How the 173-year-old glassmaker behind Edison’s light bulb and iPhone screens became a Silicon Valley darling

In his corner office at Corning Inc.’s towering steel-and-glass headquarters in Corning, N.Y., CEO Wendell Weeks keeps a small, yellowed piece of paper in a dark wood frame behind his desk. Dated Nov. 17, 1880, it’s Thomas Edison’s $311.97 order for Corning Glass Works to produce the glass for a risky new invention of his: the lightbulb.

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“I keep that to always remind me: If someone comes to you with an idea that seems small, but there’s a way to make the world just a little bit better, say yes,” Weeks says. “A lot of ideas won’t work, but the ones that do, those are really good.”

The 173-year-old glass company has proved this concept again and again. The creator of iconic kitchen brands such as Pyrex and CorningWare also developed the glass for telescopes, the earliest TV picture tubes, and heat-resistant glass windows for spacecraft. It answered the call of Apple’s Steve Jobs to create Gorilla Glass—that touch-sensitive, hard-to-shatter glass encasing your smartphone. And it created the fiber-optic cables connecting much of the internet—and those now powering the AI revolution.

Those innovations help explain why the CEO of a company in upstate New York with just $13 billion in 2023 revenue has the admiration and friendship of some of the biggest names in business, from Silicon Valley tycoons such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to Motor City moguls like Ford’s Jim Farley. Jony Ive, Apple’s former head of design, says there are few collaborators he holds in higher regard—high praise from the man who crafted the industry-shifting iPhone. “As a designer, as a creative, it’s a complete honor to work with somebody like Wendell,” Ive says. “He is utterly consumed by trying to work with you to solve difficult, sometimes almost seemingly impossible challenges.”

The original purchase order from Thomas Edison to Corning for the glass encasement for Edison’s lightbulb in 1880. Lauren Petracca for Fortune

A formative failure

But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the 6-foot-7, 65-year-old Corning CEO. In the 1990s, Weeks was the Corning vice president tapped to run a new optical fiber business to power the burgeoning internet—an innovation that drove Corning’s valuation to nearly $100 billion at the height of the internet bubble in 2000.

That bubble burst the following year, sending the company’s stock price plummeting from some $100 to $1. But Weeks proved his mettle by remaining committed to the enterprise after the dotcom crash. Even when Corning lost 99% of its value and had to lay off half its employees, Weeks insisted on the soundness of the strategy and continued to develop the company’s fiber tech.

He recalls begging company leadership not to fire him and instead let him stay on to clean up the mess: “I said, ‘I’m chaining myself to the wheel here. I’ll be a janitor or whatever it is, but I’m staying until this gets fixed.’ They said, ‘Well, it’s not going to be a janitor. We’d like you to become president.’”

Since then, Corning’s big bet on optical fiber has paid off, and it now accounts for 30% of the company’s revenue. Thanks to the rise of AI, tech giants such as Microsoft are flocking to Corning’s new and improved optical fibers to support hyperscale data centers and generative AI, which require far more fiber than has been used in the past, at much higher speed capabilities.

With a market cap of $41 billion, Corning’s stock price has increased some 50% since January. In October, the company announced a $1 billion multiyear deal with AT&T to provide this next-generation fiber, and Weeks has set a target of adding more than $3 billion in annual sales over the next three years. “We were right that ultimately there’d be a lot more fiber required,” Weeks says, laughing. “We were just off by a decade or two.”

The company’s ordeal at the turn of this century forged Weeks’ leadership style, observed Amazon founder Bezos, who met and befriended the Corning CEO when he joined Amazon’s board in 2016. “My gut is that Wendell was greatly shaped by Corning’s near-death experience,” Bezos tells Fortune. “And it has made him a much better leader.”

From Scranton to Corning

Weeks joined Corning 132 years into the company’s 173-year history. Founded in 1851 by a merchant named Amory Houghton Sr., it began as the Bay State Glass Co., a small company in Massachusetts. Houghton moved it a few years later to Brooklyn before settling upstate in Corning in 1868 and changing the company’s name to match the town’s. The company spun off the Pyrex and CorningWare businesses in 1998, but the names and tech they’ve created remain. The Houghton family took the company public in 1945 and sold its controlling stake in 2005.

Weeks’ path to becoming CEO of a Fortune 500 company wasn’t a straight line. He was born in Scranton, Pa., where his father was a plumber and his mother a secretary at the local elementary school. Neither went to college, and both were alcoholics, he says.

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