 It's great to see a lot of things out there I have never seen before at some of our events and that's always what we are striving for, especially with this game changer series. It's really allowed us to expand our audiences. So welcome, we are thrilled, you're all here tonight. And I can promise you that in an hour and a half from now you will be walking out of the air with a greatly expanded idea, a notion of what glass is, how important it is and how critical it is in our life and why we are now living in what some people consider the age of glass. I'm Karen McCarty, the curatorial director of Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and I would like to welcome all of you to this evening's event, the evening's game changer with Jeff Evenson and Courtney McCorp-Rated. Thanks to the generosity of Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, our game changer conversations invites influential designers, thinkers and industry leaders for robust discussions of design's boundary at bushing purpose. Glass is one of the most important materials on our planet. There's a huge range of what glass is and isn't and what Corning has developed is truly spectacular. Most people associate Corning with ovenproof bowls, pyrex bowls, light bulbs and the extraordinary museum in Corning in New York. But few know about Corning's fantastic contributions to the world that totally impact our lives. We could go to the moon because of Corning because they developed glass that could withstand such extreme heat and which allows astronauts to see through windows. Part of the Hubble telescope was cast at Corning and enabled us to look at the heavens and discover new things. The reason why we can walk down the street and breathe today is thanks to Corning's brilliant design of a catalytic converter which I think we might hear about tonight. And until quite recently, we thought of thin glass like wallpaper made into windows to keep flies out. But it now has ingeniously wonderful interactive properties such as the more recent Gorilla Glass. And in fact, thanks to Corning earlier this morning, I typed on glass to create the notes for this evening's questions and my introduction. Cooper Hewitt and Corning have collaborated on several occasions. We partnered on two glass labs, one in our garden in 2008 and two years later on Governor's Island. Corning also very generously produces the beautiful glass trophies that we give to each year's National Design winners. And tonight I'm delighted to welcome to Cooper Hewitt, Jeff Evenson, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Corning Incorporated. Jeff joined Corning in 2011. In this role, he oversees corporate strategy, corporate communications and analytics. Before Corning, he spent seven years at Sanford C. Bernstein as Senior Vice President and Senior Analyst where he focused on data networking companies. Earlier in his career, Jeff was a partner at McKinsey and Company where he led technology and market assessments for early stage technology. Sounds perfect for Corning. Jeff received his PhD from Harvard University in a bachelor's degree in physics from MIT, his chairman of the Corning Museum of Glass, a trustee of the Corning Foundation and a member of the board of directors of View Inc. and Fuzzy Logic Inc. We are very grateful that Jeff is here to tell us about the game-changing expanding developments in glass technology in fields as diverse as consumer electronics, architecture and medicine as well as the possibilities for exploring the atomic structure of glass. Drawing on his experience as chairman of the Corning Museum of Glass, Jeff will also discuss the role that artists and designers play in realizing glass's creative and functional potential. Following his presentation, I will join Jeff on stage for a Q&A. But for now, I'd like to welcome Jeff to the stage. Thanks, Kara, and good evening. I appreciate the opportunity to be here tonight and speak to you about a topic that I am truly passionate about. As Kara noted, I am Chief Strategy Officer for Corning Incorporated and for those of you who don't know us, I think the shortest description that fits us is we are a global leader in glass science and related capabilities. For 165 years, we've applied our expertise in advanced glass, ceramics, optical physics to solve some very tough technology challenges. And in many cases, we've also disrupted industries. Our innovations do include the first ball for Edison's electric light, the substrate at the heart of catalytic converters, and the first low-loss optical fiber. We have a long track record of game-changing innovations. But tonight I am not here to talk about how my company is a game changer, but instead to talk about the game-changing material that's at the center of just about everything that we do. Glass is arguably one of the most transformative materials of all time. And today it's changing the game in industries from consumer electronics to telecommunications, life sciences, architecture, transportation, energy, and more. Given that, I'd like to start tonight by describing exactly what glass is and illustrating some of the properties that make it such an extraordinary material. Next, I'll review some of the revolutions that glass has spawned and talk to you about why, despite those, we believe that we have only recently entered the glass age. I'll then finish up my prepared remarks by taking a look at some examples of glass-based breakthroughs that Corning and other innovators are bringing to life. And we'll finish up the evening, as Kara mentioned, with discussion and questions. So does that sound good? All right, great. Let's get started. So what is glass? At its core, glass is quite simple. It consists mostly of silica in the form of sand. But glass is not a single material. Instead, it's a broad family of materials. By adding different elements from the periodic table to sand, you can dramatically change its properties and tune its performance for specific applications. So let's talk about some of the inherent and achievable properties that make glass so special. I'm sure you already appreciate its aesthetic properties. For more than 3,000 years, artists have used glass because of how it forms, how it feels, how it handles light, and how it takes on color. But glass is also remarkable for its technical attributes. For example, glass is one of the world's most stable and enduring engineering materials. Silica glasses get their stability from a continuous network of silicon-oxygen bonds. These bonds remain intact from the time the component sand is mined through the life cycle of the material. That's why glass objects endure for centuries. In contrast, metal corrodes and plastic disintegrates or generates toxic chemicals when burned. Let's consider an example of glass's stability. Have any of you heard someone say that the windows in medieval churches are thicker at the bottom than the top because of relaxation that takes place over the centuries? Yes, well, it's completely wrong. In fact, it would take about 20 trillion times the age of the earth for gravity to produce a visible change in the thickness of a window. Next, glass is almost impermeable. It's been used for thousands of years as a container because of its effectiveness at protecting context from the surrounding environment. A molecule oxygen takes about two weeks to get through a one-millimeter thick piece of high-tech plastic. That same oxygen molecule would take about five trillion years to get through a one-millimeter thick piece of silica glass. Glass also features unprecedented transparency, which makes it ideal for both radio frequency and optical transmission and communications. The glass used for optical fiber is about 30 times more transparent than the clearest water, and only about 1% less transmissive than air on the clearest day. If the ocean were made of the glass used to make optical fiber, you could see the bottom from every point on the planet. And despite its reputation for being fragile, and what happened to the glass in the war earlier this week, glass could be engineered to be incredibly strong and damage-resistant. Scientists estimate that glass's theoretical strength is about 15 gigapascals. Now, my guess is only a few of you in this audience regularly measure things in pascals, so let me give you an example to explain. Imagine a scale that measures the pressure under an elephant's foot. To give this scale to measure even one gigapascal would require stacking 10,000 elephants on top of one another. Now, despite repeated requests, Kara would not allow me to bring 10,000 elephants into the museum this evening, so I'll not be demonstrating this directly, but later in my talk I will give you a different example of how strong glass is. Finally, glass is incredibly versatile, which opens up tremendous possibilities from both an artistic and an engineering perspective. Artists can mold, cast, blow, and draw glass into their desired shape because its viscosity decreases with increasing temperature, unlike most other materials that have an abrupt transition from solid to liquid or gas. And, as I noted earlier, scientists and engineers can create a nearly infinite range of new glasses by combining silica with different elements from the periodic table. To date, scientists have incorporated about 50 elements with silica glass to create unique compositions. But we're just getting started. That brings us to the end of the first section. I've described what glass is and illustrated some of the properties that make it so cool. And with capabilities like that, it's no surprise that glass has already had a profound impact on the world. The development of spectacles in the 13th century allowed monks to copy and study religious texts and help popularize reading with the invention of the printing press. The development of crown glass in the 14th century allowed people to incorporate windows into their homes while keeping out cold, wind, and rain. The invention of the telescope in the 17th century expanded our understanding of the universe and the environment in which we live. The development of the microscope enabled the discovery of the cell, bacteria and viruses, leading to vaccines and antibiotics. Glass mirrors led to the formal use of linear perspective during the Renaissance and encouraged artists such as Rembrandt to paint self-portraits. The development of tempered glass in the early 1900s led to saber military gear and automotive windshields. Glass lenses and picture tubes created major shifts in popular culture by enabling photography, motion pictures, and television. And the invention of low-loss optical fiber in 1970 created the backbone of the internet and ushered in the telecommunications revolution. I think you'll all agree that's a pretty impressive list. In light of glass's long history and already profound impact on the world, it's reasonable to ask why do we believe that we are living in a glass age today? One reason is the ubiquity of glass and its central role in our day-to-day lives. We interact with glass screens on our computers and smartphones. We take pictures through glass lenses, transmit information through glass fibers, protect materials in glass covers and containers, and incorporate glass elements that are both functional and decorative into our homes. But the main reason that I believe that the glass age is happening now is because of the journey that we've been on from magic to science and from science back to magic. Let me explain. For centuries, the LeCourgis Cup confounded observers with its mysterious property of appearing jade-green when lit from the front and ruby-red when lit from the inside. The cup was fabricated in the fourth century, but it was only recently that scientists figured out that the phenomenon was due to the presence of nanoscale clusters of gold and silver. When monks are used early spectacles as reading aids, they didn't understand how the eye refracts light or focuses images. When Murano glass makers in the 15th century made extraordinarily clear crystal by melting river stones with plant ash, they almost certainly didn't understand how silica interacted with sodium or manganese. People believed that magic was behind all these things. Today, we replace that magic with science. We understand how different formulation and fabrication techniques determine the atomic state and structure of a glass. That allows us to precisely control its mechanical, thermal, and optical properties. Our understanding of glass physics and chemistry also reduces our dependence on serendipity and time-consuming trial-and-error experimentation. We now use sophisticated modeling techniques to predict the behavior of how glass will interact with its environment and behave in specific applications. This knowledge has dramatically accelerated the design and development of industrial glasses. In the past 10 years alone, scientists have unleashed capabilities that we could only dream of a few decades ago. As I noted at the beginning of my talk, Corning has a 165-year history of glass-based innovation. Yet some of our most recent breakthroughs have happened in relatively quick succession. In the past decade, Corning scientists have developed chemically strengthened glass that can withstand the impact of baseballs traveling more than 35 miles an hour. Let's take a look. Soda-like glass is on the left. Corning Gorilla Glass is on the right. All the panes of glass are one millimeter thick. Quite the difference, huh? Corning. We've also created flexible glass that's slimmer than a dollar bill. Did you ever think you'd see glass do this? And we've developed antimicrobial glass that suppresses the growth of mold, mildew, fungi, and bacteria. Of course, we're not the only ones forging new frontiers in glass. For example, the VTT Technical Research Institute of Finland has created smart lenses that use optical light guides and large, high-quality images that augment reality. And scientists at Mosai Corporation have developed bioactive glass glasses that heal flush wounds by stimulating the body's natural defenses.