The Story of Starlite, the 'Blast Proof' Material (bbc.com) 206
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: The BBC has posted an interesting video series on "Starlite," a white paste developed in the 1970s and 1980s by British hairdresser Maurice Ward that could completely insulate any object it coated, like a raw egg or a piece of cardboard, against extreme heat sources -- even acetylene torches, nuclear blasts and lasers capable of heating an object to 10,000 degrees Celsius. Anything Starlite paste was smeared on could withstand extreme heat exposure without the coated object melting or combusting or heating at all in the process. The heat-proof paste got a lot of attention around the world when it was demonstrated on the BBC's Tomorrow's World TV program in 1990. Ward was an eccentric inventor -- not a classically trained scientist -- who came up with the formula for Starlite by experimenting wildly with different substances. He got the initial idea for Starlite when he was burning garbage in his backyard one day and one particular piece of garbage simply would not burn at all. Ward thought that Starlite would be worth billions when commercialized. He let NASA and other scientists test Starlite -- it did work as advertised -- but never allowed anyone to retain a sample of the substance, fearing that it could be reverse engineered. Starlite never was commercialized properly, and Ward died in 2011 without making the millions or billions he had imagined he would. Sadly, Ward took the chemical formula for Starlite to his grave with him. To this day, nobody knows the exact chemical composition of Starlite, or how one might go about recreating the substance.
Nuclear blasts? Lasers? (Score:3, Informative)
There are limits as to how well ordinary matter can resist the ionization of its electrons. As far as I know, energetic enough photons of the correct frequencies can convert anything into plasma.
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In good Slashdot tradition, I posted before doing real research.
It seems that the material might have been designed to disperse the incoming energy via slow ablation, in similar fashion as spacecraft reentry heat shields work.
There are limits as to how well a non-moving object can survive this way, I think. Even if the shield absorbed all of the incoming energy, you still end up surrounded by a cloud of super-heated plasma. Anyone want to chime in?
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Gosh,... on the one hand we have The Standard Model. ... a dead hairdresser's undocumented process, without samples.
On the other hand
Extreme claims require extreme evidence.
It ain't there.
Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? (Score:5, Insightful)
>Extreme claims require extreme evidence.
The quote is actually : extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The quote should be retired because it is wrong and perpetuates bullshit ideas about how science works.
Extraordinary claims just require evidence, that is all. Reproducable, confirmed scientific evidence is all that is required.
The only reason this quote is repeated so often is because of the individual from whom the quote originates.
Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? (Score:4, Insightful)
But, at minimal, evidence for a claim needs to match the claim, so if the claim is extraordinary so is the evidence for it.
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Extraordinary claims just require evidence, that is all. Reproducable, confirmed scientific evidence is all that is required.
Some people like to use adjectives. If you want to treat every possible claim as equal then that's up to you.
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I remember reading about this in the newspaper when this stuff was first invented... it was apparently demonstrated in front of a number of people that a raw egg could be coated in just a millimetre or so of this substance, and then blasted with a blow torch on full heat for something like 20 minutes. The egg was cracked open and apparently still raw and cold after the demonstration.
The inventor was terrified that someone was going to try to take credit for his idea and there wouldn't be anything he co
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I remember reading about this in the newspaper when this stuff was first invented... it was apparently demonstrated in front of a number of people that a raw egg could be coated in just a millimetre or so of this substance, and then blasted with a blow torch on full heat for something like 20 minutes. The egg was cracked open and apparently still raw and cold after the demonstration.
It's almost as if you didn't click the video link in the summary.
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The quote is actually : extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The quote should be retired because it is wrong and perpetuates bullshit ideas about how science works.
But that really is how science works. If you make an extraordinary claim, such as that you've found particles move faster [wikipedia.org] than light, you're going to need extraordinary evidence before the position is accepted.
If you're trying to prove the case for ESP [wikipedia.org], would you accept the same amount of evidence as for a more ordinary claim?
This is the basic idea behind Bayesian [wikipedia.org] probability.
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I wouldn't call the claims he made "extraordinary," really.
He's making a claim about the properties of a material. Such claims are easily tested and verified. The inventor's refusal to provide samples for more than a handful of demonstrations is problematic and contributed to why the material was never turned into a commercial product.
That said, other people have created similar materials with similar properties since then. (I loved the BBC documentary where his kids were saying "ours is better." That's a n
Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are close; it should be:
On one hand we have The Standard Model.
On the other, a dead hairdresser's undocumented process discovered while burning trash in his back yard in the 1970s , without samples.
Whatever he came up with is roughly derivative of melted and slightly charred packaging and household waste from the UK in the 1970s. It's probably quite the cocktail of asbestos, brominated plastics, lead, and velvet smoking jackets. The formula is probably lost to the world, as we don't generate the same kind of toxic shit headed to the landfill anymore, and we have HOAs to prevent people from "improving" the neighborhood aroma by dumping household waste in a hole in the in the back yard, dousing it with diesel fuel, lighting it on fire, and being surprised by the God-knows-what carcinogenic goop left in the bottom of the hole that just! won't! burn!
Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, on the other hand, it was tested by the U.S. Military at the White Sands Missile Testing Range by subjecting it to a 5-kiloton non-nuclear explosion. It was also subjected to -- and passed -- tests by the U.K. nuclear weapons agency as well as tested involving high intensity pulse lasers.
Watch the video series, it is very interesting.
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I can understand that "he never commercialized it" so even if governments wanted to buy some there was none to buy.
And no one was allowed to hold onto a sample.
But when he died in 2011 there were no samples found???
No governments stepped in to "snoop" around? No heirs found a chunk sitting around? No safe deposit box?
I'd imagine that a sample or formula exists somewhere.
If you have a good thing and it's proven to work why would you not commercialize it? Or partner with some business schmuck who can handl
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I agree with what you are saying, but in this particular case, the inventor was very obviously paranoid... afraid that some large company from whom he could not defend his claim because he was not rich would try and take credit for his invention.
It is unlikely it occurred to him that if he did not reveal the secret, that he would die before anyone else might be able to benefit from it, which is of course what happened.
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From what I understood by the videos, it works by turning itself into solid carbon while at the same time expanding the foam between the carbonized surface and the object, thus making an even thicker insulating layer in between.
I'm not sure if it works via ablation, but they did some tests heating it up and then touching the surface which were not hot, so I would believe that it's more about heat reflection than absorption.
As for the withstanding of nuclear blasts, they mentioned it's thermal resistant, not
Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? (Score:5, Informative)
Mr Ward came to my lab about a year before his death needing help to turn what was essentially a party trick into a useable & commercialy viable product. The problem he had was although the powder component did exactly as it said on the tin, he had found no way of applying a lasting coating. All he really has was some powder mixed with PVA glue, the problem being that although you could apply it to certain objects it's longevity was no more than 2 weeks. While testing we discovered that a sample he'd kept for almost 10 years could be destroyed in a matter of minutes under a methylacetylene-propadiene propane blowtorch. Unfortunately after many samples & tests we where unable to find a effective application method & we parted company on good terms. Sadly this is the true reason why Mr Ward was never able to sell or bring his incomplete product to market
As for the nuke-proof claims? Pure fantasy, unless you're quite a long distance from ground zero, but in that case vehicular armour or similar will provide the same level of protection.
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You wouldn't even have to be that far from ground zero, depending on the size of the bomb and the structure you are attempting to protect (for various values of that far - 2.5 km from ground zero would do it for a good 'ol just-fission bomb). The blast wave diminishes with the inverse-cube law, where the thermal pulse diminishes on the inverse-square - with large hydrogen bombs the thermal pulse will out-range the overpressure effects of the detonation by quite some distance.
Some kind of material that can
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Yes. Just an ablative, hyped up by members of the press who don't know what ablatives are.
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It was quite an achievement, and one which hasn't been reproduced to date.
Google "intumescent coating", you can buy it by the tanker-load from a range of vendors.
Just watch the BBC videos for facts (Score:5, Informative)
Just watch the BBC series of videos to get actual information.
Material was tested by Ministry of Defense, they used 4kt nuclear bomb equivalent. Goal of material was to disperse heat (thermal energy), provided it withstands the shockwave. There is also many more details available on lasers (tested energy), view of the inventor on patents (from an interview)...
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I'm not where I can watch the video today but did they actually use a nuclear bomb to test it? If not then they really didn't test it for being nuke proof. There is no real equivalent to a nuke short of a nuke. Sure you can simulate blast effect with conventional explosives but you can't simulate the nuclear fireball of a few million degrees.
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This was not testing blast effects or radiation effects but thermal effects.
They wouldn't need to use a real nuclear bomb for such specific test like thermal protection for military objects outside of fireball range. In the video the person from MOD mentions that the blast might have damaged the object/Starlite anyway. Starlite was not protection against nuclear bomb explosion.
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Yup, I called BS on this too when I read it. These people get their science from hollywood. They don't really understand what a laser or a nuclear blast really is. They treat a nuclear explosion as just big ass bomb.
They don't understand that the heat generated by a laser or inside the fireball of a nuclear blast is hot enough that the nuclear forces holding matter together break down. It doesn't matter how "spacy" or advanced the science is when the basic physics holding your shit together cease to
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If you watch the videos it's not "blast" proof, and they never tested it for any mechanical strength in the videos. However the intense radiation as from a nuclear blast or laser is completely absorbed, with one scientist quoted as saying the depth of damage appears to be exactly the minimum needed to accommodate the laser, nothing is transmitted further. The material then expands to a low thermal conductive carbon foam which is just warm to the touch immediately after an oxy-acetylene torch is turned off.
Tomorrows World (Score:3, Interesting)
As a small child I remember seeing this demonstrated on a UK Science program in the 70's I think. It truly was as amazing as it sounds
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Where do you think the Heat Shields for the NASA Space Shuttle came from? They basically do the same thing.
Unobtainium (Score:2)
Unobtainium is always good to have in your BOM.
Yeah, it really does wonders, but I can't sell it to you.
Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry and I know that they aren't very popular here, but that's what patents are for.
Afraid of commercializing something and someone reverse-analysing and stealing it? Patent it! It's public knowledge then, but you can sue the crap out of anyone trying to steal it.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure the UK would throw a national security exception on publishing that patent. Maybe they did, and it's in use in their military.
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If it really works... Rumour has it that while it performed well in demonstrations it was not durable, which would have greatly limited its commercial applications. A cynic might suggest that he was hoping someone would pay him for the rights to his invention before discovering this, and hence he did not want to patent it or allow others to retain samples for longer term testing.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole affair smacks of pseudoscience. It has many of the classic symptoms:
(1) An inventor without any training or scientific background who purports to have invented a device or solved a problem that has eluded scientists and engineers.
(2) Unreasonable secrecy about the details of the invention, and reluctance even to work with impartial third parties operating under a non-disclosure agreement.
(3) Public demonstrations, but only when made under the direct control and supervision of the inventor.
(4) Proclaimed distrust of the patent system, or else an attempt to manipulate the patent system by filing a non-enabling patent disclosure.
(5) An attitude of "pay me the money first, and then I'll show you how to make it". In other words, you have to put your faith in the inventor and give him your money, and then he'll show you the way to "salvation". (The religious parallels are quite common with pseudoscientific inventions.)
Based on my own experiences dealing with a pseudoscientific invention (and inventor), I would bet that Ward did indeed have Starlite secretly tested, perhaps numerous times ... but you never heard about those tests, because Starlite didn't work as claimed. That leads to the final symptom of pseudoscience:
(6) Despite claims of an amazing invention, the inventor seems completely incapable of doing anything useful with it on his own. It's the equivalent of the inventor who claims to have a machine that generates free electricity, but who still pays the power company to keep his lights on.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe that explains this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Challenger 2 tanks suffered no tank losses to Iraqi fire, although one was penetrated by an Improvised explosive device (IED). This was, at the time, unprotected by Dorchester armour. The driver was injured. In one encounter within an urban area, a Challenger 2 came under attack from irregular forces with machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. The driver's sight was damaged and while attempting to back away under the commander's directions, the other sights were damaged and the tank threw its tracks entering a ditch. It was hit by 14 rocket propelled grenades from close range and a MILAN anti-tank missile. The crew survived, safe within the tank until it was recovered for repairs, the worst damage being to the sighting system. It was back in operation six hours later. One Challenger 2 operating near Basra survived being hit by 70 RPGs in another incident."
Or maybe they were just using non-penetrating warheads being fired from ineffective angles, which might be an effective approach against a Humvee but is a bit like using a BB gun to try and destroy a land rover when used on a tank. I suspect this is more likely to be the case than secret magic armour, though the good version of Chobham armour the Challenger 2 uses is still a state secret even if it probably contains nothing magical I believe.
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Role playing games vs. Real tanks? (Score:2)
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Except one Iraqi dude had a +5 mace.
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RPGs are great for taking out cars and jeeps and low-flying aircraft, but they're only good for telling a tank exactly what bearing you're on so they can put a couple hundred machinegun rounds in your general direction.
For dealing with tanks, you need anti-tank weapons where the ordinance works like a shaped charge to punch a hole in the metal and direct as much damage as possible at as small a surface area as possible. There is a reason why the arms manufacturers make both.
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That is actually how an RPG works. Modern tanks have of course been designed with defending against those kinds of attacks in mind. The effectiveness of a shaped charge projectile is highly dependent on it being detonated at the right time. If detonation happens to early then the plasma jet won't be effective on contact, and the same is true if the detonation is too late. The larger in diameter your shaped charge is the longer your plasma jet will be and so the more leeway you have in timing the detonation.
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RPGs are great for taking out cars and jeeps and low-flying aircraft, but they're only good for telling a tank exactly what bearing you're on
1950s era ones like the RPG-7 sure. Not so much recent one like the RPG-29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Similarly, 0 M1 Abrams (the US Main Battle Tanks) fell to RPG fire in the conflict. I guess they also had super-armor?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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RPG as in rocket propelled grenade, that is usually not an anti tank weapon. So why are you faking your surprise?
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Actually the RPG-7 was an anti-tank armor in its time. It's just that modern tanks are too heavily protected for either the HEAT or tandem-HEAT charges available for them to work. Most insurgents don't even have access to the tandem-HEAT charges. So it mostly ends up being used against light armored vehicles and buildings now. The Russians have more modern and effective anti-tank weapons like the Metis or the Kornet but they are less portable.
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s/anti-tank armor/anti-tank weapon/
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I'm sure the UK would throw a national security exception on publishing that patent. Maybe they did, and it's in use in their military.
The Untold Story - How the British really won the Second Falklands War.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Informative)
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Patents have never worked the way they were intended.
Patents have always worked the way they were intended. They were intended to give buddies of the king exclusive access to free shit. See letters patent [wikipedia.org].
All that crap about being for the common good and protecting inventors is propaganda.
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Only works if you have a lot of money and this guy did not.
Patents are okay but they mean e.g. the Chinese can just copy your stuff because it's all hung out there; This guy didn't want ANYONE to be able to copy his formula - He didn't want it to be in the public domain.
He didn't even keep a copy in a safe or with his family - He knew how precious his idea was but was too greedy/paranoid to trust anyone else to keep the secret... which, judging by how the world is now, was probably right.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is, he could have sold it for millions as a trade secret. He was worried about doing that though, in case it was worth billions. While that makes sense on one level, in practice, he didn't sell it, so made £0.00
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The guy was a bit of a kook. I could imagine he simply didn't trust the patent system.
Then you do it for a percentage. Can bite you in the butt either way I guess. Just ask the author of the witcher.
https://www.eurogamer.net/arti... [eurogamer.net]
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Patents don't prevent re-engineering, they make it redundant by telling you exactly how to copy.
Patents prevent commercialization of those copies for a limited* period.
* For practically infinite values of "limited".
Patents (Score:2)
Patents don't prevent re-engineering,
But you need to come up with a sufficiently different way to solve the same problem, or a new way which solve a ton of other problems. (in the realm of (stupid) software patents: see marching tetrahedron vs marching cubes, range encoding vs. arithmetic coding, etc.)
Here some groups of chemists and material engineer must come up with an entirely different recipe (an entirely different chain of synthesis reactions) which happen to give the same end product.
It's possible, but non trivial.
they make it redundant by telling you exactly how to copy.
On the other hand, the
Re:Patents (Score:5, Informative)
Patents prevent commercialization of those copies for a limited* period.
* For practically infinite values of "limited".
Patents are limited to 20 years, hardly unlimited. We are seeing the result of expired patent everyday. If you see a barrage of knockoffs of a popular product seemingly appearing out of nowhere, it usually mean its patent has expired. Another well discussed result of expiring patents are generic drugs.
You may be confusing patents with copyright, for with every work published after and including Mickey Mouse gets effectively unlimited protection.
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Patents are limited to 20 years, hardly unlimited.
Yes. And some patents do expire as planned. Yet perhaps you are unaware of the term "evergreening" which is a way that patents about to expire are extended by making minor changes and then getting a new patent to cover the changes. It's used a lot in the pharmaceutical industry, but not just limited to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And your point is? The new patent does not cover the material disclosed in the old patent.
The reason that evergreening is pretty much limited to the pharmaceutical industry is that there is not only the
Re: Patents (Score:1)
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If only there was a short video available to explain the reasons why he didn't want to patent it.
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That's OK. I don't have a problem with chemical (or pharmaceutical) patents, since those ones (and only those ones) actually work.
Bessen, James & Meurer, Michael J. (2008) Patent failure [princeton.edu]. Princeton University Press.
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Pharmaceutical patents often result in death and suffering where patients who could have benefitted from a treatment are unable to afford it, but would have been able to afford a generic version sold for a much lower price.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Informative)
That's because pharmaceutical drugs have an inverse relationship between usefulness and cost.
It costs a penny to manufacture a pill, but $300 million to get it tested for safety and efficacy--and 90% of drugs that make it to clinical trials turn out to have intolerable side-effects, so patients won't use them, so they fail. $3Bn to find a good drug.
This happens because you can't tell what drugs do by looking at them. There's a chemical compound--n-methyl-alpha-methyl-beta-hydroxide-phenethylamine--which in its (1R,2S) configuration acts as a systemic adrenal stimulant. If you remove a single oxygen atom, it becomes n-methyl-alpha-methyl-phenethylamine. If the alpha-methyl group is leaned away from you (phenethylamine on the left, alpha-methyl on the bottom), it's a harmless nasal decongestant; if it's leaned toward you, it's d-Methamphetamine. If you bind a CO2 to the 3 and 4 positions on the phenethylamine ring, it's MDMA and will destroy your serotonin system.
Notice one of these was "harmless, does nothing in relatively-high doses" because a bond was tilted a little in one direction, versus "will totally fuck you up and cause brain damage and severe addiction if you regularly take 2-3x as much as necessary to stay awake for 30 goddamn hours" for leaning the bond in the other direction.
One compound we found will kill you immediately at micro-doses in a certain chirality.
We don't know what kind of long-term damage these drugs are doing, so we test on rats for 2-3 years, then on isolated human tissue, then at high doses in preclinical trials to check safety when we're pretty sure we won't seriously injure people. There's a 3-year follow-up after filing hundreds of thousands of pages of data with the FDA for approval: you have to get more data from the drug in use on actual patients.
So what if you made a new ADHD drug?
It's expensive...kind of. $20/pill is pricey. I actually think they should bank on re-standardization, e.g. $5/pill but try to get a bigger market--although people also hate pharmaceutical companies for pushing doctors and patients to move onto their new drugs. If it's safe and it works, you can try it as a front-line treatment to help disperse those R&D costs, right? Why not?
A lot of people have ADHD. ADHD drugs disperse cost extremely well.
What about a Hepatitis-C drug?
Yeah, few people have Hepatitis-C, and the drug cures it in 3 months. You're not going to sell very many pills in total, even selling to everyone. If you get a lot of market share up front, you're going to eradicate the disease and kill your market. That's going to be one hell of an expensive drug.
In this case, a government bail-out seems fine by me: you made a drug that can totally eradicate a disease, and it only cost $3 billion! You can sell it for $90k/pill or we can buy it from you outright.
Several pharmaceuticals--Mylan's Epipens, Shkreli's toxoplasmosis pills, one generic drug that got marked up to $40k after being bought, and even athsma inhalers--get big numbers due to rent seeking. Pass a law requiring Epipens in schools and the price jumps up for no reason. "We're going to $1 billion, baby!" total profit seeking. Mismanage R&D into new applications for an old drug and jack up the price to recover. Inhalers and insulin injectors use old, cheap drugs in constantly-tweaked new delivery devices, artificially maintaining patents (devices are expensive to manufacture in small batches).
These people are unscrupulous con artists who prey on the lives of the weak and vulnerable. They need their toys taken away.
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Yes, while the costs are high manufacturers are usually unscrupulous and the motivations are tilted towards profit and away from actually helping anyone, so research is aimed at more profitable drugs (ie someone has to keep taking it rather than providing a cure)...
So have research done by government and charity, with pharmaceutical companies only allowed to perform the physical manufacturing. You could also encourage more collaboration so research could be pooled rather than wasteful parallel research cond
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so research is aimed at more profitable drugs (ie someone has to keep taking it rather than providing a cure)
Research isn't really targeted as well as you'd think. Atomoxetine, for example, was a promising antidepressant because it's an NET inhibitor; it turned out to not work well for depression (it works GREAT for some people). Atomoxetine works quite well for hyperactivity by selectively inhibiting NET in the prefrontal cortex, where dopamine is also transported primarily across NET instead of DAT: it's a non-stimulant ADHD drug. Without the DAT action, it won't get you high; it also won't improve the func
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pharmaceutical patents sort of work.
FTFY. Even pharmaceutical patents have issues. There's suboptimal research where patentability is a more important property than efficiency. There's no motivation for doing research on old drugs or natural non-patentable substances. It is better to create something similar but just different enough to make it patentable and then do research on this "new" drug. Even if there is no improvement you can still patent it, do a bit more research until some studies show a tiny improvement by pure chance and then do
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In response to AC, Bert64, ath1901, bluefoxlucid: Yes, I think I've overstated the case. I agree there are serious problems with chemical and pharmaceutical patents, and there may well be a better approach to funding this research. To scale my claim back, I think it's fair to say that chemical and pharmaceutical patents provide a net benefit overall, although I also think it's fair to sa
Re:Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
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> (We're still trying to figure out how Stradivarius made his violins.)
I'm still trying to figure out why it's taking so long for people to understand that there is nothing particularly special about Strads when they are tested in rigorous, double-blinded tests. [sciencemag.org]
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I remember seeing an article, possibly this year, suggesting that the wood for the Stradivarius violins originated from trees that grew during a particularly cold, decades-long period. The wood was therefore more dense, with better acoustical properties.
With dense wood readily available everywhere for such purposes for many decades now, it's no surprise that newer violins are superior (and the Stradivariuses may have deteriorated in various ways), but for a very long time, it's quite possible those violins
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And he was a very good violin maker. Dense wood and quality craftsmanship. I'm sure he had a few custom tools that he invented or improved, and a few assistants who worked on scrub wood until they were ready for the good stuff.
Around that time, his was the best product. And the reputation stuck even after people had better tools that made the average builder better, And the better builders strad quality. But they didn't have the dense wood.
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A great book about how patents boosted civilization:
https://www.amazon.com/Most-Po... [amazon.com]
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There are plenty of stories of inventors without an army of lawyers losing their patented invention to some corporation which does have access to a medium-sized village of lawyers.
If you are a bit of a paranoid type, those stories give you plenty of a reason to not trust the patent system.
Though unless you are also a sociopath, you would leave a secure copy with someone you trust. If you are very distrustful, you can encrypt it and leave the key with yet another person, both not knowing who the other party
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Anecdotes can change the behaviour of people, and my comment was about how these stories can influence an inventor to act the way this guy did.
So +100 bubble points for completely missing the point.
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Indeed, it is, but apparently the patent systems isn't even good for that anymore because the 'lone inventor' clearly doesn't trust the system.
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If you don't have access to a gang of lawyers and the money to fund them - sometimes for decades - the patent system doesn't work if someone else really wants to steal your idea.
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That's exactly what he was talking about in interviews: once he patented it, everyone would know the formula and would be able to create this material without paying him anything.
There are quite a lot of countries in the world where US patents cannot be enforced.
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As I remember it, he thought $megacorp should just pay him $money for the formula, and then he'd be done with it. Of course, all such companies looked at what he had and knew it would take some additional work to really commercialise it. Thus, they offered less money than he thought it was worth.
I remember seeing something about this on TV some years ago - my thoughts were that it was a cool product, but for any company to actually be able to use it, much less sell it, they'd have some work to do. He said i
Necromancy (Score:5, Funny)
Surely one of you adepts can pull his soul from the great beyond and bind it to an Alexa or something so we can recover this important lost secret!
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Tony did it [wikipedia.org] --- but now he's dead, too!
Be careful what you wish for! We're talking "knowledge of good and evil" here! :-)
C'mon, it's easy. (Score:5, Funny)
It's made of catskin. Proof: Anyone who ever had a cat knows that any amount of heat can easily be absorbed by a cat. Cat thermodynamics also mandate that heat always flows from the warmer body to the cooler body, except in the presence of a cat body whereas all warmth flows to this.
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Back when my wife and I first got married, there was this semi-feral cat that used to hang out in my father-in-law’s shop. That thing would lay down on the top of a lit cast-iron wood stove.
It was as if his fur were made of asbestos.
Maskelyne's Cream (Score:3)
Jasper Maskelyne, a British stage magician, claimed to have invented something very similar during the Second World War. One of the ingredients, however, was asbestos.
https://books.google.co.uk/boo... [google.co.uk]
That's OK, there's always Firepaste (Score:2)
Oh wait
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Oh man, I used to love watching those Project Grizzly videos when I was in high school/college.
He took the secret to his grave (Score:2)
Wait... (Score:2)
Something is very fishy here.
You want me to believe that various military and governmental science agencies got their hands on the stuff for testing and saw it working, but didn't get a sample for their own analysis? That's the extraordinary claim for which we need extraordinary evidence.
The stuff's gotta be bullshit.
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Have you tried filing for an international patent? I mean, as someone ordinary, not someone richer than some corporations combined?
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I have. It completely sucks. It's weird, requires lots of money and paperwork, takes ages and then there's the yearly fee.
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Afraid you won't be able to steal our work when we all just Walk Away?
Just walk away. You can put a stop to all this. Just walk away and we will spare your lives. Just walk away.
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