Creative Tension

For two decades, Corning searched for a use for such a marvelous product. At first, it tried to sell it to carmakers for windshields and to eyeglass makers for lenses, but it was too expensive for either use. It was when the makers of computer screens started demanding high-performance glass that Corning's "overflow glass" found its moment.

LCD glass is a premium product. Because it is designed to have layers of semiconductors and corresponding color filters applied to it, it must be absolutely flawless in composition and flawless in creation. And that presented a problem for Corning: Too many sheets of LCD glass had flaws in them. "If there was one inclusion that blocked a single pixel on a sheet of glass a meter wide," Ellison explains, "the customer would reject the entire sheet and then call Corning to complain."

Solving the problem -- which was wasting lots of high-purity glass and lots of customer goodwill -- meant more than sending a couple of people to the plant to figure out what was going on. Several dozen people struggled for months, doing fundamental glass analysis and process modeling, often coming up with solutions that were great lab ideas, but that wouldn't work in a factory.

"We'd say, 'We can solve the problem this way,' " says Ellison, "and the factory guys would say, 'Yeah, when hell freezes over!' " Ultimately, the LCD team traced the defects, and the factory worked out a process to eliminate them.

Four years after that first assignment, Ellison has four major projects bubbling and another four simmering. But one project dominates his time: his discovery of a completely new kind of glass that uses the element antimony. Although the epiphany of the idea, and the first melting and pouring of the glass, happened more than 18 months ago, he talks about it with spontaneous delight.

"What kind of glass does antimony make? It's a gorgeous glass! Brilliant, white glass. But it's also very sensitive to contamination. Any contamination, and it turns a lurid yellow. It is something new under the sun," he says. "It's a very uncommon thing at this stage -- after 100 years of glass research -- to find a breakthrough glass. Antimony is in the backwaters of the periodic table. It's really pretty weird." (Although antimony has only a few commercial uses, a little-known one is of great value: Antimony imparts fire-resistance to children's clothing.)

From Ellison's perspective, his antimony glass was the direct result of the kind of independent, exploratory work he loves most, the kind of work he has acquired the credibility to pursue, the kind of work a setting like Corning makes possible -- and the kind of work Corning is unusually positioned to exploit.

How does this kind of R&D work? "I wonder about something," Ellison says. "I see someone who could use a material with a particular attribute, and I think, 'Let me see if I can make a material with that attribute.' Or I make something with interesting attributes -- and then I wonder if someone could use it."

Antimony-silicate glass falls into the first category -- an invention aimed at a specific problem. Although fiber-optic cables are made of impossibly clear glass, the glass is not so completely transparent that light will travel through it indefinitely without dimming and fuzzing. Light flashed into the best optical fibers fades after about 80 miles and needs to be refreshed -- brightened, sharpened, cleaned up, and zapped on its way again. Quite simply, the signals need to be amplified.

Amplification is a necessary evil, and it used to be done by converting the light back to electronic signals, amplifying those, and converting the restored signals back to light to continue their journey. (Involved as it all sounds, amplification happens so quickly that phone conversations proceed without any hiccups.) These days, the job of amplification is done much more efficiently and cheaply using lasers and special "amplifier fibers." Certain kinds of light, when pumped into certain kinds of glass fiber, actually amplify the signals in the fiber. Light, then, can be used to amplify and focus other light.

Amplifier fiber is used in tiny quantities compared to the millions of miles of fiber-optic cable laid across the country: Tiny loops of amplifier fiber, like very fine fishing wire, do the job. But amplifiers are vital, and they are a lucrative business.

And what kind of glass does an amazing job of refreshing fiber-optic signals? Adam Ellison's new antimony-silicate fiber. "It blows away everything else in terms of performance. The bandwidth it will amplify exceeds anything known. It's the best material we've found," says Ellison.