Gus Filbert, Ph.D.
Some 35 retirees and guests were given a whirlwind slide lecture tour through Corning's R&D history at the September Coffee session. Speaker was Dr. Augustus (Gus) Filbert, a now-retired veteran of 36 years of active service in the R&D facilities of Sullivan Park. These days, he is somewhat of a company historian, prowling the corporate archives digging up and assembling all kinds of information about our company's R&D work. In the process, he has contributed to three books dealing with company history.
It was an informative trip through the company's long history of research, discovery, innovation, and re-invention... not just of its products, but of its whole nature. In the process, Corning has been involved in three inventions that have altered the way we live the light bulb, the television tube and fiber optics.
For the first half of the company's history, Corning was pretty much a problem solver. That started with the copious scientific and technical notes kept by the founding brothers, Charles and Amory Houghton. Given the belief in the broad potential of glass - a material that has been around for millennia - and a belief shared by the founders and their heirs - it was no surprise that in 1903 Corning became one of the first corporations to establish its own Research and Development facility.
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Corning's Role in The Great White Way
In 1879, Thomas Edison created an electric lamp, but needed an envelope to prolong its life. Corning developed a teardrop shaped bulb that could do the job and hand-made bulbs
became a major production activity for the next 30 years. It was a slow production process. It was the invention of the ribbon machine in 1926 that enabled light bulb production on a scale that could literally light up all of Broadway. Where teams of blowers could produce a dozen bulb blanks an hour, the ribbon machine could kick out as many as 82,000 in the same time.
Next to seek Corning's help were the railroads. They needed more heat-resistant glass and better lenses for their signal lanterns and a more uniform set of red, green and amber colored lenses. The solution was found in a new low-expansion glass the company called NONEX. When the bottom of a battery jar made of NONEX material was used to bake a cake, Corning got into the consumer market with a line of PYREX ovenware. PYREX products changed the way of many cooks, but it wasn't on the life-altering scale of the light bulb.
When World War I limited the supply of laboratory glassware - most of which came from the German companies Schott and Zeiss - Corning expanded the PYREX brand into another new major market - labware and chemical systems apparatus.
Next on Gus' R&D scope was fused silica - long recognized as one of the purest of man-made materials… but also one of the most difficult to produce. The first new glass making process in centuries - vapor deposition - overcame that obstacle in 1932. That technological development became the root of Corning's involvement in a range of fields from space travel and discovery to high-speed communications using fiber optics.
The 1930's also saw Corning expand into broader markets by joining its materials and technology with the marketing of other firms to form mutually beneficial and profitable new business entities - Owens-Corning Fiberglas; Pittsburgh-Corning architec-
tural glass block, Dow-Corning silicones. This was also the decade of the Hale Observatory 200-inch Mt. Palomar telescope mirror, which generated major public attention worldwide.
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Television
The second life-altering impact in which Corning played a major role was the TV picture tube. From its birth as a radar bulb for monitoring both domestic and military air traffic,
the ability to transmit more complex images onto the face of a box in the living room became a major market. As with the light bulb, it was not the material that was key… it was the forming process. As TV bulbs became larger and moved from round to rectangular, a new way to form the bulbs had to be found. The answer - centrifugal casting, in which molten glass dropped into a mold which was then spun to force the glass up the sides of the mold to form TV bulb funnels. Television was the company "money tree" of the 50's and 60's. Said Gus, "Corning made 110% of all the TV bulbs in those years… because our customers would break 10% in their own
manufacturing process."
Dr. Don Stookey's lab experiment bounced -- literally, and led to the discovery of a new glass-ceramic material that found its first uses as rocket and missile nose cones. R. Lee Waterman's question of "How many of those can we sell?" sent the company's well-established Pyrex consumer group in motion and Corning Ware cookware was born in 1958. The "Little Blue Flower" logo became THE product with which most people associated with Corning. It's reliability, marketing and guarantee - "The Corning Promise" - became a symbol of quality readily linked to Corning.
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Through Glass Clearly
The notion of impressing information onto cohesive beams of light - lasers - has long held promise for being able to provide a quantum leap to message-carrying capability. The key to success in this area was long recognized as the development of a carrier pure enough to transmit information with minimum signal loss or "scattering," thus maintaining the integrity of the input. Once again, Corning had the material - fused silica - what was
needed was a new manufacturing/forming process. That process, vapor deposition, was developed and perfected at Sullivan Park. Today, optical communications are at the heart
of all levels of data links from long distance to local area networks. They are the key to cable communications services that let people view TV, operate phones, run computers and who knows what-all - all over the cable provider's fiber optic connection.
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Dust It Off and Bring It Back Out
The liquid crystal display flat glasses so much a part of the company's success is made by the fusion forming process developed years ago for an electronics customer. The process was shelved at the time because the flat glass from our process was more expensive than others available at the time. As the LCD market exploded, the company dusted off the process and was perfectly poised for this worldwide business.
Gus also touched on such other Corning innovations that pave the way for the company's future: catalytic converters and ceramic substrates, DNA testing systems from the Life Sciences Division.
In summary, it has been an interesting century and a half and Gus did a nice job of capturing it for us. |
