Next to the skull of a newborn baby and a 5ft 10 man’s ego on Tinder, there are few things more near universally considered more fragile and easy to shatter than an egg. That is unless of course said egg is coated in Starlite, a space-age material invented by a hairdresser of all things that would allow an egg to nestle safely Johnny Storm’s jockstrap without issue.
Now a lot of people’s first reaction to that sentence is likely some variation of “What the fuck is Starlite?“. The answer to which is, quite simply, nobody really know. What we do know is that this mysterious wonder-material could have changed the world as we know it, if any fucker knew besides Maurice Ward knew how to make it.
A hairdresser by trade, Ward was supposedly inspired to make Starlite whilst observing a bonfire and noticing how certain materials seemed oddly resistant to the gentle lick of Sweet Lady Flame.
Supposedly made from random shit Ward found under his sink and mixed together in a fucking blender in exacting, but closely guarded quantities sometime in the 1980’s, Starlite could have theoretically revolutionised everything from space travel to housing. Why? Well to put it simply Starlite was virtually immune to the effects of heat to the point any object coated in a thumbnail thick layer of it could survive the equivalent of being hit by Sephiroth’s Supernova Limit Break.
Which sounds like bullshit right? Well NASA thought so and decided to test the extent of Starlite’s heat-resistant properties by shooting it with a military grade laser outputting the kind of heat seen at ground zero of a nuclear blast and it was fine. But more importantly, so was the thing coated in it. Something Ward himself would frequently demonstrate, with eggs.
To explain Ward’s go-to way to showcase the potential applications of Starlite was to slap it on an egg and then blast it with a blowtorch. After 10 minutes or so, Ward would the pick up the egg with his bare hands and then crack it open to show that it was still raw.
Which itself is remarkable but according to Ward the real benefits of Starlite were that it was organic, made of readily available and easily procured materials that could be found in anyone’s home (read: cheap) and perfectly safe. The latter he discovered by feeding handfuls of the stuff to his dogs who ate it without issue. No, really.
So why isn’t everything we own coated in this shit? Well, to put it simply nobody knows how to make it. Ward infamously refused to patent the exact composition as doing so would have required him to reveal how it was made and he failed to reach an agreement with entities as influential as NASA the British Ministry of Defence because he would only agree to sell them any if he and he alone was responsible for producing it.
As of right now, while numerous private and government agencies are still interested in procuring Starlite, most efforts fail due to Ward’s new hobby of being dead. Meaning the secret of how to make Starlite is probably lost forever.
Admittedly some members of his family supposedly still know how to make Starlite and have admitted to being interested in selling it. They are however similarly as stubborn as Ward himself was when it comes to actually revealing anything about it and most discussions stall around as quickly as if they’d dug up Ward’s skeleton and asked it instead.
So more than anything you have to at least give Ward props for being consistent.
