The Glass Age, Part 1: Flexible, Bendable Glass

pop quiz if you are able to look back on the present from deep in the future what age would you say we're living in is this a trick question I mean I want to say information age but it seems too obvious can I say more than one age yeah I think it is safe to say that we are living in more than one age from the beginning of humanity we've seen prevailing technologies marked with milestones the Stone Age the Bronze Age the Iron Age all occurring many thousands of years ago man's mastery of these materials has defined us but by that metric the last couple of hundred years have seen a flurry of Ages the steam age the Industrial Age the Atomic Age the television age the Space Age to name but a few but those are not the answers I was looking for is that a clue yes it is I think that this age could be classified as the glass age that's not what I was thinking I know so how are we in the glass age well let me put it to you this way can you imagine a world without glass now I don't want a cheeky answer I want you to really think about it okay no I can't imagine the world without class exactly glass is really quite extraordinary without it many of our major accomplishments would never have happened glass has a deep and complex history and as a material it has properties and characteristics that we are only just beginning to understand we look right through it and think of it one dimensionally most of us think of glass as a fragile brittle thing that if not handled correctly will break in a spectacular fashion so you're gonna break that to make a point indeed can I help yes you can and it's true our everyday common variety of glass is brittle but it doesn't have to be that way glass has already altered our lives and is behaving in ways that is totally unexpected got it let's start with a history of glass I think I can handle that glasses we know it is most commonly made of silica the primary ingredient of beach sand mix silica with a couple of other key ingredients heat it all up till it melts and bang you got glass humans have been making glass since ancient times starting with beads vessels and ceremonial accoutrement glass making techniques spread out from Mesopotamia cultured culture changing in incremental ways for much of the last forty five hundred years or so the Romans even had glass windows and their important buildings as early as the 1st century AD glassblowing was discovered around that time and soon inexpensive and ubiquitous glass became one of the hallmarks of the Roman Empire but no period has seen such growth in the development of glass technologies as in the last 150 years we've been able to unlock the secrets of glass in ways that would have seemed like magic to our forebears nice Thanks so tell me what's so special about the last 150 years well several things in that period technology evolved in an exponential rate with that came tools and processes that enabled advancement across all material sciences the leader in glass material science was and still is an upstate New York glass company that started out in the mid-1800s Corning incorporated one of their first products was a toughened glass lens for railroad signal lanterns that offered two radical improvements over any other lens of that time they could be produced in a consistent color and more importantly it didn't break when rain hit the hot glass this helped save lives by bringing down the number of train wrecks but it also set a course for a hundred and sixty years of innovation in glass of course everybody knows about Corning ware and Pyrex products - those innovations came from Corning during their early part of the last century you know I have tons of this in my kitchen the Corning no longer makes kitchen where they've innovated way beyond that let's take a look we'll start with this optical fiber right optical fiber this does two things both astonishing the first one is this that right there is pure glass a glass strand inside the cable tightly wound around a pencil and yet not breaking when you stop and think about it that is a mind bender okay what's the second thing well it's the way the light moves through the glass when the glass is bent this way you'd expect light to leak out and get weaker and corrupt the data that it carries but that's not happening nearly all the light entering this optical fiber is coming out the other end so it has a low attenuation yeah exactly very low in the late 1960s Corning figured out how to limit the attenuation or loss of light as it travels through fiber even when that fiber is bent nice this discovery led to the practical use of fiber as a medium for voice and data communications over great distances assuring in an era of low cost high bandwidth communications and ultimately the Internet as we know it Wow so just how much data can these optical fibers carry this video playing back right here is sucking in data at around 20 gigabits per second it's a lot of data yeah this is Ultra High Definition raw video but even in this case the optical fiber is not anywhere near capacity the bottlenecks are here and here not here the practical limit of data transport over optical fiber keeps increasing using today's technology it's possible to transport more than a million gigabits per second about appetitive that'd be like downloading 17,000 high-definition movies for Netflix in a single second that's amazing okay tell me about this stuff well obviously it's an optical fiber as well but instead of sending light through one end and out the other it emits light throughout its entire length oh what's it good for I have no idea okay so I was able to seriously bend a strand of glass didn't break but what do you think is going to happen when I try to bend a pane of glass ah rhetorical question check this out that doesn't look like it went very well well that was soda lime glass the kind of normal stuff we see around us every day but watch what happens next this this is glass - it's called willow glass also made by Corning and it's flexible no way I cannot believe that is glass well it is there's no trickery here this is glass but it's as flexible as paper so what kind of applications does that have well that's where it gets really cool check this up alright so looks like a piece of stainless steel and what is this willow glass bonded to one side is a scratch resistant coating yep okay but tell me this how is the willow glass anywhere near as durable as stainless well that's a good question watch this that is amazing I cannot believe that the blade did not shatter the glass it didn't and that's just half the story all right so what are we doing give me that okay take this this is heavy man what do you want me to do with it I want you to drop that right on that piece of stainless steel with a willow glass on it seriously let's see what happens here we go three two one no way it dented it but it didn't break the glass that is insane and you can attach this to just about any solid surface bendy flexible durable glass impressive and characteristics you wouldn't normally associate with glass right right I like this in glass age were you

Channel: Corning Incorporated

Views: 6,281,525

Rating: 4.8165913 out of 5

Keywords: Glass (Visual Art Medium), Adam Savage (TV Producer), Jamie Hyneman (TV Producer), adam and jamie, corning, corning glass, flexible glass, corning willow glass, MythBusters (TV Program), mythbuster, demo, soda lime glass, glass demo, glass characteristics, corning optical cable, fibrance, corning optical fiber, optical fiber, product design materials, thin glass, Corning Inc. (Award Winner)

Id: 12OSBJwogFc

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 19 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/justhavingacoffee]

You tricked me into watching a 9 minute commercial for Corning Inc. Well played, OP.

[u/DashFerLev]

Okay so obvious "this was a commercial" comments aside.

What the hell applications does this have?

Why is this any better than plastic?

[u/doopercooper]

Why don't the mods put "Commercial" next to the title like they do with other videos?

[u/tolerantlychaotic]

I live in the Glass City, and if this is the Glass Age, then why aren't we booming?

[u/Icon_Arcade]

I like like Corning's Concept Video. Here's one from years ago that's still pretty fresh in mind.

(And for those people complaining about the bad acting... I think you need to keep in mind the audience this video is for.)

[u/antdude]

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13B5K_lAabw

[u/sammyhere]

so basicly cablecompanies are fucking money out of my asshole, regarding fiberoptics? i wish to live in the time where everybody can have almost free 1tb ul/dl speed

[u/[deleted]]

Awkward

[u/Can37]

Jamie looks really unwell in this video, I hope he is OK.