An Invention From The 60's To Change The Face Of TV

It looks like an invention from early 60's is now going going to even further it's surge in the marketplace. In 1962 Corning Inc. invented a type of glass that was very hard to break, dent, or scratch. Problem being,  what is now known as "Gorilla Glass", served no known purpose at the time.

The almost invincible glass finally found that purpose in 2008, protecting the cell phones that our fingers abuse on a daily basis. With just cell phones alone, Corning Inc. has created a 170 million per year operation and Gorilla Glass can be found on over 40 million cell phones and other such devices all over the globe.

Now the company is set to make an even bigger mark on the technology market as television manufactures attempt to make sets even more thin and stylish. Companies are hoping that Gorilla Glass will prove marketable on more than just the look. The glass is lighter, which also means saving on shipping the product among other advantages.

See below for the history of "Gorilla Glass" and head over to Yahoo Finance to further educate yourself.

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.