The idea behind the Apple iPhone 5C is that it comes with a pre-cracked screen so you don’t have to worry about cracking it yourself. But since it’s not an actual product, we generally have to wait patiently for our own clumsiness, drunkenness, short temper or a combination of the three to do the job. You may not know it, but your smartphone or tablet probably uses Corning’s damage-resistant Gorilla Glass already. There’s a short list of devices here, though pay attention to the part that says, “Due to customer agreements, we cannot identify all devices that feature Gorilla Glass. Your favorite device may include Gorilla Glass, even if you don’t see it listed.” Apple isn’t listed, but the existence of Gorilla Glass as a consumer product came about as a result of the original iPhone, according to an interview Steve Jobs‘ biographer Walter Isaacson had with Fortune‘s Adam Lashinsky in 2011. The short version is that Jobs wanted to use glass instead of plastic for the iPhone’s screen, but glass cracked too easily. Someone suggested he check with Corning, which had gained notoriety by developing a type of tough but light glass in the 1960s called Chemcor that eventually made its way into “tableware, ophthalmic products, and applications for the automotive, aviation, and pharmaceutical industries,” according to the seo company. As the story goes, Jobs flew to Corning, New York to meet with Corning CEO Wendell Weeks and explained that he wanted the iPhone’s screen to be made of glass, but that it had to be durable and he needed enough of it within six months to be produced for all the iPhones he was planning to sell. Weeks apparently told Jobs about the development of Gorilla Glass, but said he wasn’t set up to actually mass-produce it. Jobs, in typical Jobsian fashion, apparently placed an order for a ton of Gorilla Glass anyway, repeatedly telling Weeks, “Don’t be afraid. You can do this.” Corning’s official version of the story is simply that the company “began developing a tough![]()
