Tech Savvy Mama

Parenting in the Digital Age

How a Desire to Learn Leads to Constant Innovation

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This post is sponsored by Corning® Gorilla® Glass

Five years ago, I was sitting in our apartment in Turkey on a vacation high when a work email caught my eye. Our family had spent a week exploring and eating our way through Istanbul. We taught our kids the history of the Byzantine empire while Istanbul Not Constantinople played in our heads. We were 24 hours away from leaving to sail the Turkish Blue Coast for five days and I was enjoying a rare moment with a strong wifi connection to scroll through my phone.

When you own your own business, it can be hard to take a vacation. Mobile devices can feel like a blessing and a curse. On one hand, we rely on them to help us fully explore the places we’re visiting but they can also keep you tethered to work. We’re constantly challenged to find the balance between the two as we live and survive in today’s digital age.

But when I saw the subject “Opportunity to join Corning Gorilla Glass on upcoming trip?” I was glad to have my phone.

I admit that I didn’t know too much about Corning when I accepted the invitation. I knew they were a glass company but my desire to learn more made me say yes without hesitation.

That trip to the Arizona desert was my introduction to Corning Incorporated. It was the beginning of years of work with Corning® Gorilla® Glass.

As a teacher, I always love learning new things. Over the past 5 years, my work with Corning has taught me so much about the glass on our digital devices. It ignited a passion to champion STEM learning and the various kinds of engineering careers girls can pursue through my site. This same desire to keep learning and challenging myself led me back to the classroom to teach middle school for the first time.

Like me, Corning is a brand that is always learning. With each new product launch, I’ve watched Corning listen to concerns, learn from consumers, study, analyze, and innovate. Each generation of glass has improved drop performance while maintaining features like thinness, lightness, touch sensitivity, and resistance to scratches that come with everyday device use.

At its core, Corning is a science company that is deeply rooted in innovation. Each and every day scientists who have backgrounds in materials science, optical physics, engineering, and process innovations work to solve problems that will lead to the development of the next generation of technology.

A trip to company headquarters in Corning, New York allowed me to spend time in the labs comparing the strength, durability, and toughness of Corning® Gorilla® Glass against soda-lime glass, competitor glass, and other various generations of Corning Gorilla Glass. There I soaked up the science of glass, meeting fractographers.

If you’ve never heard of a fractographer, don’t worry! I hadn’t either until spending time at Corning’s Sullivan Park Research and Development campus at their headquarters.

Fratographers are highly-trained scientists who specializing in determining why and how glass breaks. Corning fractographers like Lisa Noni have experience in material science, physics, or glass science. She likens her field of science to CSI because “You’re presented with a broken device, and you have to figure out how and why it broke. I find that very interesting.”

At Corning’s lab in Corning, N.Y., researchers perform testing to simulate the kinds of stresses that the cover glass will endure in the field by creating tests in their reliability lab. Corning fractographers are constantly working to design tougher tests to replicate the real-world drops responsible for more than 70 percent of cover glass breakage.

Their gold-standard of drop tests aims to replicate real-world drops on rough surfaces that commonly cause smartphone cover glass to break. They created a drop machine that allows devices to fall on a specific grit of sandpaper to simulate the rough surfaces that provide sharp contact that happens in real world drops.

Corning scientists spend thousands of hours dropping devices on many different surfaces to collect samples that can be analyzed by fractographers back in the lab. After replicating and studying the problem of drops and tweaking the chemical composition, Corning developed a proprietary fusion manufacturing process.

This extraordinarily precise, highly automated draw process produces a thin sheet of cover glass. The manufacturing process allows Corning’s glass to have pristine surface quality, outstanding optical clarity, and inherent dimensional stability – essential features for the cover glass we use on our digital devices throughout the day

Work by Corning’s scientists to develop products like Corning® Gorilla® Glass have changed the face of consumer electronics through the invention of products such as damage resistant cover glass for smartphones and tablets.

4 Lessons Learned That Led to the Development of Corning® Gorilla® Glass Victus™

Corning recently announced their newest glass- Corning® Gorilla® Glass Victus™. In honor of the latest version of glass, I thought I’d share a few of the things Corning learned about the ways we use our devices and how this knowledge led to the development of the next generation of glass technology.

Scratches Affect Device Use

We know scratches happen to our devices with everyday use. If you’re among the 58% who keeps your phone in your front or back pocket, your device is more likely to have the most scratches.

40% of us say scratches make our devices more difficult to use and 3 out of 4 of us worry about how these scratches impact how their device display works.

Drops Lead to Scratches

In addition to keeping phones in our front and back pockets, drops can lead to scratches. We know that simply dropping a phone can lead to scratches that can impact the usability of a device. In fact, 45% of smartphone scratches are caused by drops!

Drop and Scratch Features Matter

2020 research by Corning found that more than 85% of consumers rated drop and scratch as very important mobile device features. In fact, in our eyes as consumers, drop performance and scratch resistance are one and the same.

Corning Imitates Real World Drops Through Testing

Corning has conducted experiments to determine how drop and scratch can lead to cover glass failure in smart devices. Here’s a look at a couple of the testing methods being used to imitate real world drops:

  • The Slapper- This portable demo demonstrates how the glass performs under face drop with tension
  • Drop Tower- Corning established a testing vehicle using a drop tower on to hard, rough surfaces using 180 grit sandpaper. This test simulates sharp contact damage that may occur on asphalt or concrete.

Why Corning is Always Tough. Always Innovating.


Since I first started working with Corning, their tagline has been “Always Tough. Always Innovating.” Having worked with the brand so closely, I’ve gotten a front row look as to why this has continued to be true over the past five years.

Rather than previous numbered versions of glass, Corning is calling their new Gorilla Glass Victus. Victus is a Latin word meaning “to live or survive.” Victus™ features significant improvement in both drop and scratch performance for the first time ever and is the toughest Gorilla® Glass yet.

Lab tests show that Gorilla Glass Victus™ typically survives from up to 2 meters. Competitive aluminosilicate typically fails when dropped from less than 80 centimeters.

It also surpasses Gorilla Glass 6 with up to a 2X improvement in scratch resistance when tested with on Knoop and ring-on-ring tests in Corning labs. Additionally, the scratch resistance of Gorilla Glass Victus performs up to 4X better than competitive aluminosilicate.

Corning Gorilla Glass is currently on over 8 billion devices worldwide and with Victus™, our devices will live or survive drops and scratches better than ever before.

Corning is not a brand that rests on its laurels. Like me, the company always loves learning new things to develop better products. While Victus™ is the strongest Gorilla Glass to date, I have no doubt that Corning scientists are hard at work solving problems that will lead to the development of the next generation of glass technology.

To learn more about Corning® Gorilla® Glass:

Although this post is sponsored by Corning, all opinions are my own and based on personal experiences with the brand over the years.