that Corning was under investigation for potential antitrust violations. The concern centers on exclusive supply agreements with mobile phone manufacturers and raw glass processors that may be hindering competition in the specialty glass market.

The investigation highlights just how dominant Corning has become in certain niches. When you control the technology for smartphone screens—when Apple alone has invested nearly half a billion dollars to ensure your continued success—you have market power that attracts regulatory scrutiny.

The outcome remains pending. But the fact that European regulators are investigating a glass company from rural New York tells you something about how much the world has changed since Amory Houghton started making glass in the age of whale oil lamps.

Sixty-One Thousand People, Fourteen Billion Dollars

As of 2021, Corning employed roughly sixty-one thousand people worldwide and reported sales of fourteen billion dollars. The company has appeared on Fortune's list of the five hundred largest American companies for many years, ranking two hundred ninety-seven in 2015.

These numbers make Corning a substantial corporation but not a giant. Apple's market value exceeds three trillion dollars. Google processes more than eight billion searches daily. Corning makes glass.

But that glass is in your phone. It carried the data for the website you're reading. It might be in your car's emission control system. It helped astronomers see galaxies billions of light-years away. It enabled the flat-panel displays that replaced cathode ray tubes. It may be in the laboratory equipment being used, right now, to develop the next generation of medical treatments.

Corning's products are invisible by design. Glass, when it works correctly, is something you see through, not something you see. The company's greatest achievement is creating materials so good that you forget they exist.

That's the strange fate of an infrastructure company. The better they do their job, the less you notice them. But the next time you pick up your phone and it hasn't cracked despite everything you've put it through, you're holding the result of a hundred seventy years of accumulated glassmaking knowledge, a failed windshield project from the sixties, and one urgent phone call from Steve Jobs.