The first iPhone will go on sale in four weeks, and Steve Jobs is not happy . His personal iPhone has been scratched mercilessly by the keys in his pocket. “I want a glass screen. And I want it perfect in six weeks.”

This is Day 3 of 30 Days of iPhone, a look at the moments that shaped the smartphone era.

Corning Chemcor: Reviving Cold-War Industrial Glass For The iPhone

The answer came from 1962, when Corning Glass Works developed Chemcor Glass , a chemically strengthened glass with a highly compressed surface that offered increased protection against damage and stress. It never found a market in the sixties. The iPhone’s damaged plastic screen was the opening that Corning needed.

Motorola’s Razr V3 flip phone was designed with an external display replacing plastic with a glass screen. Following its release on Nov. 16, 2004, Corning’s research team examined if Chemcor could be revived. It offered a starting point for a toughened glass suitable for consumer electronics. CEO Wendell Weeks gambled that the researchers could come up with the answers in time to satisfy Apple. Could it be mass produced at scale? Rolled out to just 1.3 mm thick? And could it be ready in an impossibly tight timeframe?

The new variant would be called Gorilla Glass and debuted on the first iPhone when it launched in 2007.

The Original iPhone Banished Plastic Displays

Since then, Corning states that Gorilla Glass has covered more than 8 billion mobile devices worldwide and reportedly commands a 72% market share in “the aluminosilicate glass market for electronic devices” during 2025. The snap commandment by Jobs and the hastily discovered solution by Apple’s iPhone engineering team can be felt in every high-end smartphone to this day.

This is Day 3 of 30 Days of iPhone. Yesterday we looked at Steve Jobs’ reluctance to offer native apps on the iPhone .