The Glass Age Today

Everyday surfaces are taking on extraordinary capabilities. Suddenly your refrigerator door becomes a touchscreen that helps organize your daily schedule. Your family room wall becomes an integrated entertainment center, letting you immerse yourself in streaming videos, games, and interactive chats while managing seamlessly online tasks. A storefront connects to an app on your phone and offers you individual discounts and product information, all before you set foot inside.

Everyone loves the convenience and brilliant moving imagery of touchscreens – and they’re becoming more and more popular in public locations, from automatic teller machines to elevator directories and interactive restaurant menus. Since its market introduction in 2014, the glass has caught on with a wide variety of industries where surfaces are part of everyday operations. Banking, hospitality, healthcare, and other sectors are now designing and producing devices with antimicrobial glass.

Even at its inception in 1970, mass-produced glass fiber – stripped of even the microscopic impurities that might interfere with light signals – could transmit data far more quickly than its copper wire counterpart. Telecommunications companies found it ideal for their long-haul networks that soon became the backbone of the Internet.

Today, more than 2 billion kilometers of optical fiber make up the world’s telecommunications network. And innovations in glass science are yielding new generations of high-speed, high-capacity fiber to meet the demands of today’s network applications.

Capacity is also remarkable. A single long-haul strand can support up to 2 million simultaneous high-definition video streams. And in the home, new fiber innovations are enabling high-speed optical connections between computers, operating systems, gaming consoles, tablets, and more.