Corning's 1962 Invention Finally Hits Its Stride

Coming to a TV screen near you — Gorilla glass!
Yeah, not exactly a get-rich quick scheme since it took almost 50 years to find a marketable use for it, but Corning thinks it may finally have the next big thing — nearly unbreakable touch screens and TV screens.

The 159-year-old glass pioneer expects that its Gorilla glass will be worth billions when it finally gets used to create hard-to-break, scratch or dent flat screen TVs or touch screen tablets.

Corning first started searching for a strong-as-steel glass back in the '50s and came up with the formula for Gorilla glass in 1962 but the manufacturer couldn't find the right commercial application for it. The glass is three times as strong as conventional glass and is super thin — about the thickness of a dime. Now, as consumer demand for frameless flat screens and unbreakable tablets is exploding, Gorilla glass could be the muscle behind a market flex worth billions.

So far, there are more than 100 devices with Gorilla glass, including Motorola's Droid smart phone and LG Electronics' x300 notebook. The company is hush-hush on whether Apple's smash iPad tablet features Gorilla glass.

This isn't the first time it's taken awhile for Corning to turn its' brainpower into Benjamins. Way back in 1934, a chemist named Frank Hyde fashioned fused silica into optical fiber, but it wasn't until the 70s that the company began using it in communications.