 O n the evening of March 8, 1990, viewers of the BBC science programme, Tomorrow's World, were treated to a sight so unbelievable that argument has raged ever since over whether the footage was real.  The presenter Peter McCann lit an oxyacetylene torch and applied its 1,200C flame to an egg coated in a thin layer of paste. Five minutes later the surface of the paste was glowing red hot. Unperturbed, McCann picked it up with his bare hands and cracked it into a bowl. The egg was still raw.  The demonstration seemed to defy the laws of science. Everyone knows that you can't cook an egg for five minutes without it even getting warm. The secret, explained McCann, lay in the coating, a heat-defying plastic that he called Starlite.  as if that weren't enough, McCann went on to reveal that this "miracle" material was not the cutting-edge work of a university department or private research facility. It was invented by a former hairdresser called Maurice Ward. Ward had no formal training, no academic background, no special equipment, no funding and no help other than from his wife Helen and daughters Jane and Caroline.  No wonder many thought that the Tomorrow's World item was a hoax.  In the intervening two decades, many even more preposterous claims have been made for Starlite: that a sheet a few millimetres thick can withstand temperatures equal to the surface of the Sun; that it can withstand lasers that cut solid steel in seconds and, most implausibly, that it can withstand nuclear blasts equivalent to 75 Hiroshimas. It was even claimed that Starlite, which according to Ward is as easy to make as a cake, could make a significant dent in global carbon emissions by dint of its exceptional insulating powers. Recently it emerged that Ward, now 79 years old, has an inoperable brain tumour, raising the possibility that the secrets of one of the most intriguing and frustrating materials ever invented, could be permanently lost. Ward says that the only other person who knows the formula is his daughter Carrie. She learnt it two decades ago and, like him, has no formal training.  If even a fraction of the claims made for Starlite are true, it should have changed the world and Ward should be a billionaire. Yet 20 years on, he has failed to bring his miracle product to market, he is still living in his modest bungalow in a cul-de-sac in Hartlepool and his family is heartily sick of the whole thing. So what went wrong? Speaking late last year, a frail Ward ruefully explains that he has finally started the process of patenting his remarkable invention - or at least two comparatively minor applications of it: ballistics and a fire door (there are several different forms of Starlite it transpires). He tells me that the patents are due to come through in January. and then he pauses. "Unless I withdraw them. a patent makes all your secrets and special knowledge public, you see." a check with the Patent Office reveals that no patents have been granted.  Jane rolls her eyes at her father's behaviour. Carrie doesn't want to be quoted. But according to his wife Eileen, who has patiently spent the last quarter of a century, teetering on the edge of billionairedom, the remark with its blend of outlandish claims and cantankerousness was typical of Ward. "He's just so pig-headed. The trouble is he's so passionate and paranoid about everything. Sometimes I wish he'd never discovered it. No peace, constant interruptions. It has been a nightmare."  Now I know what you are thinking.  Surely no material, especially one created by an amateur, could do these things. The reason why nothing has come of Starlite is because all the claims are nonsense, the product of Ward's imagination. But what makes the story of Starlite so intriguing is that the utter implausibility of Ward's claims keeps on bumping up against hard evidence that they are in fact true.  Ward first became interested in heat-resistant plastic after seeing news footage of the Manchester aircrash in 1985, in which 55 people died. "It wasn't the crash or fire that killed them, it was fumes from the plastics in the plane. They were all using halogenated materials. So we started looking at what we can do that doesn't have halogens in."  He had dabbled with chemicals for 20 years as a hairdresser, mixing his own dyes and setting solutions. Then, in 1974, he went into plastics, buying waste and reforming it into damp-proof membranes. By the 1980s he had a 16,000 sq ft factory and a small area in which he could "try stuff out".  But it was definitely amateur hour, more a family project than anything. "I guess I was the lead chemist," Ward says. "The wife and I, and our daughters, would mix bits and pieces and apply them and control them."  In 1989, after mixing hundreds of formulations, he accidentally mixed a batch from some old plastic and it seemed to meet his aim of being able to resist heat. "We put an oxyacetylene torch on it and nothing happened. I thought, shit this is far better than anything I'd have ever expected."  Convinced that he had something truly exceptional on his hands, Ward recruited Sir Ronald Mason, former chief scientific adviser to the MoD, as a marketing consultant. With his heavyweight endorsement, Ward secured introductions to a string of multinational corporations.  But serial flirtations with ICI, British aerospace, numerous american investors, the defence contractor Hunting, Nasa and finally a half-billion-dollar deal with Boeing, all came to nothing. In each case Ward says a major factor was that they were either corrupt or tried to steal his formula. "ICI tried to stifle it ... a bloke from Bae wanted backhanders ... Even Boeing tried to pinch it," he claimed. Those who worked with Ward remember it differently. Ken Miller, then chief executive of Hunting now chairman of Colt International, recalls Ward being charming but difficult. "On the surface this stuff had huge potential. The issue was that he wouldn't trust anyone. He thought everyone would do him down and he wanted to retain control of the test programme. But we weren't prepared to invest in a product we couldn't test ourselves."  It's tempting to speculate that Ward was being difficult because he knew that Starlite couldn't live up to his claims. But tests by numerous UK and US government agencies prove otherwise.  Following Tomorrow's World, he received a call from the atomic Weapons Establishment at Foulness, Essex, which wanted to test Starlite's ability to protect against nuclear weapons. It passed with flying colours, withstanding a simulated 10,000C nuclear blast. That same year, the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern, attacked a sheet of Starlite with lasers capable of cutting through steel. again it passed with distinction. according to the International Defence Review, which reported the tests in 1993, "Starlite showed little damage to the surface".  Professor Keith Lewis, head of the MoD's Electro-Magnetic Remote Sensing Defence Technology Centre, who conducted the Malvern tests, gives measured suppor 