Corning, via Associated Press Corning says its Gorilla Glass is used in 280 gadgets from 20 brands.I’ve always been just a little baffled at the whole concept of app-phone cases. I mean, people go out of their way to buy these thin, gorgeous iPhones and Android phones, and then wrap them in 3/4 inches of ugly black rubber!
I know, I know: all I need to do is drop and break my phone once, and my attitude will change completely. But for now, I still carry my phone around naked all the time, and there’s not a scratch on it. (To be clear: only the phone is naked all the time.)
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What I’ve never understood is how that can be. The screens (and, on the iPhone 4, the back as well) are glass, for crying out loud. People carry their phones around in pockets with keys and change. People drop these things, toss them, scrape them. Why on earth don’t they get totally scratched up?
I’ve just spent a year filming a new PBS Nova miniseries about, of all things, materials science. (I’m the host; it airs in January. You can see the trailer here.) Materials science is a little-known, multidisciplinary field — physics, chemistry, biology, nanotech, and so on — where some absolutely mind-blowing advances are being made.
Last week I was on a panel, presenting clips from the show at the annual conference of the Materials Research Society, a scientific group that helped advise us on the show. After the talk, a scientist came up to me and said, “You know, it looks like your show doesn’t cover one of the coolest materials that’s right under your nose: Gorilla Glass.”
No, I said. That’s not in the show. What is it?
“It’s the screen of every touchscreen phone, like the iPhone and Android phone, plus the iPad and iPod Touch. It’s an amazing story. Corning invented this stuff in the ’60s, but didn’t know what to do with it. Then a few years ago, someone showed a piece of it to Steve Jobs. The guy dropped a piece of the glass into a bag full of keys and shook it hard; it came out without a scratch on it! Jobs immediately seized on the idea of using it for his iPhone. Today, Apple buys practically all the Gorilla Glass that Corning can make. Apple is the world’s No. 1 consumer of it.”
Now, I had no idea how much of this story was true, but some of it sounded right; Steve Jobs immediately seeing the value in tech breakthroughs is a common theme in tech lore. And the Corning Web site seems to confirm that this is special stuff: “Gorilla Glass is an environmentally friendly alkali-aluminosilicate thin-sheet glass. It features exceptional damage resistance to the scratches, drops, and bumps of everyday use. It’s thin, cool to the touch, and cleans easily – making it the perfect solution for sleek, seamless designs.”
So I got in touch with Corning, and found out that the rough outlines of the story are true:
“In 1962,” the company’s PR guy wrote, “we unveiled Chemcor, a new ‘muscled’ glass. It was used in a variety of commercial and industrial applications, including the automotive, aviation and pharmaceutical industries, until the early 1990s. Now, fast forward to 2005, and the first mobile devices began appearing with cover glass. Corning started looking at this market as an opportunity.
“Our scientists took out the old Chemcor technology and started experimenting to create a tougher, more durable glass. By 2008, after two innovative developments, the new formula glass could now be produced in uniform, thin sheets with a pristine surface. Thus, what came out of our lab was a fresh composition that we patented as Corning Gorilla Glass.”
Today, he said, this glass covers the screens of 280 gadgets from 20 brands — Samsung, LG, Dell, Motorola, Acer and so on. Needless to say, it’s been a hit; sales of Gorilla Glass were under $100 million last year, will be $250 million for 2010, and, if the TV market takes off as Corning expects, will hit $1 billion next year.
Corning’s Web site goes into some detail on how this glass is made: “The glass is placed in a hot bath of molten salt at a temperature of approximately 400°C. Smaller sodium ions leave the glass, and larger potassium ions from the salt bath replace them. These larger ions take up more room and are pressed together when the glass cools, producing a layer of compressive stress on the surface of the glass. Gorilla Glass’s special composition enables the potassium ions to diffuse far into the surface, creating high compressive stress deep into the glass. This layer of compression creates a surface that is more resistant to damage from everyday use.”
Well, O.K.
All I know is that neither Apple nor anybody else has, in my opinion, made enough fuss over this material. In its humble, ionic-exchange way, this stuff has made possible the new era of thin, scratch-proof touch phones and touch tablets.
One thing’s for sure: there will be a lot of Gorilla Glass under the tree this year.
(P.S. Set your TiVo! This Sunday, I’ll appear on CBS News “Sunday Morning,” with a special, rhymed appearance full of high-tech Christmas-gift suggestions.)