In 1851, Amory Houghton Sr., a merchant and glass industry entrepreneur, founded the Bay State Glass Company in Somerville, Massachusetts. The company produced basic glassware for household and industrial use, but Houghton had larger ambitions. In 1868, he moved the operation to the small town of Corning in upstate New York, drawn by the area's natural gas deposits—which provided cheap fuel for glass-melting furnaces—and the Erie Railroad, which offered transportation access to major markets. The company was renamed Corning Glass Works, and the town of Corning, with a population that would never exceed 15,000, became the permanent home of what would become one of America's most enduring industrial enterprises. The early decades were characterized by steady expansion into technical glass products. Corning developed heat-resistant glass for railroad signal lenses, laboratory glassware for scientific research, and specialty glass for industrial applications. In 1915, the company introduced Pyrex, a borosilicate glass that could withstand extreme temperature changes without shattering. Pyrex became a household name and a staple of American kitchens, but it also established Corning's reputation for materials science innovation that solved real-world problems. The company's relationship with Thomas Edison, formalized in an 1880 purchase order for $311.97 worth of glass for his incandescent lightbulb, set a pattern that would repeat for 150 years: a visionary inventor or entrepreneur would approach Corning with a seemingly impossible materials challenge, and Corning would figure out how to manufacture it at scale. In 1945, the Houghton family took Corning Glass Works public, listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The post-war period brought new opportunities. Corning developed the glass for cathode ray tubes (CRTs) that powered the television industry, becoming a dominant supplier of TV picture tube glass. The company also expanded into scientific glass, ceramics, and industrial materials. By the 1970s, Corning was a diversified conglomerate with operations in glass, ceramics, metals, and consumer products. The name change to Corning Incorporated in April 1989 reflected this evolution from a glass company to a materials science enterprise. The defining moment of Corning's modern history came in 1970, when researchers Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz invented low-loss optical fiber—a glass thread capable of transmitting light signals over long distances with minimal attenuation. This invention, developed in Corning's Sullivan Park research facility, created the physical infrastructure for the internet and modern telecommunications. Corning bet heavily on this technology, building fiber-drawing towers and manufacturing capacity throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By the late 1990s, optical fiber was the company's largest business, and the stock price surged to nearly $100 per share as investors priced in infinite demand for internet infrastructure. Then the dot-com bubble burst. In 2001, telecommunications carriers that had overbuilt fiber networks stopped ordering, and Corning's sales collapsed. The stock price fell from approximately $100 to $1, and the company lost 99% of its market value. Half the workforce was laid off. Bankruptcy was a real possibility. Wendell Weeks, then a 42-year-old vice president who had led the optical fiber business into the crash, begged the board not to fire him. "I said, 'I'm chaining myself to the wheel here. I'll be a janitor or whatever it is, but I'm staying until this gets fixed,'" he later recalled. The board made him president instead, and he led the restructuring that returned Corning to profitability by 2003. The fiber business survived, and in the 2010s it became the foundation for Corning's resurgence as data center demand exploded. The second defining moment came in 2006, when Steve Jobs called Wendell Weeks and asked if Corning could produce millions of square meters of ultrathin, chemically strengthened glass for a new device called the iPhone. Corning had developed the underlying technology—ion-exchange strengthening—years earlier but had never found a mass-market application. Weeks said yes, and six months later Corning was shipping Gorilla Glass. The product became the standard cover glass for smartphones, tablets, and wearables, generating billions in revenue and creating a consumer brand recognition rare in industrial materials. The third defining moment is unfolding now. In 2024, the generative AI revolution created demand for optical connectivity that exceeded even the dot-com era projections. Corning's new products for hyperscale data centers—RocketRibbon, Edge8, and advanced fiber—drove 93% year-over-year growth in the Enterprise portion of Optical Communications. The company launched the Springboard plan, targeting $3 billion in additional sales by 2026. And in October 2024, Corning announced a $1 billion multiyear deal with AT&T for next-generation fiber. The 173-year-old company that nearly died in 2001 is now positioned as an essential supplier to the AI economy.