ABOUT THIS COMPANY

ABOUT THIS COMPANY

If there's any U.S. company (or town) synonymous with glass, it's Corning, in upstate New York.  Corning was technically founded as the Corning Flint Glass Company in 1868, but its founder, Amory Houghton, had already cycled through three other glass companies.  Houghton and his sons settled on Corning as their glass company's ideal headquarters because of its central location for transporting glass across the country and because it was close to large reserves of coal and wood which were crucial to glass manufacturing at the time.  In fact, no town existed when the company moved in—the town and company are both named after Erastus Corning, a railroad executive from Albany who was instrumental in funding the enterprise.  The firm changed its name to Corning Glass Works in 1875, the same year that Amory Houghton Jr. became company president.  Corning founded its own R&D center in 1908 and produced high-quality products like borosilicate, a heat-resistant glass ideal for laboratory test tubes and beakers, first invented in Germany decades previous.  Borosilicate is better known by a brand name that Corning introduced in 1915: Pyrex.