Dr. Jeffrey Evenson, senior vice president and operations chief of staff for Corning, addressed the MIT Mobile Technology Summit, a gathering of industry leaders in some of the hottest innovations hitting the mobile market.

Evenson began by asking, “So, why is a glass company that’s more than 160 years old appearing at a conference packed with hip, innovative upstarts?” He went on to explain that glass is a lot stronger than most people think. And because it’s also stable, transparent, and impermeable, it will continue to be the perfect partner for mobile electronics in an ever-connected world.

He offered a host of examples that illustrate how Corning’s precision glass can be vital to every facet of the mobile experience – “how you see information, how you touch information, how you transmit information, and even how that information gets processed.”

Here are a few examples of how he encouraged the conference audience to think of glass in a new way:

• Glass can withstand an astonishing amount of pressure. Imagine, for example, a scale that measures the pressure under an elephant’s foot. Glass can theoretically tolerate the pressure of 10,000 elephants stacked on top of that scale – a strength of 10 gigapascals.
• A sheet of glass is so stable that it would take 20 trillion times the age of the earth to create a visible sag in the thickness of a glass window. This dimensional stability is critical to manufacturers of high-performance devices.
• You want to talk transparency? The glass used for optical fiber – which forms the backbone of the Internet – is 30 times more transparent than the purest water, and only about 1 percent less transmissive of light than air on a clear day.
• As for being impermeable – consider the difference between plastic and glass covers on electronics. A molecule of oxygen could pass through a piece of 1-millimeter-thick plastic in about two weeks. That same trip would take 30 billion years through the same thickness of glass. That makes glass “an ideal enclosure for advanced display technologies such as OLEDs, which decay rapidly if exposed to oxygen or water,” Evenson said.

How does Corning do it? Evenson explained that Corning understands how formulation and fabrication determine the atomic state and structure of a glass. These, in turn, control the mechanical, thermal, and optical properties of the glass.

Corning’s knowledge of glass properties, and how glass operates in combination with application requirements, allows the company to solve tough customer problems. This same know-how will help the company turn the technologies depicted in “A Day Made of Glass” into realities.