1 Company in Corning, New York

Corning's founding product was the glass bulb for Thomas Edison's first light bulb in 1879 — and the company has spent the century and a half since turning glass into technologies that didn't exist when it was founded. It invented Pyrex cookware, the glass picture tubes that made television possible, and the fiber optic cable that made the internet possible. Its name is shorthand for materials science. The modern Corning has five businesses: optical communications (the fiber and cable that carry the world's data traffic), display technologies (the glass substrates inside virtually every LCD screen on earth), specialty materials (Gorilla Glass, the tough cover glass on most smartphones), environmental technologies (ceramic substrates and filters for vehicle emissions control), and life sciences (glass vials and labware for pharmaceutical and biotech). Headquartered in Corning, New York — the town named for the company — with about 52,000 employees and annual revenue near US$14 billion, Corning has survived by reinventing itself every generation. Its formula is simple and brutal: invest heavily in R&D during downturns, so that when the next technology arrives (fiber optics, LCDs, smartphones, AI data centers), Corning's glass is already inside it.