SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE                      Article:                                                                 Inventors & invention - Eureka UK                                by Peter Martin

“Gentlemen, I am now going to show you something you have never seen before - and you probably won’t believe it.” The brave words were those of David Nicholas, addressing a gathering of fifty government scientists at the Defence and Evaluation Agency (now Qinetiq)), at Farnborough, Hampshire. Nicholas, of Business Link Wessex, was introducing Mike Keenan and just one of his truly incredible inventions.

Keenan, a painter and decorator by trade, was understandably nervous: “Me, in front of all these guys with brains as big a buses.” First, like a busker with a magic show, he drew a number of materials - paper, cloth, plastic resin and wood - from a battered suitcase. Next, he subjected each one to the roaring white heat of a blowtorch. Only the paper became thoroughly scorched, but it didn’t ignite. For a grand finale, he covered his hand in a grease he’d formulated himself, and aimed the blowtorch at a range of one half of an inch, with no harmful effect. Qinetiq’s boffins exploded into applause, then crowded around Keenan to ask all sorts.

“Mike stands to make millions and millions and millions,” said Nicholas, who has unrivalled experience of getting British inventions to market. In Keenan’s case, well, consider: fireproof building materials of every sort, including paint; everything inside a home, factory and office block made fireproof. But try getting your mind around this: fireproof petrol and aviation fuel. Yes, our man can chemically treat both so that, in the event of a crash or dangerous spillage, the fuel gives off a fire-dampening gas that’s not activated during ordinary combustion.

Keenan’s a bloody miracle. He comes from Essex, had a rubbish education and, on first meeting, appears as quick as a potato. Yet by doing what the best of lone inventors do - following his passion through skint and skinter - he turned himself into a world-beating chemist. He’s a classic in another sense, too. No expert to start with, and therefore “not knowing any better”, he thought: “What if?” Sir Christopher Cockerell was like that. He’d have never been able to invent the Hovercraft, so he reckoned, had he been a trained naval architect because he would have “known” that it couldn’t possibly work. Conversely, and with a twinkle, he liked to “prove” to engineers that fish couldn’t swim.

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For Keenan, it started with an odd discovery back in l974. On a job in a power station, he’d been burning out some old paint tins for re-use, and poking the fiery clumps with a stick, when he noticed that the stick just wouldn’t burn. The floor of the power station was thick with fuel ash and, somehow, it had made the stick fireproof.

Intrigued, when next in his local library - looking for jobs in the gratis newspapers - he asked for some books on chemistry. Next, he bought just ?8’s worth of chemicals, “Which sort of did my ?10 petrol money for the week.” From then on, he couldn’t, wouldn’t, leave it alone. Give him anything - MDF or the stuff they make TV casings out of - and he’d find a way to fireproof it.

Now a garden-shed widow, his wife, Rita, was a martyr to patience. “Look, Reet! Fireproof rubber!” It’s a wonder he didn’t kill himself. To demonstrate fireproof polystyrene, he filled a soft cup with petrol and aimed a blowtorch at it. Astonishingly, all this was just a hobby - for 5 years, 10, 15. But in l990 he went to ask his bank manager for a loan, for a van. “Really, just to show him I wasn’t a guy to spend money on drink - that I had other interests, like - I showed him this fireproof cheque. He’d never seen one of those before! And when I pulled out me blowlamp and gave ’em a demonstration, all the bank staff seemed so impressed, I thought: ‘Oh.’”

Now taking his fiery magic show on the road, he stunned and amazed nationwide but no one came close to offering him a deal. Aware of the origin of the King’s Cross disaster, escalator grease, he approached the new-products boss at London Underground - not just offering his fireproof grease, but fireproof cardboard cladding for the Tube’s miles of dust-thick spark-combustible power cables, oh, a whole list of clever things. But, as Keenan tells it, he got very short shrift. “Companies, generally, don’t like outsiders coming up with stuff.” On and off, he was busking his inventions for fully eight years before Business Link’s Nicholas heard tell of him. But one look, and Nicholas - who had good defence department contacts - had the boffins from Qinetiq assemble.

These two years on, Keenan is poised to bring the first of his inventions to market; but he’s so prolific a chemist-inventor, this one is nothing to do with fireproofing. Every car manufacturer in the world has drain-

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grilles on the floors of their spray-shops from which it is nigh on impossible to clean the paint. Or it was until Keenan came up with a cheap, quick, solvent coating. An agent for Fiat’s tractor division was the first to snatch Keenan’s arm off, and now Honda, Lotus and Ford want a piece, too. Millions and millions and millions then. Meanwhile, Keenan continues to scuffle gratefully between painting and decorating jobs.

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