HARRODSBURG, Ky. -- One of the most innovative gadgets in a generation -- the Apple iPhone -- would not have hit the market in 2007 were it not for a 60-year-old glass factory in this central Kentucky town of 8,300 people.
The plant -- owned by Corning Inc. -- has been a longtime fixture in Harrodsburg, Ky. But its pivotal role in enabling the worldwide sale of millions of iPhones was not widely known until October, when a biography of the late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs was published.
Even then, the biography misspells the name of the town as "Harrisburg" instead of Harrodsburg, a mistake that a publisher's spokeswoman said will be corrected in future editions. And most people here still aren't aware of the town's role, according to locals such as Jerry Sampson, who has owned a book and antiques shop in the heart of town for 20 years.
"I think it's a pretty cool feature that, in little Harrodsburg, Ky., that glass is made," he said. "All over the world, this iPhone, it's revolutionary. It changed everything."
In his best-selling biography of Jobs, journalist Walter Isaacson tells how Apple's chief executive challenged Corning to begin churning out a durable, scratch-resistant material called Gorilla Glass for the iPhone's screen.
Apple originally had planned for the iPhone to have a plastic screen, Isaacson wrote. But Jobs decided the device would "feel much more elegant and substantive if the screens were glass."
According to a separate account in The New York Times, Jobs resolved to get a glass screen after carrying around an iPhone prototype in his pocket and finding its plastic screen marred by tiny scratches.
Isaacson says Corning CEO Wendell Weeks told Jobs about an ultra-strong glass that the company had developed in the 1960s but shelved because it never found a market. It was called Gorilla Glass, and Jobs wanted to buy as much of it as Corning could produce in six months.
Responding to the impatient Jobs' challenge, the Harrodsburg plant quickly went from making liquid crystal display (LCD) glass for products such as TVs and monitors to manufacturing Gorilla Glass for the first run of iPhones.
On the day the iPhone hit the market, Jobs sent Weeks a message: "We couldn't have done it without you."
Joe Dunning, a spokesman at Corning's headquarters in Corning, declined to verify the details of Isaacson's account.
But after the book's publication, Corning is publicly acknowledging its relationship with Apple. It previously had been bound by a nondisclosure agreement that designers like Apple use to keep their competitors from learning too much about their operations, Dunning said.
"What we can now say is that we have supplied the glass for iPhones since 2007," he said.
Apple acknowledges its relationship with Corning, too. On its website, the company includes as an example of American jobs it supports: "Corning employees in Kentucky and New York who create the majority of the glass for iPhone."
A Corning fact sheet does correct one minor aspect of the book's story. Gorilla Glass actually was not developed in the 1960s, it says, though the company drew on expertise it gained while experimenting with strengthened glass during that era.
Beyond Apple
While the plant here still churns out some Gorilla Glass, it does not have the capacity to meet worldwide demand, Dunning said.
The majority of Gorilla Glass is now made at Corning factories in Taiwan and Japan -- closer to the electronics manufacturing that occurs in Asia, Dunning said. The iPhone is manufactured in China.
"If you have a component in that supply chain, it would make more sense if you had your plant right next to the next guy's plant and not 8,000 miles away," he said.
Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited the Foxconn Technology factory in the province of Henan where the phone is made following a series of negative reports this year about labor practices there, according to The New York Times.
Far beyond Apple products, Gorilla Glass now is used in more than 600 devices, including smartphones, tablet computers and high-definition televisions, according to Corning. The company sold about $700 million worth of Gorilla Glass last year, nearly triple the amount it sold in 2010.
"It is a real success story for us," said Casey Duffy, manager of the Harrodsburg plant.
While the plant churned out the first run of Gorilla Glass, Duffy said the real contribution of workers here was re-working their processes to show how it could be done.
In recent decades, as manufacturing has moved overseas, the Corning plant has remained "viable and relevant" because it's been the place where Corning's New York-based scientists and engineers put their ideas, such as Gorilla Glass, into practice, he said.
"We certainly believe it is our life blood here," he said.
And while the majority of Gorilla Glass is made in Asia, its growth has meant jobs and investment here.
The plant recently underwent a renovation that cost at least $186 million, in part to boost production of Gorilla Glass. In 2010, Corning projected the investment also would mean 80 additional jobs at the plant -- a mix of production workers and engineers. The plant now employs about 400, Duffy said.
Changing functions
From sand and other raw materials to the finished 5-foot by 6-foot sheets that are shipped across the Pacific Ocean, the glass is made mostly without touching human hands.
Workers are in the background, such as the ones who monitor the robots that cut the glass and package it.
In that sense, the plant is an example of how American manufacturing is becoming more advanced, with automation performing repetitive tasks that used to be done by unskilled workers, said Manoj Shanker, an labor economist with the Kentucky Office of Employment & Training.
For instance, being a sheet-glass operator means something much different now than it did 20 years ago, said Wayne Reinsmith, president of the local chapter of United Steel Workers, which represents about 240 workers at the plant.
When Reinsmith began working at the plant in 1993, "we had five or six people" cutting the glass and moving it along in the process, he said.
Today's sheet glass operators "are really watching and servicing the robots," he said.
While that has meant fewer jobs for rank-and-file workers, it has meant opportunities for them to learn such skills as operating machines, which earns a better wage, Reinsmith said.
Of the 80 new jobs Corning expects to add at the plant, the average wage is projected to be about $25 an hour -- far higher than the average wage in Kentucky, about $18 an hour.
About a quarter of those jobs will be engineers, while the remaining are production workers, Duffy said. A typical rank-and-file union worker makes about $20 an hour, he said.
Horn, a life-long resident of Harrodsburg, remembers when the plant made lenses for eyeglasses and binoculars. In the 1950s, young men who graduated Mercer County High School could get a job at the plant and make a middle-class career of it, she said.
"Any citizen in this county is grateful to still have Corning as an industry ... when you think how many years it's been here," Horn said. "And now, it's like it has its second life -- it's gone to high-tech."
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