If you’ve dropped your phone a million times today and are still walking around with its glass front intact – you probably have Corning to thank. Inventors of the famed Gorilla Glass – the highly scratch-resistant, impact-resistant yet touch-sensitive glass that makes your phone
Named after the Gorilla for its shared attributes of toughness and beauty, the enduring glass is manufactured independently by Corning but is featured in over 2.7 billion devices from mobile phones to LCD TVs, across 33 major global brands.
Gorilla Glass achieves its extremely thin width of less than half a millimetre using a technique called Fusion Draw that uses robotic arms to draw sheets out of molten glass.
Gorilla Glass is different from regular glass because it contains additions like aluminium, sodium silicon and oxygen and is called aluminosilicate. But what gives this glass the damage-resistant properties that make it invaluable is the potassium bath that causes ion-exchange – where the sodium ions are replaced with heavier potassium ones, resulting in compression. This gives the glass sheet a protective layer that makes it a lot stronger than an average sheet of glass. It’s found on most smartphones, ranging from the Moto G to the HTC One M8.
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