How Hemi Magic Made It To The iPhone (And Its Competitors)

The chances are good that, as a TTAC reader, you use a smartphone. Among the literate, educated people who make up our reader base, ownership of a touch-screen phone with more computing power than a stack of DEC PDP-11s is the rule, not the exception. Google claims that over 250 million devices are running Android. Apple sold as many as 44 million iPhones in the past quarter. To some degree, the entire globe runs on these devices. Most of us couldn't do our jobs or manage our lives without them. The chances are not good that, as a TTAC reader, you own one of the two hundred and two 426 Hemi Super Stock "A990″ Dodge Corornets and Plymouth Belvederes built. 93 TorqueFlite Dodges, 8 four-speed stick Dodges, 85 TorqueFlite Belvederes, 16 four-speeds. They were up to five hundred pounds lighter than their non-A990 brethren and were known to turn quarter-mile times in the high ten-second range with trap speeds between one-twenty-five and one-thirty. Modern supercars like the GT-R and Ferrari 458 can't hang with a 1965 Plymouth Belvedere. Think about that. Now think about the fact that, without those '65 Mopars, your smartphone wouldn't work quite the same way it does today. As produced, the so-called "A990″ Coronets and Belvederes were actually too light for the NHRA; they had to have a hundred-pound "off-road skidplate" added back to them in order to compete. Chrysler pulled out all the stops for their 1965 factory drag racer. They also pulled out everything from the rear seats (of course) to the passenger windshield wiper. That's wasn't enough. The NHRA wouldn't permit the widespread use of aluminum body parts in a "stock" car, so Chrysler tried another tack at saving panel weight. A special run of body parts was stamped, using lightweight steel. As everybody who has ever tried to race a showroom-stock car around a road course or down the strip knows, however, the glass in a factory vehicle is murderously heavy. Enter "Chemcor", a special project from the Corning Glass company. According to Wikipedia, Chemcor is made as follows: The glass is toughened by ion exchange. It is placed in a hot bath of molten potassium salt at a temperature of approximately 400 °C (~750 °F). Smaller sodium ions leave the glass, and larger potassium ions from the salt bath replace them. These larger ions take up more room and are pressed together when the glass cools, producing a layer of compressive stress on the surface of the glass… creating high compressive stress deep into the glass. This layer of compression creates a surface that is more resistant to damage from everyday use. The A990 cars received Chemcor glass panes all the way 'round. The additional surface toughness allowed it to be much thinner while meeting the same impact requirements, although were Chrysler to pull the same trick in a Dart R/T today the NHTSA might have something to say about it. Come to think of it, the NHTSA might have had something to say about it back then, perhaps at lunch in the London Chop House or wherever such things were privately done, and as a result no Mopar, and no car, ever used Chemcor again. Corning put the process, and the results, away in its vault, and did not develop or sell any more products with Chemcor glass… …until the day Steve Jobs came to visit. I will let Walter Issacson, Jobs' biographer, take it from here, quoting a speech he gave after Jobs' death: Steve Jobs when he does the iPhone decides he doesn't want plastic, he wants really tough glass on it, and they don't make a glass that can be tough like they want. And finally somebody says to him, because they were making all of the glass in China for the fronts of the stores, says, "You ought to check with the people at Corning. They're kind of smart there." So, he flies to Corning, New York, sits there in front of the CEO, Wendell Weeks, and says, "This is what I want, a glass that can do this." So, Wendell Weeks says, "We once created a type of process that created something called Gorilla Glass." And Steve said, "No, no, no. Here's how you make really strong glass." And Wendell says, "Wait a minute, I know how to make glass. Shut up and listen to me." And Steve, to his credit, shuts up and listens, and Wendell Weeks describes a process that makes Gorilla Glass. And Steve then says, "Fine. In six months I want enough of it to make–whatever it is–a million iPhones." And Wendell says, "I'm sorry, we've actually never made it. We don't have a factory to make it. This was a process we developed, but we never had a manufacturing plant to do it." And Steve looks at him and says what he said to Woz, 20, 30 years earlier: "Don't be afraid, you can do it." … Wendell Weeks said he called his plant in Kentucky that was making glass for LCD screens, and said, "Start the process now, and make Gorilla Glass." That's why every iPhone in your pocket and iPad has Gorilla Glass made by Corning. "Gorilla Glass" was a marketing gloss on "Chemcor". In a way, the two names perfectly symbolize what's changed in America since 1965. "Chemcor" just sounds all space-agey and forward-thinking, the sort of optimism that Donald Fagen sprinkles all the way through his "The Nightfly" solo record. "Gorilla Glass", by contrast, has the sheen of explain-it-to-the-dumb-proles to it, a ridiculous exaggeration based on the idea that, while people might be frightened by chemicals, they have no problem feeling good about gorillas. "Gorilla Glass" it is, and its use has expanded to dozens of other smartphones and small devices. I've personally spiderwebbed two Gorilla Glass phones, but check this: when I went to Palm Beach late last year, I accidentally (meaning drunkenly) walked into the ocean with a spiderwebbed Droid3 in my pocket, and the display didn't short out. Good stuff, even if it can't quite stand up to gorillas in smartphone-friendly thicknesses. Best of all, although future Gorilla Glass production is likely to come from China, for the time being a lot of is it made right where it was invented: in the United States. American ingenuity, American production. Makes you feel good. Here's another American idea: let's go ahead and try it again, in a 350-horsepower, maxed-out, 2.4-turbo Dart. Call it the Super Stock. Light Chemcor glass, Quaife diff, no-fluff, quarter-mile-oriented. After all, there are still some of us who rank a kick-ass Mopar way above a not-so-simple smartphone. from The Truth About Cars http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com

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