Starlite

Starlite is an intumescent, heat resistant material said to insulate against extreme temperatures by charring into an expanding carbon foam when heated. It was invented during the 1970s and 1980s by Maurice Ward, a British hairdresser and amateur chemist, and named by his granddaughter Kimberly; a 1990 demonstration on the BBC program Tomorrow's World showed an egg coated in Starlite surviving several minutes under an oxyacetylene torch while staying cool and raw inside. Ward never commercialized the material before he died in 2011 without disclosing its exact formula, and the American company Thermashield LLC acquired rights to it in 2013, saying it has since reproduced and validated the material, though many of the original claims remain unverified by outside researchers.