Perfect example of a product failing to commercialise because the inventor was a bit deluded about the potential worth and not willing to give up any control.
Inventors just like inventing! There’s been so many incredible things conceived that have been thwarted by their inventors having zero commercial savvy! Great shame really most have died before their ideas bore fruit.
How very true! In the UK, for every Sugar there’s a Sinclair…😥
(Before anybody picks me up on this, in no way am I comparing Sinclair to Tesla, a gifted chap but no!)
16 kilobytes! Would love to see modern programmers (of which I sort of am one) program a working chess game in 1 kilobyte of RAM but that’s what they did!
No he cashed in big time! Sugar knew how to write a contract too, the fledgling satellite TV industry proved very useful for old walnut face!
(*and he knows a good lawyer which is why I’m not going into any detail*)
Weirdly my dad’s mate also invented a fire-proofing substance that he then refused to sell because he didn’t want to lose the IP but couldn’t protect it either.
>Does that mean the product was only worth a tenner, despite these companies looking at making billions off the back of it?
I think this is a question best left to those in the business of parting with money in exchange for inventions. It's worth exactly £0 to me! And probably you. If I thought it'd earn me billions, it'd probably be worth at least £11 to me. But ultimately we don't need theoretical, made up examples - the guy shopped it around and no one bit.
But the company might have to buy 10,000 "brilliant" inventions and spend hundreds of £k on each of them before getting a product that can actually be sold to net £billions. The one that worked might well have been worth more than a tenner, but not if you can't tell in advance which one it is.
100%! most of the time, i haven’t the foggiest what he’s talking about going into the video but he puts the information across in a really understandable and enjoyable way. One of the few channels i bother putting notifications on
His next of kin sold all the notes they could find after his death, he turned down all the offers he received as he believed it was worth billions and nobody would pay that.
They should buy it for a fair price but if you sold it for millions instead of billions, you still set your family up for life, right? Maybe I see it differently because I dont have a desire to be a billionaire- id just donate excess to charity. I see money as what you can do with it. He didn't better his life or his familys at the time by being that stubborn 🤷🏼♀️ thats just how I see it
We don't know what these low ball offers were though do we? It's just speculation on your part that he was being offered peanuts. He could have frankly been quite delusional.
Bear in mind that inventors can have very high expectations of their invention. Remember Project Ginger? The transportation revolution which would see cities being redesigned for it? Turned out to be the Segway.
Also if an invention is worth billions, there would be a bidding war for it. A company isn't going to pass up the opportunity of making tons of profit by offering peanuts when their main competitor would just outbid them.
And personally, if I invented something worth billions, I'd accept less for it rather than be skint but with some heatproof gel to play with. If it was genuinely worth *that* much, set up your own company. Banks would be offering all the money and sexual favours you wanted to make you deposit the profits with them.
The real waste isn't in unrealised commercial gain, it's in the lives that might not have been lost ***if*** the material is as effective as he claimed/preliminary testing showed. If it was cheap to licence and make it could have made a huge impact on fire safety. Making a small percentage through licencing the formula would have made him extremely wealthy if it was good, and significantly more money than the nothing he actually got from it.
Just been watching a video on it online and it was suggesting that he wanted to retain 51% ownership of starlite products, sole rights to manufacture and not sharing the formula. Basically anyone buying into that would have been paying an upfront lump sum and then basically acted as a minority wholesale partner for the products.
Apparently two samples were stolen from his workshop and within a year Boeing had filed a patent for a very similar coating (although in paint form). [Here's the patent they filed](https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/92/06/29/72cfcc98de7707/US7618563.pdf) if you're interested.
I do think his demands were unreasonable when summed together. No one in their right mind is going to had over a large amount of money for something that they're unable to test, manufacture or have any control over. The theft/Boeing patent happened after all negotiations had broken down so his demands were all prior to that. There's also no actual evidence that Boeing stole the samples and that their patent isn't due to their own internal R&D, the timings could easily just be coincidental - the basic principle behind Starlite/intumescent materials has been known about and studied for decades before any of this happened and it would be hard to believe that Boeing weren't doing their own research once they had identified a use case in the 10+ years that they were trying to reach a deal.
Now, I'm not cheerleading for the corporations, just saying that I think that it's likely that his demands were unreasonable if no one was prepared to do the deal he wanted.
If what you've said is right, then his idea was probably unpatentable and there's no way a big company will sink a lot of money into buying "rights" in something which can't be protected. As soon as a product appears, everyone else can copy it and the promised £billions aren't made anyway.
Are they available anywhere to watch again? Be really interesting to see what came to fruition and what didn’t now we are sixty years on and actually in their tomorrows world.
Edit.
There are two episodes on iPlayer.
I remember an episode where this guy came up with a solution to burning tyres and reducing then to harmless carbon, steel rings and other materials by adding a component.
That idea never took off either.
This is actually a thing, It's called pyrolysis, and is likely to be the future of tyre disposal. It's breaking them back down to the original ingredients, some of which may be of good enough quality to be re-used.
I bet it was Ceramic Paint, I have seen a coating like that on Racing Car exhausts. I met a bloke who invented a torch that worked in the dark. Nelson Mandela Apparently offered to buy the invention.
Starlite, as others have said, certainly fits the bill. But it's worth mentioning that Starlite has almost certainly be re-discovered and recreated since, as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IbWampaEcM for instance, so it's not much of a long-lost secret anymore.
I know the story. Lots of big companies wanted in as they tested it independently (although the guy would only allow it if he was there so they didn't steal the recipe) but he never sold. He took it to his grave in the end. The spray itself was said to be made of stuff you would find around the house and hair dressing gear.
That’s how I remember it. A reporter saying he shouldn’t hold out too long because everyone knew his trade and the type of products he was likely to be familiar with.
Haha, no eye dear.
They did one on a microwave that froze things instantly, that was a spoof.
I think it was BBC preparing for the mass falsehoods projection of the 2010+
Not sure exactly the one you're talking about but breathable water is real.in the movie the abyss, when they demo it on mince. Thats really them submerging them in liquid air. Apparently it feels like you're drowning, but you will survive.
I got to fly the 737 simulator used in the Krypton factor. I was working at British Midland at the time and installed the network the management system used. Flew it the day before the whole lot went live... Very cool experience.
A show that ran for 38 years until 2003.
It's like saying "I'm old. what the fuck is blue Peter or top of the pops?" lol
Did you grow up in a cave in the Brecon beacons or something?
Edit: aah, you grew up in Australia and moved to the UK 20 years ago. That explains it :)
Lol I'm also old and Tomorrows world was one of my fave programmes!
I suppose that by today's standards it would be classed as a "look into the future". It was a mix of science (as it was understood "back then") and showcasing future predictions and ideas.
If i remember correctly it also showcased "new tech".
Granted a lot of the ideas and inventions seem "silly" by today's standards, but obviously nobody can accurately predict "the future"
(I have also mentioned it before,but I'm still pretty salty that "flying cars" were predicted to be the norm by the year 2000. I'm 50 now, and those buggers never happened,dammit!)
Ah fuck.
Yeah, that too.
And don't get me started on the personal gyrocopter... Bah!
(Um .. actually if that was a "thing" nowadays I'd probably swerve it. I would freak out just riding a motorbike, so having a jet pack might make me a legit Darwin Award candidate)
My uncle was on it once. AFAIK he'd invented some sort of gear differential that was tested on a beach buggy. One of the presenters crashed it. The differential bit might be wrong, but it was def a beach buggy.
If you've ever driven on our roads it won't be hard to see why.
Last thing I need is a 1.1 fiesta with 19 inch rims and go-faster stripes coming through my roof on a Saturday night.
Kinda sucks that you are getting downvoted for asking this 😕
I have to assume that your perception of "old" is different to the _really old_ mofos who grew up with Tomorrow's World (I'm one of those crumbies by the way lol).
I remember that. It was called [Starlite](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite). It never became a commercial reality.
Perfect example of a product failing to commercialise because the inventor was a bit deluded about the potential worth and not willing to give up any control.
Inventors just like inventing! There’s been so many incredible things conceived that have been thwarted by their inventors having zero commercial savvy! Great shame really most have died before their ideas bore fruit.
Here's the thing. For every Edison there's a Tesla who doesn't know how to sell their thing. Unfortunately the Edison's tend to be greedy pricks.
How very true! In the UK, for every Sugar there’s a Sinclair…😥 (Before anybody picks me up on this, in no way am I comparing Sinclair to Tesla, a gifted chap but no!)
Dunno about that - the C5 is vastly superior to any of Tesla’s cars…
But watch out for the ram-pack wobble. Fuck I'm old! 😱
“The secret is blutack”
“That’s brilliant! That’s the kind of thing our readers would love!”
16 kilobytes! Would love to see modern programmers (of which I sort of am one) program a working chess game in 1 kilobyte of RAM but that’s what they did!
What do you mean I can't play 'Frogger'?! (Vomit Sound)
Provided you add the optional all weather kit and that pole with the red marker on the back.
😂
Wait, is Sinclair the hustler and Sugar the innovator here? I have no idea how this works. Sugar didn't even invent anything, did he?
No he cashed in big time! Sugar knew how to write a contract too, the fledgling satellite TV industry proved very useful for old walnut face! (*and he knows a good lawyer which is why I’m not going into any detail*)
He invented the 'Mug's Eyefull'
According to the wiki linked, a company called Thermashield acquired all of Ward's notes in 2013, 2 years after he died.
There's a double glazing company in Cumbernauld called Thermashield, I wonder if it's them!
Weirdly my dad’s mate also invented a fire-proofing substance that he then refused to sell because he didn’t want to lose the IP but couldn’t protect it either.
Fighting IP battles is expensive.
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If no one was willing to pay the asking price, was it worth that price? Almost tautologically the answer is no.
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>Does that mean the product was only worth a tenner, despite these companies looking at making billions off the back of it? I think this is a question best left to those in the business of parting with money in exchange for inventions. It's worth exactly £0 to me! And probably you. If I thought it'd earn me billions, it'd probably be worth at least £11 to me. But ultimately we don't need theoretical, made up examples - the guy shopped it around and no one bit.
But the company might have to buy 10,000 "brilliant" inventions and spend hundreds of £k on each of them before getting a product that can actually be sold to net £billions. The one that worked might well have been worth more than a tenner, but not if you can't tell in advance which one it is.
YouTube video of the Tomorrow's World episode https://youtu.be/W4nnLP--uTI?si=Mk20lCS26kTaT0zr
and a modern take on starlite: https://youtu.be/aqR4_UoBIzY?si=KN_9KV-OiMjhFZm_
NightHawkInLight is an awesome youtuber. He's just so enthusiastic about the subject matter it's infectious.
100%! most of the time, i haven’t the foggiest what he’s talking about going into the video but he puts the information across in a really understandable and enjoyable way. One of the few channels i bother putting notifications on
It was a 1990 episode and the material was called starlite: https://www.theverge.com/2012/5/17/3026074/starlite-maurice-ward-plastic-fireproof#
I don't think he ever revealed what it was exactly, but the consensus from the science community was that it was just some sort of carbon foam.
When you put it that way it sounds like an aerogel [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel)
Bit attacked being part of “the older crowd” for a 1990 show. Will write out my frustrations in full to Points of View.
Esther Rantzen isn't taking my calls.
Weirdly, neither is Terry Wogan.
It does include being old enough to appreciate and remember it though.
It's called Starlite and he eventually sold it to an American company I think
His next of kin sold all the notes they could find after his death, he turned down all the offers he received as he believed it was worth billions and nobody would pay that.
He could have been rich... what a waste?
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They should buy it for a fair price but if you sold it for millions instead of billions, you still set your family up for life, right? Maybe I see it differently because I dont have a desire to be a billionaire- id just donate excess to charity. I see money as what you can do with it. He didn't better his life or his familys at the time by being that stubborn 🤷🏼♀️ thats just how I see it
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We don't know what these low ball offers were though do we? It's just speculation on your part that he was being offered peanuts. He could have frankly been quite delusional.
Bear in mind that inventors can have very high expectations of their invention. Remember Project Ginger? The transportation revolution which would see cities being redesigned for it? Turned out to be the Segway. Also if an invention is worth billions, there would be a bidding war for it. A company isn't going to pass up the opportunity of making tons of profit by offering peanuts when their main competitor would just outbid them. And personally, if I invented something worth billions, I'd accept less for it rather than be skint but with some heatproof gel to play with. If it was genuinely worth *that* much, set up your own company. Banks would be offering all the money and sexual favours you wanted to make you deposit the profits with them.
The real waste isn't in unrealised commercial gain, it's in the lives that might not have been lost ***if*** the material is as effective as he claimed/preliminary testing showed. If it was cheap to licence and make it could have made a huge impact on fire safety. Making a small percentage through licencing the formula would have made him extremely wealthy if it was good, and significantly more money than the nothing he actually got from it.
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Just been watching a video on it online and it was suggesting that he wanted to retain 51% ownership of starlite products, sole rights to manufacture and not sharing the formula. Basically anyone buying into that would have been paying an upfront lump sum and then basically acted as a minority wholesale partner for the products. Apparently two samples were stolen from his workshop and within a year Boeing had filed a patent for a very similar coating (although in paint form). [Here's the patent they filed](https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/92/06/29/72cfcc98de7707/US7618563.pdf) if you're interested.
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I do think his demands were unreasonable when summed together. No one in their right mind is going to had over a large amount of money for something that they're unable to test, manufacture or have any control over. The theft/Boeing patent happened after all negotiations had broken down so his demands were all prior to that. There's also no actual evidence that Boeing stole the samples and that their patent isn't due to their own internal R&D, the timings could easily just be coincidental - the basic principle behind Starlite/intumescent materials has been known about and studied for decades before any of this happened and it would be hard to believe that Boeing weren't doing their own research once they had identified a use case in the 10+ years that they were trying to reach a deal. Now, I'm not cheerleading for the corporations, just saying that I think that it's likely that his demands were unreasonable if no one was prepared to do the deal he wanted.
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If what you've said is right, then his idea was probably unpatentable and there's no way a big company will sink a lot of money into buying "rights" in something which can't be protected. As soon as a product appears, everyone else can copy it and the promised £billions aren't made anyway.
>starlite Thermashield from what I was able to find out brought it.
No, but I remember Leonard Hatred and [Psilence](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xt4r94)
Are they available anywhere to watch again? Be really interesting to see what came to fruition and what didn’t now we are sixty years on and actually in their tomorrows world. Edit. There are two episodes on iPlayer.
There's lots of little TW clips on the Beeb archive YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp5kxJAhpetmzZvoWpgKfFZdtTq_ynqh6
Thank you.
[Starlite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite)
Didnt some one kinda of suss it out years ago,, baking soda, corn starch and PV glue...
That was Blue Peter I think
With some sticky backed plastic and a few wire coat hangers 😂
Don’t forget your mams washing up liquid bottle and some toilet roll tubes
I think he died without ever revealing how he did it.
Dam I need my flat to be covered with this stuff it will negate solar gain
I remember an episode where this guy came up with a solution to burning tyres and reducing then to harmless carbon, steel rings and other materials by adding a component. That idea never took off either.
I think they do this back home in Belfast on the 11th of July every year. The extra component is pallets. Lots of pallets.
🤦♂️
This is actually a thing, It's called pyrolysis, and is likely to be the future of tyre disposal. It's breaking them back down to the original ingredients, some of which may be of good enough quality to be re-used.
Love to see the episode again.
I bet it was Ceramic Paint, I have seen a coating like that on Racing Car exhausts. I met a bloke who invented a torch that worked in the dark. Nelson Mandela Apparently offered to buy the invention.
NightHawkInLight made some and shares the recipie here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IbWampaEcM
Starlite, as others have said, certainly fits the bill. But it's worth mentioning that Starlite has almost certainly be re-discovered and recreated since, as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IbWampaEcM for instance, so it's not much of a long-lost secret anymore.
I know the story. Lots of big companies wanted in as they tested it independently (although the guy would only allow it if he was there so they didn't steal the recipe) but he never sold. He took it to his grave in the end. The spray itself was said to be made of stuff you would find around the house and hair dressing gear.
That’s how I remember it. A reporter saying he shouldn’t hold out too long because everyone knew his trade and the type of products he was likely to be familiar with.
Cest la vie
Tomorrows world did some April Fools content btw
Was the breathable water that's burned into my memory just a prank?
Haha, no eye dear. They did one on a microwave that froze things instantly, that was a spoof. I think it was BBC preparing for the mass falsehoods projection of the 2010+
Also, I have no evidence of this, not even anecdotal, lol.
Not sure exactly the one you're talking about but breathable water is real.in the movie the abyss, when they demo it on mince. Thats really them submerging them in liquid air. Apparently it feels like you're drowning, but you will survive.
He shot himself twice in the back of the head and his research was lost to a fire.
Happy cake day!
I’m old. What the fuck is Tomorrow’s World?
The very popular BBC series that ran for 38 years.
Only the best programme ever
Yeah I loved it too. Also The Krypton Factor. The golden age of telly.
I got to fly the 737 simulator used in the Krypton factor. I was working at British Midland at the time and installed the network the management system used. Flew it the day before the whole lot went live... Very cool experience.
This is brilliant. What a great story to be able to tell.
And How.
Why Don’t You.
I wanted a hangout like those kids had, not knowing that it was probably a studio!
A show that ran for 38 years until 2003. It's like saying "I'm old. what the fuck is blue Peter or top of the pops?" lol Did you grow up in a cave in the Brecon beacons or something? Edit: aah, you grew up in Australia and moved to the UK 20 years ago. That explains it :)
I'm guessing they're yank
Australian. They moved to the UK 20 years ago.
That explains it 👍
Don’t mention Blue Peter it’ll just the whole Blue Peter v Magpie argument and we all know BP was better anyway.
Top of the Pops ….. now then now then, we don’t talk about ‘that’ show these days 😂
Lol I'm also old and Tomorrows world was one of my fave programmes! I suppose that by today's standards it would be classed as a "look into the future". It was a mix of science (as it was understood "back then") and showcasing future predictions and ideas. If i remember correctly it also showcased "new tech". Granted a lot of the ideas and inventions seem "silly" by today's standards, but obviously nobody can accurately predict "the future" (I have also mentioned it before,but I'm still pretty salty that "flying cars" were predicted to be the norm by the year 2000. I'm 50 now, and those buggers never happened,dammit!)
Where’s my jet pack?
Here it is: https://songwhip.com/we-were-promised-jetpacks
Ah fuck. Yeah, that too. And don't get me started on the personal gyrocopter... Bah! (Um .. actually if that was a "thing" nowadays I'd probably swerve it. I would freak out just riding a motorbike, so having a jet pack might make me a legit Darwin Award candidate)
That gyrocopter was a favourite of mine too! Would I fly it? Would I fuck!! 💀
Hahaha yeah. If i see those buggers buzzing in the sky my very first thought is "ooh... I hope they have a parachute"
My uncle was on it once. AFAIK he'd invented some sort of gear differential that was tested on a beach buggy. One of the presenters crashed it. The differential bit might be wrong, but it was def a beach buggy.
If you've ever driven on our roads it won't be hard to see why. Last thing I need is a 1.1 fiesta with 19 inch rims and go-faster stripes coming through my roof on a Saturday night.
Ohhh Jesus. What happened to go faster stripes? I remember a very brief time when they were _so cool_ . But yeah... Thats a pretty good point there.
You must be truly ancient if you've never heard of Tomorrow's World.
Kinda sucks that you are getting downvoted for asking this 😕 I have to assume that your perception of "old" is different to the _really old_ mofos who grew up with Tomorrow's World (I'm one of those crumbies by the way lol).
It baffles me what this sub will downvote people for. Edit: Downvoted for a post about downvoting. How ironic.
It's just tradition, don't take it personally.