Maurice Ward

Maurice Ward was a British inventor best known for his invention of Starlite, a thermal shielding material. A former hairdresser from Hartlepool, County Durham, England, he liked to invent things in his spare time and bought an extruder from ICI in the early 1980s. The Manchester plane fire of 1985 inspired him to look for a material that does not burn much and gives off little toxic smoke, and he mixed up to twenty formulations of heat-resistant, non-toxic plastics a day until one dissipated the heat of a blowtorch. The material gained publicity in the 1990s when he held a blowtorch to a coated egg on the television series Tomorrow's World. He refused to sell Starlite directly or allow unsupervised research and kept the formula private, and he died in May 2011 at the age of 78.