Corning Museum of Glass
Near Watkins Glen, New York
Corning Incorporated, the company that made the glass for Edison's first lightbulbs and later the screens of every smartphone, was founded in eighteen fifty-one and moved to this small Southern Tier city in eighteen sixty-eight. In nineteen fifty-one, on its one hundredth anniversary, the company gave the nation a gift: a museum dedicated entirely to the history and art of glass.
The Corning Museum of Glass opened with two thousand objects and five staff members in a low, glass-walled building designed by the architects Harrison and Abramovitz. Today it holds more than fifty thousand objects spanning three and a half millennia of glassmaking, the largest such collection in the world. It is also one of the most visited museums in upstate New York, drawing roughly four hundred thousand visitors a year.
