Gorilla Glass 5 Lets You Drop Your Phone In Full Selfie Mode

by
Don Reisinger

@FortuneMagazine

July 21, 2016, 11:47 AM EDT

Your smartphone screen is about to get a lot stronger.

Corning GLW on Wednesday unveiled the latest iteration of its Gorilla Glass screen technology. Dubbed Gorilla Glass 5, the glass cover is capable of survive a drop of 5.2 feet up to 80% of the time when it spills onto a rough surface, the company says. It claims that its technology is “up to four times better” than other glass designs and a dramatic improvement over its currently available glass technology, Gorilla Glass 4.

Corning’s technology is designed to create a more rugged mobile device screen. While the technology was actually developed by Corning a decade ago, it started to hit its stride when touchscreen-based smartphones started hitting store shelves. Soon after, users were dropping their devices and smashing their screens. Gorilla Glass aimed at reducing chances of screen damage when a device is dropped.

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The key to success for Gorilla Glass is two-fold: Height and surface. Dropping an iPhone on a soft surface at a tall height likely won’t cause damage. However, drop it on a concrete floor from too high up and users might be looking at a seriously damaged screen. Corning’s Gorilla Glass iterations, therefore, have focused on rough surfaces, but also on improving the height at which a device could be dropped and its screen remain intact. Gorilla Glass 4, which was unveiled in 2014, for instance, had an 80% effectiveness rate at 3.28 feet.

Boosting the technology’s height to more than five feet is critical, Corning says. The company cited by a third-party survey from research form Toluna, which found that 85% of people have dropped a phone at least once in the last year and 55% have dropped it more than three times. Most importantly, more than six in ten of those falls have occurred between shoulder and waist height—about where Gorilla Glass 5’s ceiling is on many Americans.

Still, Corning acknowledges even with its 80% success figure that a device equipped with Gorilla Glass 5 won’t always survive a nasty five-foot fall. That, of course, creates the need for cases that help protect against additional damage.

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Regardless, Gorilla Glass is doing well: Since its launch, the technology has been used in more than 4.5 billion devices worldwide and on more than 1,800 product models across 40 brands.

Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5 will reach devices from “leading global brands” later this year.

Working glass at Corning

by
Don Reisinger

@FortuneMagazine

May 6, 2013, 12:59 PM EDT

To make glass is to know failure. A glassmaker begins with powders of oxides, stirring them into a platinum crucible, then sticking the batch in an oven heated to 2,912° F, where the oxides liquefy into a molten state. He then removes the crucible, and the liquid cools and hardens into glass — an amorphous solid. A team analyzes its chemical makeup and “seeds” (a.k.a. bubbles). But to really know glass, to get a sense of its strength, you must break it. So someone bends and hammers and sometimes throws baseballs at the glass until it scratches or cracks or shatters. He studies the fractures, which reveal the glass’s secrets. Glass fails, the researchers learn from the failure, and the cycle repeats.

The making and breaking and remaking of glass has been happening for 162 years at Corning. One of Corning’s early customers was Thomas Edison, who needed a way to mass-manufacture his incandescent lights. The company constructed the ribbon machine — “The only machine that’s made nearly every light bulb you’ve seen in your life,” says David Morse, Corning’s chief technology officer. Morse arrived at Corning’s upstate New York headquarters (the town is a company town; it bears the company name) 36 years ago to work on creating glass that would respond to light.

Soon Morse’s work shifted to telecom. In the 1970s Corning began developing glass tubes that could carry information in pulses of light: fiber optics. As the Internet rose, so did Corning’s stock. But then the dotcom bubble burst, and the company found itself in need of another hit. Serendipitously, Steve Jobs called. He wanted a thin and very strong glass for Apple’s new smartphone. And he wanted it in production in six months. Corning (No. 326 on the Fortune 500) dusted off and modified an old project it had first pitched to the auto industry 50 years earlier, modified it, and ended up with Gorilla Glass, a line that nearly all glass touchscreens are made of today. Sales have doubled every year since it was first introduced in 2008.

Glass can be made even thinner, stronger, better. Teams at Corning are embedding inorganic, bacteria-killing ions into glass; making bendable glass so thin it can be rolled up in great spools; and designing a new type of fiber-optic cable that can carry cellphone signals and pick up Wi-Fi. “The scale of glass, what you can do with it today — it’s wonderfully different,” Morse says.

This story is from the May 20, 2013 issue of Fortune.

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