Flashback: 15 years of Gorilla Glass on phones

As the story goes, just six weeks before the original iPhone was released CEO Steve Jobs got annoyed that the plastic screen of the prototype device he was using got scratched up, so a last minute change saw Apple switch to glass. And not just any glass, but Gorilla Glass. This chemically-strengthened glass was created by Corning and has since become a staple of the smartphone market. Let’s look at a bit of history first before getting to the smartphone era. Corning got its start in the mid-19th century and made lenses for railroad signal lights and later car headlights. It made the…