Your Next Smartphone's Display Will Be Much Tougher to Crack

There’s no shame in cracking your smartphone’s screen. “That’s what we were trying to solve, that kind of competitive, continuous drop,” says Corning division vice president Scott Forester. By contrast, Gorilla Glass 5 prioritized surviving a single drop from what Forester calls “selfie height.” To accomplish that priority shift without making trade-offs, Corning turned not just to clever chemistry, but an entirely new composition. Scott Forester, Corning “You get to a point where there’s only so much you can do within a given family of glass compositions, and that’s when it becomes necessary to go to a completely new family of glasses that can offer some enhanced property that was not previously available,” says John Mauro, a professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State University, who had previously spent 18 years at Corning and worked on early versions of Gorilla Glass. “Every time we would come up with something, it would be the best we could do at that point, and then we’d have to top ourselves.” A caution on Corning’s claims: The glass’s actual, real-world performance will differ from what happens in the lab, and Mauro notes that manufacturers can request a thinner version, or a specific shape, that might reduce some of its resilience.