Corning Incorporated, a world leader in specialty glass and ceramics, has its world headquarters in Corning and employs approximately 29,000 people worldwide. The company has $8 billion in annual sales, a figure that would be nearly doubled if its share of joint ventures such as Dow Corning, Samsung Corning Precision Materials, and others were included.
Corning produces a range of consumer and industrial products that include glass substrates for LCD televisions, computer monitors and laptops; ceramic substrates and filters for mobile emission control systems; optical fiber, cable, hardware & equipment for telecommunications networks; optical biosensors for drug discovery; and other advanced optics and specialty glass solutions for a number of industries including semiconductor, aerospace, defense, astronomy, and metrology.
The company is driven by a sustained investment in R&D, more than 160 years of materials science and process engineering knowledge, and a collaborative culture. Corning’s long history of innovation began in 1879 with the development of a bulb-shaped glass encasement for Thomas Edison’s new incandescent lamp.
Subsequent inventions include glass globes for railroad lanterns, Pyrex cookware, high-speed glass production processes, silicones, cathode ray tubes, centrifuge casting for TV tubes, pyroceram (Corning-Ware), LCD substrate, fiber optics, and newer technologies such as the durable Gorilla Glass, which is now used on more than 1 billion handheld devices.
At a time when many companies have cut back on their business innovation expenses to pump up their bottom line, Corning spends nearly 10 percent of revenue on what it calls RD&E: research, development, and engineering. In 2013, it will spend more than US$700 million on RD&E.
These days, 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,” says David Morse, Corning’s chief technology officer.
In a recent interview, Morse commented on emerging innovations at the company. “Take a big industry like automotive. Think of all the things that have been done to cars to reduce weight—moving from steel to aluminum to carbon fiber, making tires lighter, and doing everything you can to the engine. But you’re still hauling around the same thick window glass made by the same soda lime float process that was used in 1950. Lighter, stronger glass makes a great deal of sense and will take a great deal of weight out of the car. Consumers will see that in improved gas mileage, and we see it as an opportunity for our advanced glass technology.”
“Think also about architecture. If architects design buildings with electrochromic windows (sometimes called smart glass), which can change colors to regulate the amount of sunlight that enters a building, for example, they need a technical glass like ours. You can achieve a lot of energy and light control with that.”
“In consumer electronics, touch is becoming ubiquitous. If you’re 15 years old, you live with your touchpad. You watch TV on it, not on your parents’ television. One sees babies playing with iPads these days, and those babies will grow up expecting to touch things to get them to respond. Ubiquitous touch is going to be everywhere— refrigerators, computers, everything in school. Companies will need thin and strong glass for all these applications.
For more information, visit www.corning.com
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