Corporations: Built on Glass

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Technology and fat profits by themselves do not satisfy Corning Glass. "People ought to have fun in their jobs," insists Amo Houghton. "If they don't, they're probably in the wrong business." Corning sees to it that its workers do. To its base in Corning, far off the beaten track in upstate New York, the company has brought such widely different organizations as the New York Philharmonic and the Harlem Globetrotters to perform for its employees. Its handsome Corning Glass Center, which boasts a collection of historic examples of the glassmaker's art rivaling that of the British Museum, draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Convinced that it is both good advertising and a social duty to create the beautiful as well as the useful, Corning also pours time and talent into the making of its world-famous Steuben crystal, even though Steuben is a regular money loser.

Challenge to Steel. Despite all this, Corning long remained a relatively little-known maker of specialty glass. But in recent years it has been moving rapidly into consumer fields. In 1958 it introduced its Corning Ware cooking utensils, made of an ultrahard glass ceramic called Pyro-ceram which was developed in more "curiosity" experiments with photosensitive glass. Its new Chemcor has a wide range of potential industrial uses as a cheap, strong substitute for plastic, but has so far been used only for a virtually unbreakable tableware called Centura.*

Putting Corning products in every U.S. home is only the beginning of Amo Houghton's ambition. Mulling over the possible uses of Chemcor—glass pipe, safety lenses for spectacles and even load-bearing walls in buildings—Houghton last week admitted: "It's sort of a wild dream, but I would like to feel that one day glass can be as important to our economy as steel is today." If skyscrapers do ever ride on glass girders, it is a good bet that Corning will make them.