Take a look at your smartphone. The chances are incredibly high that the sheets of glass covering the front and back come from a company called Corning. You almost certainly know it by its more famous brand name: Gorilla Glass.
Since the launch of the original iPhone back in 2007, Corning’s glass has dominated the smartphone industry. Its glass is so ubiquitous that it’s become the default material for nearly every major phone on the market, including the most recent iPhone 17 series, Samsung Galaxy S25 series, Pixel 10 series, and many more. Despite this, Corning is a notoriously secretive company. Its research and development facilities are tightly controlled, with access granted to a select few.
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Recently, however, I had the rare opportunity to peek behind the curtain. I took a tour of Corning’s flagship R&D facility in a town called, appropriately, Corning, located in upstate New York. There, I saw firsthand how Gorilla Glass is made and learned about the absolutely bonkers ways Corning tests its durability. It was a journey from a furnace hotter than a volcano to a series of wild torture tests, and it gave me a whole new appreciation for the unsung hero of our digital lives.
From molten goo to crystal-clear glass
Lanh Nguyen / Android Authority
One of the first stops on my tour was the furnace room, where Corning melts down the raw materials that make up Gorilla Glass. The room has multiple small furnaces, and specially trained Corning employees can conduct small batch tests on new glass products.
To say this was an intense experience would be an understatement. The molten glass glows with an otherworldly incandescence, churning away at a blistering 1,650 degrees Celsius, or about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. For context, that’s hotter than magma bubbling up from the Earth’s core. It’s so brilliantly bright that you can’t look directly at it without special protective eyewear.
Corning's innovative process for making glass is extraordinary.
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