While a tanked-up steroid-filled John F Kennedy nearly ended the world over his drug fuelled obsession with Cuba, a boffin working for the glass maker Corning hit on a brilliant idea to make really tough glass.
According to AP the glass did not bend, or scratch, could be laid out super-thin and was generally seen as a brilliant breakthrough.
They thought it would be the material for windshield glass but got a rude shock when the British came up with Pilkington Safety Glass which could be made a bit cheaper.
To make the glass Corning ran the sheets through a "tempering" process that set up internal stresses in the material. It is the same idea used in Pyrex glass, but the glass was tempered in a chemical bath, not by heat treatment.
Beaten by the British, no one could really think of a use for it and the blue-prints and patents sat around gathering dust.
Now however someone has remembered they invented it and think it could be the new face of touch-screen tablets and high-end TVs.
According to Reuters, Gorilla picked up its first customer in 2008 and has quickly become a $170 million a year business as a protective layer over the screens of 40 million-plus cell phones and other mobile devices.
Now Corning hopes that frameless flat-screens tellies that could be mistaken for chic glass artwork on a living-room wall, if your artist paints Italian games shows, will take off.
A sheet of Gorilla would add $30 to $60 to the cost of a set but many analysts think it could be worth it.
However the other place it could end up are the Motorola Droid smart phone and LG Electronics' X300 notebook.
"The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner features electrochromic windows which replace the pull down window shades on existing aircraft. NASA is looking into using electrochromics to manage the thermal environment experienced by the newly developed Orion and Altair space vehicles"
One More Use:
That's a cryogenic Chihuahua!
It's very delicate. I got a friend back in Juarez who knows how to freeze-dry these things for the "wet mount". Look at that. It's a girl. Pop that little bitch in the micro wave for two minutes on defrost... she'll be running around the room. Fastidious & Precise
We're still here and your precious USSR is all kaput.
Khrushchev, famously denounced Stalin. Comon this is history 101.