The enigma of Starlite

One of the strangest stories in material science concerns the mysterious substance called Starlite. It was reported that Starlite could be applied to surfaces like a paint yet was capable of resisting temperatures of over 3000 °C. Frustratingly, Starlite’s inventor died without publishing its formulation.

Maurice Ward, a hairdresser from Hartlepool, enjoyed inventing things in his spare time. In the 1980s, he bought an extruding machine that was being sold off by a local chemical plant and began experimenting with manufacturing materials. He initially attempted to make a material that could be used in car bonnets but, after disappointing results, threw away the samples he had produced.

After learning about an air disaster at Manchester Airport, Ward became interested in developing a flameproof material. He retrieved the results of his car bonnet experiment from the bin and mixed them with solvents in a kitchen blender. After passing the resulting mixture through the extruder, Ward found that the sheets of materials he had produced withstood the heat of a blow torch flame and he named the material Starlite.

Showing great faith in his newly produced material, he placed some Starlite on his hand, aimed the blow torch at it and was amazed to discover that he couldn’t feel the heat. His discovery was met with incredulity from the scientific community and Ward decided to silence the doubters by demonstrating Starlite’s properties on the BBC television programme Tomorrow’s World

 The presenter first demonstrated the effect of a blow torch on an untreated egg – almost instantaneous destruction. Then, the blow torch was turned on an egg covered in Starlite for around four minutes.

On turning off the flame, the surface of the egg was barely warm to the touch and the egg was cracked to show it was raw inside. This demonstration caused renewed interest from scientists who found that Starlite could resist temperatures equivalent to 10,000 °C in simulated nuclear blasts.

Ward was resistant to sharing samples of his material for fear that companies would reverse engineer the material and he did not patent Starlite to avoid describing its manufacture. He died having only shared the details of the manufacturing process with a number of close relatives. In 2017, the American company Thermashield reported on its blog that it had acquired the rights to manufacture Starlite from Ward’s widow and had successfully reproduced the material.