Starlite

Basic Information

This was a material invented by an amateur chemist named Maurice Ward as a way to prevent deaths during fires. It proved to be a good enough insulator that it could keep an egg painted with it raw even when a blowtorch was applied for five minutes, and was barely scratched in later tests with laser pulses. As such, it attracted interest from investors, but no patent was filed or deal made. The inventor was reluctant to reveal the chemical formula or let testers retain samples due to fears of exploitation. He died in 2011, leaving his invention mysterious and unreplicatable.

Sources

Bibliography

1. Starlite

Game and Story Use

• In a Twenty Minutes Into The Future setting, materials with similar heat-tolerant properties could be widespread.
• The way in which the material failed to be commercialised could be a model for another invention failing, or being covered up, for that matter.