"I have Maurice Ward sitting next to me, and can offer the following updates.
a) He is making great progress toward development of material for specific applications.
b) He is working with a manufacturing company in the US and has just produced a commercial quantity (as opposed to laboratory-sizes) of product that is due for certification on January 29. Market surveys indicate that one product will have in the area of 4 million units with a market value of $0.8 billion. Further within a different market a test recently carried out (a burning cigarette test on furniture foams) revealed a result confirming that a weight loss of only 0.4% was made. The standard to pass this test is a weight loss of 20%. In a vertical burn test in connection with aircraft interior materials whereby Starlite is to be a fire barrier, the test requirements are that the impingement can reach 8" in height, and Starlite has actually achieved an impingement restricted to 0.125". A burning afterflame of 15 seconds is allowable, and Starlite has no afterburn, in fact has a minus reading. Weight loss allowed is 10%, Starlite has 0.3% weight loss. Watch for it soon in aircraft interiors.
c) Nobody has actually effectively been able to plagiarize the formula or reproduce the product for Starlite, rumors to the contrary. Certain governments (not within his knowledge the US) have had a multimillion dollar program with a remit to copy and reproduce the composition and intellectual properties, without success even having gained illegal access to certain elemental information and data. This may be the source for the rumor in Update #4.
d) Currently Maurice has been approached (3 meetings) regarding buying the technology, and the figures being discussed are approximately a half-billion for 50%. This offer appears to be genuine. A meeting took place as recently as 1/10/97. The largest brokerage house in the US is discussing and negotiating a flotation on the stock market estimated at the present time to be taken up by institutional investors in excess of a billion dollars on first offering. Another investor from Miami is negotiating to open up a Maurice Ward Starlite Technology Center which will be employing, among others, top personnel from NASA. Technical advisors will be people already involved from certain universities.
e) NBC and others who have done stories on Starlite are looking to do updates.

Harness racing is Maurice's biggest interest at the moment. He's only been doing it a few years (started at age 61 or so!). He used to ride and be interested in horses when he was young, and just picked it up again later in life. He has five horses, some of which are apparently world-class champions, and he does his own training. He brought over several flyers and brochures of his horses and so forth last October on his first visit with us. We took him to our local track which had just started its harness season, and it made a big hit.

OK, here's the info on Maurice Ward's race records:
- 6/10/94, York, 1 1/4 mile: Old record was 2:35, Maurice set 2:32.00. That's not a misprint; three full seconds better than the old record!
- 6/11/95, York, 1 mile: Old record 1:59.04, Maurice set 1:59.01
- 9/19/95, Tir Prince, 1 1/4 mile: International free-for-all, set new record of 2:33 and won by 50 yards
- 7/6/96, York, 1 1/4 mile: Beat his own record of 6/10/94, 2:31.08
And not a record, but on 7/9/96 at Tir Prince won another International race against the odds-on favorite American horse Sable Matters (which had won 47 of 50-something races in the States). Beat him by 10 lengths! To qualify for these "free-for-all" races, I found out, your horse has to have a handicap of at least 40 yards. Maurice's horse Leckwith Gypsy is at the maximum 80 yard handicap."

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Last revised: March 17, 2002