Humankind’s Most Important Material
To reach you, these words were encoded into signals of light moving about 125,000 miles per second through fiber-optic cables. These lines, splayed out across mountains and oceans, are made of hair-thin glass 30 times more transparent than the purest water. The technology was made possible in part by a team from Corning Incorporated. In 1970 they patented a type of cable that could transmit large amounts of information long distances, building on decades of work by other researchers.
Assuming you’re reading this on a smartphone, you also owe a debt to Steve Jobs, who in 2006 asked Corning to make a very thin, strong screen for his new product, the iPhone. The result, Gorilla Glass, now dominates the market for mobile devices: Phones made with the fifth generation of this product can be dropped onto a rough surface from a height of five feet (selfie height) and survive 80 percent of the time.
That’s just the start. Without glass, the world would be unrecognizable. It’s in the eyeglasses on your face, the lightbulbs in your room, and lists over 350,000 types of currently known glass, though in principle the number of mixtures is limitless—and you get a surprisingly large and active field of research that regularly produces astounding new products. Glass has shaped the world more than any other substance, and in many sneaky ways, it’s the defining material of the human era.
