Humankind’s Most Important Material
Glass has changed the world like no other substance, but people usually overlook it. An Object Lesson.
Glass is heated in a large, fiery oven.
Regis Duvignau / Reuters
To reach you, these words were encoded into signals of light moving about 125,000 miles per second through fiber-optic cables. These lines, splayed out across mountains and oceans, are made of hair-thin glass 30 times more transparent than the purest water. The technology was made possible in part by a team from Corning Incorporated. In 1970 they patented a type of cable that could transmit large amounts of information long distances, building on decades of work by other researchers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/humankinds-most-important-material/557315/
