History of a Lost Supermaterial & How To Make It (Starlite Part 2)

[Applause] hi everyone in this video we will be digging back into the much requested topic of starlight which was an incredibly heat resistant material invented in the 1980s by an eccentric and arguably paranoid hairdresser named morris ward who by most accounts took the recipe for starlight to his grave though his family and an associated company claims the formula was not lost but nevertheless today is still protected as a closely guarded secret this material was tested in the 90s by several international agencies including nasa and the atomic weapons establishment in the uk the results of those tests led mr ward to claim that his fireproof putty successfully resisted the temperatures of an atomic bomb more than 10 000 degrees celsius by all accounts starlight was a very impressive substance in a successful attempt to gain publicity for his invention morris ward demonstrated starlight on television showing how it could protect an egg for five long minutes from the extreme heat of a butane torch it was this footage along with other clips filmed at the time that allowed me to make an educated guess about how starlight worked in a previous video on the subject i demonstrated my own material that could also protect an egg and my hand from a propane torch i used household ingredients namely baking soda cornstarch and common white pva glue in this video i will show an improved version of my formula i'll speak more about the history of starlight and why i believe it was never commercialized and then we'll look at the chemistry and application of some similar fireproofing products that you may be surprised to learn have made it to the open market my original observation of starlight was that as it was heated it generates a carbon foam which expands outward toward the source of heat this physically pushes the flame away from the object the starlight is protecting and the carbon foam also has insulating properties so the transfer of heat is doubly reduced i realized i could replicate this effect with a variety of ingredients at least one ingredient must be a chemical that contains carbon and releases that carbon when it burns and another must be a chemical that when heated releases a gas like co2 thus inflating the carbon as it forms turning it into a carbon foam cornstarch and baking soda were the two chemicals i selected to fill these rolls in my last video and as you've seen the result was quite impressive [Applause] i also used white pva glue as a binder to hold the two other ingredients together forming them into a putty like starlight my new recipe offers several improvements on my former three-part formula first of all i've cut the cost in half at least by eliminating the most expensive ingredient which was the glue my old formula also suffered from reduced performance once it became completely dry because it lost elasticity which you need in order to form the tiny bubbles that expand outward as they turn into the desired protective carbon foam i've also found an optional ingredient that adds both mold and insect resistance as well as an improvement i did not expect which i'll talk about in a moment these are the ingredients i use in my improved composition 40 grams of flour then 20 grams each of corn starch powdered sugar and baking soda combining this together with approximately 25 grams of water creates a workable dough it may seem like a lousy cookie recipe but each of these ingredients serves a specific and important purpose the flour is my new binder which holds all the rest of the ingredients together cornstarch reduces stickiness and allows the putty to better hold its shape and sugar is the secret to generating a carbon foam even when the resulting material is bone dry when heat is applied to my composition the sugar inside will melt providing elasticity and lubrication between the other chemicals so that gas bubbles can form baking soda is the final ingredient which when heated releases co2 and water which inflate the carbon bubbles and give us our final result an extremely heat resistant putty which can be used as is or dried into solid tiles the flame my propane torch generates is almost 2000 degrees celsius and i can hold it against a tile in my hand for several minutes before it becomes uncomfortable as soon as i turn the torch off the carbon foam is cool enough to touch almost instantly because carbon is very good at dispersing its heat as infrared light the most obvious weakness to this composition is that it's very edible both by insects and by mold so i decided to try adding borax to the recipe borax kills most insects that would eat it and also kills mold similar to baking soda it releases water vapor as gas when heated so borax could replace baking soda in my formula entirely the resulting carbon foam is slightly less insulating to heat but the added resistance to rot and insects may be worthwhile one discovery that surprised me in my tests with borax was that the carbon foam generated by a borax containing composition is significantly stronger physically than any foam i had generated before the hardness if you can believe it is about the same as an alumina fire brick which may open some new opportunities for how these normally very fragile carbon foams could be used this might be an idea i explore in future videos now the original starlight made by morris ward probably did not contain any of the ingredients that i have used so far i specifically chose to build my formulation from ingredients that are accessible to anyone so it could be reproduced the goal of mr ward was entirely different his intention was to develop a secretive product that he alone could sell as such he may have welcomed the use of ingredients that are complicated and hard to find when mr ward gave demonstrations of starlight in public or allowed it to be tested in scientific institutions he always kept the material within his sight and required anyone that handled it to thoroughly wash their hands afterward so it couldn't be hidden under their fingernails and later reverse engineered this pervasive caution and distrust certainly played a role in preventing mr ward from doing what most inventors do when they develop a new product file a patent a patent allows an inventor to sell a product without fear of being lawfully copied but there's a catch if patented the components of the invention become public knowledge mr ward's secret formula could be known by anyone who cared to look instead of a patent morris ward decided to protect his invention with old-fashioned secrecy to that end he spread many rumors which were intentionally misleading and others perhaps unintentionally so ward himself openly stated that he did not know how starlight worked only that it did he was sort of a pseudo-scientist before starlight he experimented with home chemistry in an effort to develop new plastics but admittedly he lacked a deep understanding of the science it seems morris ward worked mostly on the premise of trial and error this partially superficial understanding may have led to some of the most extraordinary claims around the properties of starlight as i mentioned it was claimed to resist 10 000 degrees celsius which is especially extraordinary because that is higher than the boiling point of any known substance tungsten has the highest boiling point around 5500 degrees just over half of starlight's claim and carbon is not far behind at 4 700. both of these elements as impressive as they are would boil away long before reaching the temperatures claimed by morris ward i'm forced then to use occam's razor did mr ward invent an entirely new element that just so happens to have the same appearance and method of generation as carbon foam or was the temperature claim the result of a misunderstanding this particular claim comes from the tests done at the atomic weapons establishment in the uk where starlight was exposed to simulated nuclear flash and lasers capable of 10 000 degrees in one clip where such a test is documented the engineer in charge is heard telling mr ward that the laser quickly shut down because an error was triggered in the software such a test should be ruled inconclusive but someone with a lack of understanding might be prone to claim that their material had resisted a 10 000 degree laser when the reality was the laser barely had a chance to turn on this is one possible explanation for the claim but there is a way in which starlight could have actually been able to resist 10 000 degrees for a certain amount of time materials like the ones that i have made are capable of resisting heat not only through insulation or by reflecting it but can also offer limited protection by a method called ablative shielding an ablative shield is used when the temperature you expect to encounter is beyond the physical limits of any insulating material instead the shield sacrifices itself peeling away in layers each layer taking heat with it as it blows off this gives the appearance of an impossibly high heat resistance but eventually it will burn through a practical application of ablative shielding was used in the first space programs for atmospheric re-entry because the spacecraft needed to withstand extreme temperature but only for a short amount of time this method of protection could be another explanation for starlight's 10 000 degree claim even if the temperature that starlight could realistically endure was exaggerated almost everyone that tested it was impressed and morris ward's phone was ringing off the hook with offers to buy it despite large sums of money practically being thrown at him the primary reason why starlight never made it into the real world was once again because of mr ward's demands for secrecy he often stated that his invention was worth billions of dollars but without revealing the ingredients the many companies and government agencies who were interested in starlight's fireproofing potential had no way to independently assess the cost mr ward also insisted that in any sale he retained 51 ownership of starlight the sole rights to manufacture it and even after selling he would not reveal the secret ingredients in other words mr ward tried to convince companies to pay millions of dollars not for starlight itself but for the right to continually purchase starlight from him this would necessarily come with a contract where the buyer would practically have to use starlight while blindfolded never allowing anyone an opportunity to figure out what it was made from add all of that together and it's no mystery why starlight never made it onto store shelves it was never truly for sale after years of failed negotiations with various companies ward's paranoia was validated on several occasions as people tried to hide samples during tests and supposedly two samples were even stolen from his workshop during a break-in it's rumored that he blamed boeing for stealing starlight they were one of the last companies to drop out of negotiations with him two is credit there is a patent for a fire resistant plastic that was filed by boeing and fits the timeline for these negotiations the mechanism used by this plastic to resist fire is its ability to generate a carbon foam this would have obviously been quite upsetting to mr ward even if boeing's plastic was not based on stolen samples of starlight its development was certainly done in order to bypass the deadlocked negotiations well this was a move by boeing that would have certainly generated accusations of theft i can say with a good level of certainty that they're plastic though it was developed because of their interest in starlight it probably was not based on samples of it the building blocks of boeing's patent and maybe even for the invention of starlight itself are listed right at the bottom of boeing's application this is one thing i appreciate about patents they create a paper trail revealing earlier inventions of a similar nature i tracked patent applications for similar carbon foam generating materials all the way back to 1958 and even this oldest example i found mentions that they are only improving on an already well-known method of fire prevention it turns out that this is an old technology which morris ward probably rediscovered in this workshop and brought into the public eye with his attention-grabbing demonstrations and by making a mystery around its ingredients now i do not go so far as to discredit morris ward's invention of starlight firstly he may not have known about existing materials that were similar also the blend of chemicals he used may have been unique and perhaps even better than anything that came before it's really impossible to say one thing at least is now clear starlight is just one of a whole family of chemical mixtures that prevent fire by a similar means the technical name for the generation of foam in the presence of heat is intumescence starlight boeing's epoxy based plastic and my own homemade tiles are all examples of intumescent materials that offer protection through a carbon foam now we know the right terminology and we can use intumescence as a search term to reveal that there are many different products that use this principle for fire protection most interestingly we can find examples of intumescent paint which when applied to a surface will expand to hundreds of times its original thickness in response to heat preventing both damage to the base material and eliminating a fuel source for the fire's spread once it's safe the carbon foam can be scraped right off and it's ready again for a fresh coat of paint this is really incredible stuff and it's available to purchase and use in your own home now since i've learned that this is an old and mature technology i was able to once again pull up some patents and get a very good idea of what ingredients are in a commercially optimized intumescent paint like this most of them use a chemical that contains phosphorus which acts as a bubble forming agent in a much more interesting way than the baking soda or borax in my recipe when the phosphate containing chemical is heated in the presence of another chemical that contains carbon it releases phosphoric acid which acts as a catalyst that speeds the production of carbon and at the same time releases water and carbon dioxide gas when you drip sulfuric acid on sugar you can see a similar reaction happen at a much faster pace this is why commercial intumescent paints can generate foam that expands so aggressively from such a thin coat intumescent paint like this uses rather rare ingredients probably if i were to speculate they are similar to the actual ingredients of starlight again the two key components are an ingredient that contributes carbon and another that fills the carbon with bubbles in this case through an intermediate reaction with phosphoric acid actual examples of intumescent ingredients are ammonium or melamine polyphosphate which decomposes into phosphoric acid and for the ingredient that contributes carbon almost every patent mentions penta erythritol some versions of these chemicals are very easy to find ammonium phosphate is a common fertilizer and erythritol is an artificial sweetener if you mix these two chemicals together in roughly equal quantity and hit them with a torch you can see they very successfully produce a carbon foam but these are not exactly the chemicals used in intumescent paint for one very good reason they're both extremely soluble in water if you put these into a paint it would probably never dry let alone stand up to water in the environment so the less common relatives of these chemicals are used instead ammonium or melamine polyphosphate and penta erythritol because they're much less soluble in water even though the results upon burning are roughly the same now even though these two common ingredients are not ideal i couldn't resist playing with the idea of making my own phosphorous based intumescent barriers using these for the primary reaction because they're so easy to come by to do this i mixed them with an alcohol-based lacquer which dries into a hard and waterproof coating and can still dry even with these extremely water soluble chemicals mixed in and in that way they're also protected from the environment for at least long enough to test here is a comparison between a commercial intumescent paint versus my coatings and then also a piece of wood treated with an ordinary layer of shellac i must admit that my version gave off much more offensive fumes compared to the commercially produced paint and i think that's probably because the shellac i used as a binder was not intended for burning [Applause] i'd like to mention one more thing that is sometimes included in these types of materials which my recipes have so far neglected an intumescent material only begins insulating from heat once the surface reaches a hot enough temperature to carbonize if you want protection from lower temperatures as well you need to add an ingredient with an inherent insulating value diatomaceous earth fumed silica glass micro balloons these are all different options that could lower the density and thermal conductivity of uncarbonized intumescent materials some of the best ablative shielding is made with phenolic resin this was a large component of the first space re-entry tiles i recently learned that micro balloons which as they sound are tiny hollow particles with a high insulation value can be made from phenolic resins and therefore might be an ingredient that serves a dual purpose both intrinsic insulation from heat as well as excellent ablative qualities the trick is how to add these ingredients to an intumescent material without reducing the overall effectiveness of the carbon foam well i'm happy to once again have brilliant as the sponsor for this video brilliant's mission is to help people achieve their learning goals and i love the methods they use to do that especially their interactive tools and challenging problems which teach scientific and mathematical principles almost subconsciously for me it's a great way to keep my mind sharp and relearn some of the topics i wish i paid better attention to in school i watch videos from other science channels here on youtube just like you probably do and i wish i had their knowledge in fields like mathematics computer science and electronics how useful those skills are in discovering the exciting things of how the world works brilliant is a great tool to help you learn those things and enjoy doing it they take complex subjects and break them down into understandable pieces accessible both on brilliance website and through their mobile app set a goal to learn something new and put brilliant to the test by going through one of their courses use mylink brilliant.org forward slash nighthawk and you'll get 20 off a premium membership if you're one of the first 200 to do so if you like videos like this one please subscribe and i'd especially like to read your comments and thoughts on this video if you could leave me one below you can directly help me in producing future videos by supporting this channel on patreon and by sharing this video with others that might be interested thank you for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: NightHawkInLight

Views: 925,142

Rating: 4.9720726 out of 5

Keywords: Starlite, Intumescent, How To, Fireproof, DIY, Homemade, Science, Fire, NightHawkInLight, History

Id: 0IbWampaEcM

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020