Apple Inc. (AAPL) & Thirteen Mind-Blowing Facts About Corning Incorporated (GLW)

8. Corning’s clean-air products have helped reduce air pollutants by more than 3 billion tons since 1975.

9. Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory contains a telescope mirror 27 feet wide that was made by Corning. It took several years to polish it.

10. Corning was active in the war effort during World War II, with some 174 research and development projects. It developed extra-strong tableware for mess halls and made glass used in various military applications — and was seen as important enough that the Nazis reportedly planned to bomb the company.

11. Corning’s improved production methodology for radio vacuum tubes lowered the average cost of radios from $133 to about $35 between 1929 and 1932, making radios much more affordable for the masses.

12. There are a lot of fascinating facts just about glass. For example: “Corning makes glass tough enough for windows on the space shuttle entering the atmosphere at 25,000 km per hour, clear enough to carry a pulse of light 1000 km, and pristine enough to make an LCD TV with 3 million pixels. Corning glass is anything but simple.”

13. The company is known as just “Corning” today, but for more than 100 years, between 1875 and 1989, it was “Corning Glass Works.”

There’s a lot worth knowing about Corning Incorporated (NYSE:GLW), for both investors and history buffs.

The article 13 Surprising Facts About Corning originally appeared on Fool.com.

Longtime Fool contributor Selena Maranjian, whom you can follow on Twitter, owns shares of Apple and Corning. The Motley Fool recommends and owns shares of Apple, Corning, and Universal Display.

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