A long way from the lab
Most origin stories get tidied up after the fact. Ours is messier than the version that fits on a slide. A question about surface chemistry, asked in a university lab, ended up protecting devices in pockets around the world.
By Dr Stephen Coulson, CTO and founder, P2i
Most origin stories get tidied up after the fact. Ours is messier than the version that fits on a slide, and more interesting for it.
The science started at Durham. In the late 1990s I was doing a PhD in Jas Pal Badyal's surface chemistry group, working on how a thin plasma-deposited layer changes the way a surface behaves towards liquids. It was academic work. We were not thinking about phones or hearing aids or cars. We were trying to understand how far you could push the chemistry of a surface without changing the material underneath it.
The defence problem came next. The same chemistry turned out to be useful for something the Ministry of Defence cared about: protecting clothing and equipment against chemical agents, without making the fabric heavier or harder to wear. That is a demanding requirement. The protection has to be there, and the person wearing it has to be able to forget it exists. Working through that constraint taught us something we only understood fully later. A coating that has to vanish into a soldier's kit is a coating that can vanish into almost anything.
Then the problem changed shape. The thing about a genuinely thin, genuinely durable liquid-repellent layer is that the defence use case is the narrow one. Once you have it, you start seeing the same unsolved problem everywhere you look. Electronics that fail when they meet water or humidity. Components that corrode in the field. Products that were never designed for the conditions they end up living in. None of that is a defence problem, and all of it is the same physics.
Getting technology out of a defence laboratory is not something you do on your own. P2i spun out of Dstl, the MOD's science lab, before Ploughshare existed. Ploughshare, set up to commercialise defence science, later took on that role and spun out the companies that followed. P2i was the one that came first, the proof it could be done. Two decades on that is still the part of the story that matters, because a breakthrough that stays in a lab helps nobody.
Where it ended up. The coating is now used at scale across consumer electronics and industrial devices. Most of the people who benefit from it have no idea it is there, which is the whole point. Good protection is invisible. The device gets wet, or dusty, or knocked about, and simply carries on. No drama and no story, just business as usual. That is the outcome we were chasing in the lab without knowing it yet.
I still find it strange that a question about surface chemistry, asked in a university lab, ended up protecting devices in pockets around the world. That is what happens when you solve a hard, narrow problem properly. The narrow problem turns out not to be narrow at all.
