Corning’s Gorilla glass, which had been languishing unused since its invention in 1962, has become a $170 million a year business:
Corning set out in the late 1950s to find a glass as strong as steel. Dubbed Project Muscle, the effort combined heating and layering experiments and produced a robust yet bendable material called Chemcor.
Then in 1964, Corning devised an ingenious method called “fusion draw” to make super-thin, unvaryingly flat glass. It pumped hot glass into a suspended trough and allowed it to overflow and run down either side. The glass flows then meet under the trough and fuse seamlessly into a smooth, hanging sheet of glass.
To make Chemcor, Corning ran the sheets through a “tempering” process that set up internal stresses in the material. The same principle is behind the toughness of Pyrex glass, but Chemcor was tempered in a chemical bath, not by heat treatment.
Corning thought Chemcor sheets created this way would be the material of choice in car windshields, but British rival Pilkington Bros. intervened with a far cheaper mass-production approach. And another Chemcor adaptation in photochromic sunglasses also fizzled in the retail market.
Fusion draw finally proved its commercial value when Japanese electronics companies, looking for slim sheets free of alkalis that contaminate liquid crystals, turned to Corning’s soda-lime LCD glass in the 1980s. Corning rapidly turned into the world’s biggest supplier of LCD glass for laptops and that business blossomed around 2003 when LCD technology migrated to TVs.
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. “Initially, we were telling ourselves a $10 million business,” said researcher Ron Stewart.
With relatively low startup costs, Gorilla should generate its first profit this year. And now that production is back on, designers are again exploring using it in unexpected places, like refrigerator doors, car sunroofs and touch-screen hotel advertising.
Among the 100-plus devices with Gorilla are Motorola Inc.’s Droid smart phone and LG Electronics’ X300 notebook. Whether Apple Inc. uses the glass in its iPod is a much-discussed mystery since “not all our customers allow us to say,” said Jim Steiner, general manager of Corning’s specialty materials division.