lenses, the Corning Conaphore.
Selective yellow "Noviol" glass version shown Corning Glass Works was founded in 1851 by Amory
Houghton, in
Somerville, Massachusetts, originally as the Bay State Glass Co. It later moved to
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and operated as the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works. The company moved again to its ultimate home and eponym, the city of
Corning, New York, in 1868, under leadership of the founder's son, Amory Houghton Jr. In 1915, Corning created an improved heat resistant glass formula and launched
Pyrex, the first-ever consumer cooking products made with temperature-resistant glass, in 1915. The
California Institute of Technology's telescope mirror at
Palomar Observatory was cast by Corning during 1934–1936, out of low expansion borosilicate glass. In 1932,
George Ellery Hale approached
Corning with the challenge of fabricating the required optic for his Palomar project. A previous effort to fabricate the optic from
fused quartz had failed. Corning's first attempt was a failure, the cast blank having voids. Using lessons learned, Corning was successful in the casting of the second blank. After a year of cooling, during which it was almost lost to a flood, in 1935, the blank was completed. The first blank now resides in
Corning's Museum of Glass. In 1935, Corning formed a
joint venture with bottle maker
Owens-Illinois, creating the company now known as
Owens Corning. They spun off Owens Corning as an independent company in 1938, and it
went public on the
New York Stock Exchange in 1952. The company had a history of science-based innovations following
World War II and the strategy by management was research and "disruptive" and "on demand" product innovation. In 1962, Corning developed Chemcor, a new toughened automobile
windshield designed to be thinner and lighter than existing windshields, which reduced danger of personal injury by shattering into small granules when smashed. This
toughened glass had a chemically hardened outer layer, and its manufacture incorporated an ion exchange and a "fusion process" in special furnaces that Corning built in its
Christiansburg, Virginia facility. Corning developed it as an alternative to
laminated windshields with the intention of becoming an
automotive industry supplier. A few years later they produced a fiber with only 4 dB/km, using
germanium oxide as the core
dopant. Such low attenuations made
fiber optics practical for
telecommunications and
networking. Corning became the world's leading manufacturer of optical fiber. In 1977, considerable attention was given to Corning's Z Glass project. Z Glass was a product used in television picture tubes. Due to a number of factors, the exact nature of which are subject to dispute, this project was considered a steep loss in profit and productivity. The following year the project made a partial recovery. This incident has been cited as a case study by the Harvard School of Business. In 1982, Corning purchased a 6.5 percent stake in
Genentech and, as part of the same agreement, the two companies formed an equal joint venture called
Genencor to develop industrial enzymes using
recombinant DNA technology. In 1998, the
kitchenware division of Corning Inc. responsible for the development of Pyrex spun off from its parent company as Corning Consumer Products Company, subsequently renamed
Corelle Brands. Corning Inc. no longer manufactures or markets consumer products, only industrial ones. Company profits soared in the late 1990s during the
dot-com boom, and Corning expanded its fiber operations significantly through the acquisition of telecommunications company
Oak Industries and building several new plants. The company also entered the
photonics market, investing heavily with the intent of becoming the leading provider of complete fiber-optic systems. Failure to succeed in photonics and the
collapse in 2000 of the dot-com market had a major impact on the company, and Corning stock plummeted to $1 per share. However, the company had posted five straight years of improving financial performance. In 2013,
Samsung Display sold its stake in its decades-long
CRT glass venture to Corning. ==Technologies==