Glass A Clear Solution | Glass Age | Corning

Just as we brought our vision for advanced glass technologies to life in the A Day Made of Glass video series, designers are using our glass to turn the applications from that series into a reality. Keep reading to learn more about glass as a material in our book, Glass - A Clear Solution, or read it as an e-book.

The cover glass that started it all

Corning® Gorilla® Glass combines a thin form factor with unprecedented damage resistance and outstanding optics. Today, Gorilla Glass has been used on more than 4.5 billion smartphones, tablets, and notebooks around the world.

Gorilla Glass is much more than a clever interface between our fingers and the digital world. It also has transformed people’s ideas of what glass can do – proving that glass can be beautiful and tough…stable and versatile…elegant and damage resistant. And that’s opening a host of new design possibilities far beyond the touchscreen.

What brings this new reality to life? It’s the combination of two Corning innovations:

• First, our proprietary fusion process creates very thin glass with outstanding surface quality, with no need for grinding or polishing.
• Second, Gorilla Glass has a remarkable aluminosilicate composition, optimized for chemical strengthening. Our ion-exchange process forms a compressive stress layer that goes much deeper into the glass than a soda-lime composition of comparable thickness. The result: industry-leading glass for toughness and damage resistance.

These two factors create a powerful combination for consumer electronics, enabling sleek devices that resist scratches and damage from keys, coins, and drops.

But Gorilla Glass is unlocking possibilities in other arenas as well – anywhere designers need superior clarity, light weight, durability, and elegance. 

Let’s look at a few.

Extraordinary capabilities for everyday products

As kids, we’re taught to look beyond the surface. But for designers considering creative new glass applications, surface impressions are important.

An outdoor glass display may be durable and lightweight, but if it’s hard to read in bright sunlight, it’s not practical. A restaurant server’s electronic tablet may make it through the bumps and drops of a busy shift, but if it’s smudged and dirty, it’s unappetizing.

Corning is reducing these potential barriers by re-engineering the surface of the glass.

Our Specialty Surfaces portfolio builds on the great attributes of Corning® Gorilla® Glass and adds unique new functionality to take glass where it has never gone before.

Take a look at some of our specialty surfaces.

Mind-bending possibilities with a thin, light, durable material

At first glance, you can hardly believe it’s glass.

It’s highly flexible – almost floppy. It bends as freely as a thin piece of paper.

Then you touch it. Smoother than silk. Cool to the touch. Flawless, yet natural feeling. Responsive, but remarkably durable.  

Those properties combine to make Corning® Willow® Glass one of the most extraordinary glasses in the world.

Because Willow Glass behaves in ways you wouldn’t expect, our customers are inspired to use it in unexpected places, too. Willow Glass is covering walls, kitchen cabinets, and whiteboards. It can be sandwiched into electronic devices, carrying complex components while adding barely a whisper of thickness and weight. And it unlocks opportunities for bendable displays and curved wearable screens.

It’s solving tough problems and adding aesthetic appeal wherever it goes. And more ideas are constantly around the bend.

See why the future is flexible.

Unleashing brilliant design possibilities

As consumers, we all respond strongly to shapes. The subtle curve of a car dashboard…the tailored seams of a perfectly fit jacket…the classic silhouette of an electric guitar. They all inspire us to say, “Great lines.”

What if those lines suddenly came aglow with bright strands of color and light? What if that light seemed to come out of nowhere?

With Corning® Fibrance® Light-Diffusing Fiber, that’s exactly what happens.

Discover the possibilities.

A first cousin to glass, this innovative material is ready to take on tough new design roles

Glass-ceramic material – born in Corning labs in 1953 – is undergoing a revolutionary transformation.

Its clean, glossy surface and thermal-shock resistance have made it an enduring icon in kitchens around the world. And new innovations in lightweight glass-ceramics are emerging for designers looking for a tough material with a distinctive aesthetic flair.

Corning has a diverse portfolio of glass-ceramics with distinct properties to suit a wide variety of contemporary applications.

See the creative uses of glass ceramics.