This easy-to-make product could prevent fires. Why is it still a secret?
Imagine a substance that could be painted in a thin layer on any surface- then protect that surface from fires up to 10000°. Now imagine if it could be made using only regular household materials.
That substance exists.
It was made by a man who didn’t go to college, didn’t have any formal training as a scientist, and didn’t plan to change the world. His dreams of the future were bold, but that future is still just beyond our grasp. His name was Maurice Ward, and he invented a non- toxic substance that could protect the any material from catching fire or overheating. He called his invention starlite.
Maurice spent his youth as a forklift driver at a chemical company, then moved into hairdressing- a profession that he adored. He also made wigs. He loved to tinker around with all of the materials he used in his salon. It’s not entirely surprising that he mixed some wig glues with other household materials. Some have suggested he was trying to invent a new type of hair dye. He was also fascinated by plastics, recycling and extrusion. Whatever he was doing, the surprising part was the result: a material that could protect any substance from fire.
Humanitarian Roots
Youtuber Zepherus believes that the impetus for this invention was the crash of British Air Tours flight 28. Over 50 people died from smoke inhallation after this preventable fire. Much of the smoke was infused with toxic irritants from the materials inside of the plane’s machinery. Maurice wanted to create a material that could avert disasters like this, and eventually spent $250,000 to create the utilities for his big invention.
By 1986, he came up with a working prototype for his new wonder material. However, his lack of formal education made it hard to convince anyone to take him seriously. He wrote to every major British chemical company offering to demonstrate his invention, but they brushed him off via mail like they would any other crackpot. In a world where credibility is currency, Maurice had nothing.
His big break came almost a half decade later, when he went on a BBC program called Tomorrow’s World. As you can see on the video below, aircraft companies and NASA expressed interest in Starlite. It protects against fire without toxic fumes or smoke- and can be molded or used as a coating. After this video went out, everyone was suddenly interested in Maurice ward and his magical product.
Genius ≠ education
After this demonstration, companies had to take a second look at themselves: they’d been ignoring inventors like Maurice for decades, thinking them too uneducated to produce anything interesting. To understand the way that talent was utilized, an internal audit was conducted at the chemical company where Ward drove a forklift as a youth. They found that the more scientifically qualified their research chemists were, the fewer patents they contributed to. The less experienced scientists contributed more. Most shockingly, the person who contributed most to their patents had no qualifications whatsoever. This was one of Ward’s biggest legacies: showing that less-educated researchers are better at innovative thinking.
After this video went on air, over 3,000 people expressed interest in his product- everyone from Boeing to the Ministry of Defense. Maurice agreed to undergo further testing and other R&D, and it proved even more effective and long-lasting than anyone realized.
Failure to Launch
However, Maurice never ended up selling the product to anyone. He said none of the potential buyers were interested in the universal human applications of the product; instead, they were overcome by greed. The UK government spent over 5,000,000 to try to replicate it. Maurice viewed this as plagarism. Boeing wanted a sole license for it, and did extensive testing with the product. According to Maurice, Starlite passed every test; but still “dragged their heels” from 1996 until 2002. Perhaps they were angry that he wouldn’t give them sole ownership: he refused to stop talking about the product publicly. Or maybe the issue was that Maurice never let anyone keep samples of the product without his supervision. In 2002, Boeing insisted that they be given patent applications and exact instructions for how to create Starlite. Maurice pulled out of the deal.
Maurice refused to patent his invention because he didn’t want to make it public and risk theft. As the years went by, Starlite failed to get picked up. It was shunned not only by Boeing, but by every other company too. Maurice Ward died in May 2011 without ever bringing it to commercial production.
Why?
A lot of people are confused by this. Some people believe that, if the material was as revolutionary as Maurice claimed, NASA and other commercial companies would have made a compromise to use the material. But I believe it was no hoax. I suspect that their family just doesn’t know how the market works. They don’t have any industrial production capability, but refuse to sell the instructions to any companies. Companies don’t usually buy a product that they don’t understand, because how would they produce it? And if they don’t own the formula or the sole rights to its use, how would they prevent it from being sold to their competitors?
Another theory about Starlite is that it’s been secretly purchased by the government and “gone black”. This theory is mainly due to the way Starlite disappeared from the earth with seemingly no trace and no explanation. In an interview, Ward said “the formulations & composition of the formulations were fairly well documented”. However, none of this documentation is available anywhere. It seems possible that the military is experimenting with military applications of the product and ordered the deletion of all external test records. It would certainly be in the government’s best interest to keep such an easy-to-make material from the hands of the general public. Who knows what potentially hostile groups could do with it.
However, this theory loses a bit of ground when you consider the fact that Maurice’s children are still trying to sell the original formula. They even sold a version of it to an American company, but are trying to figure out what to do with their version- the full version. And they truly want to do good with it.
“Sitting in a corner it’s doing no good. It’s doing no one any good.” –Maurice’s youngest daughter, Nicola McDermott
Future of Starlite
It’s easy to imagine the good that Starlite could do in the world. The first application people usually think of is using it as a type of paint. After the horiffic fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, many people lamented that Starlite could have saved lives if it was commonly used to paint buildings. But I believe Starlite could be used in much more surprising ways. One example is childrens’ clothing. Laws require childrens’ sleepwear to be infused with fireproof chemicals that many people worry are carcinogenic. Since Starlite is a type of plastic, it could potentially be infused into clothing, removing the danger of such chemicals.
Since Starlite can be made using household materials, it could be open sourced and used across the world to prevent tragedies. In California, where there’s now “fire season”, electrical poles that go through danger areas could be treated with the substance. It could also be a helpful tool for firefighters. Imagine how efficient it would be if they could just cover their equipment in starlite, then run into a fire with no worries. One of the best things about Starlite is that you only need an incredibly thin layer. If exposed to fire, it blows up, protecting what it’s applied to as if it were an airbag.
People have tried to recreate Starlite at home, and you can find recipes and tutorials like the one above all over the internet. There is a chance that we are about to see its re-invention. Unfortunately, none of the recipes have yet replicated or surpassed the original formula, so there’s a chance this is as close to the original supermaterial as we will ever get. Even if that’s the case, Starlite’s legacy will go on. If it never saves the world from fire, then the mythos of its origin story will at least stand as a testament to human dreams and ingenuity.
“Anyone can invent something that can change the world. People shouldn’t think they have to be in some exotic lab and have to have several degrees in order to change the world. His story tells you that it’s possible to do something very novel, very new, in your own garage.” –Lee Johnson, reporter, BBC’s Searching for Starlite
