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The Story of Starlite, the 'Blast Proof' Material (bbc.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the lost-forever dept.

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.

39 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by Mathinker · · Score: 3, Informative

    nuclear blasts and lasers

    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.

    1. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by Mathinker · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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?

    2. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by surfcow · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Gosh,... on the one hand we have The Standard Model.
      On the other hand ... a dead hairdresser's undocumented process, without samples.

      Extreme claims require extreme evidence.
      It ain't there.

    3. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    4. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 5, Informative
      The surrounding discussion indicates something ablative, or at least some form of sacrificial material in general:

      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.

    5. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 4, 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!

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    6. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by jythie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Eh, I think it is still a good phrase. People tend to describe a claim as 'extraordinary' when it not only stands on its own but requires the unseating of other well tested things. So it not only requires evidence of itself but evidence showing why a bunch of other things have been wrong all along, thus 'extraordinary'.

      But, at minimal, evidence for a claim needs to match the claim, so if the claim is extraordinary so is the evidence for it.

    7. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 2

      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 survive the infrared and UV energy being pumped out by the expanding fireball would go a long way to limiting the damage from a nuclear blast, especially since a lot of the effect caused by these weapons are the subsequent structure fires, choking smoke, and generally removing oxygen from the area due to all the shit that is on fire.

      Of course whatever this crap is / was does nothing to help with the radioactive fallout and the long-term effects of that, and probably has it's own health hazards since it was discovered while burning 1970s household waste in his back yard which is a super-clean manufacturing process, but whatever.

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    8. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by rl117 · · Score: 2

      "Just" is a bit dismissive. It was quite an achievement, and one which hasn't been reproduced to date.

    9. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by chill · · Score: 4, 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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    10. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Your attitude is so 20th century, CIS/white biased. Today, extraordinary claims require that you provide it didn't happen. We have to believe the claim, and it's your job to prove the claim could never be...

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    11. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by shaitand · · Score: 2

      A dead hairdresser's undocumented process but hardly without testing or evidence. Try actually watching the videos.

    12. Re:Nuclear blasts? Lasers? by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      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 work. It all becomes plasma in the end.

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  2. Tomorrows World by Anonymous Coward · · 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

  3. Patents by bickerdyke · · 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.

    --
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    1. Re:Patents by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 3, 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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    2. Re:Patents by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 5, Informative

      Patents haven't worked for people without millions to defend them for years.

    3. Re:Patents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Patents by 91degrees · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The guy was a bit of a kook. I could imagine he simply didn't trust the patent system.

      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

    5. Re:Patents by GuB-42 · · 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.

    6. Re:Patents by james_gnz · · Score: 2

      I'm sorry and I know that they aren't very popular here, but that's what patents are for.

      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 University Press.

    7. Re:Patents by Solandri · · Score: 4, Insightful

      More broadly, this is why technology barely advanced for thousands of years. Paranoid craftsmen discovering new techniques but keeping them secret, whispering them to their children while on their deathbed. Except like this guy, a lot of them never managed to pass on the secret, causing it to be lost, only to be discovered again later, to be lost yet again, etc. (We're still trying to figure out how Stradivarius made his violins.) It's not a coincidence that the pace of technological advancement began to pick up around the same time as the printing press - when ideas could be made semi-permanent by publishing, thereby entering them into the shared knowledgebase of the human race.

    8. Re:Patents by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      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.

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    9. Re:Patents by Xest · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Maybe that explains this:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      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.

    10. Re:Patents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      > (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.

    11. Re:Patents by Tom · · Score: 2

      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 is.

      --
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    12. Re:Patents by MachineShedFred · · Score: 2

      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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    13. Re:Patents by SunTzuWarmaster · · Score: 2

      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/...

    14. Re: Patents by tazan · · Score: 2

      You obviously have never read the story of Robert Kearns and the intermittent windshield wipers.

    15. Re:Patents by timholman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      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.

    16. Re:Patents by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 3, 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.

      ...then you have the Shkrelis.

      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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    17. Re:Patents by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      Tank armor is layers of steal and depleted uranium. It takes special weaponry to penetrate it. See for example.

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    18. Re:Patents by greylion3 · · Score: 2

      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 were the best you could make, at the time, and for centuries after, without knowledge of what they were made from, and access to extremely dense (maple) wood.

      The Wikipedia page about them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      also supports this:
      "In 2008, researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, announced further evidence that wood density caused the claimed high quality of these instruments. After examining the violins with X-rays, the researchers found that these violins all have extremely consistent density, with relatively low variation in the apparent growth patterns of the trees that produced this wood.[12]

      Yet another possible explanation is that the wood was sourced from the forests of northern Croatia.[53] This maple wood is known for its extreme density resulting from the slow growth caused by harsh Croatian winters. Croatian wood was traded by Venetian merchants of the era, and is still used today by local luthiers and craftsfolk for musical instruments."

      The wikipedia page also mentions various wood treatments as being possibly significant, as the wood contains higher amounts of notably copper and aluminium than newer violins, but I think that goes a bit too far to discuss here.

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    19. Re:Patents by DRJlaw · · Score: 2

      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.

      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 patent barrier, but the (new) drug approval barrier, where one must either run a complete set of trials to demonstrate safety and efficacy or prove that your prospective competing version is therapeutically equivalent to the original drug in an "Abbreviated New Drug Application" or ANDA. Meanwhile, the existing drug manufacturer can deny you the samples that you need to prove equivalence (either by control or by changing the product via 'evergreening'), lock out the drug from the market via pharmacopia agreements with benefit managers, and if need be drop the price below one that recoup the new capital investment while still providing them a profit over their sunk and well-amortized costs.

      Nothing to do with patents. You link to wikipedia after saying that the practice is "not just limited to them," but wikipedia has no non-pharmaceutical examples.

      So where are they?

  4. Necromancy by The_Dougster · · Score: 4, 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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  5. C'mon, it's easy. by Opportunist · · 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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  6. Maskelyne's Cream by alanw · · Score: 2

    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...

  7. Just watch the BBC videos for facts by Moskit · · Score: 4, 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)...

    1. Re:Just watch the BBC videos for facts by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      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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