I suppose if you're trying to make a chemical for another purpose...fail and end up making something with these properties, usually it would get thrown out ... then some bright spark at the company realises that it has other commercial potential.
My housemate is a research scientist, I was speaking to him about the possibilities of this and he looked at me in surprise. He was surprised that this wasn’t already an industry standard, or at least a high level premium option. This isn't revolutionary technology as far as chemistry is involved, it’s just something that no one thought to apply to paintball.
I think their biggest achievement is to keep these properties while not making it toxic or non biodegradable.
This product has been around for some time; I was staying with a guy called Tom Kaye about 13 years ago over in Chicago; Tom owned Air Gun Designs, the company famous for creating and manufacturing the AutoMag.
Tom was a paintball genius and one of the old school guys, a true gent ... while I was at his factory, a part of his company used to deal with selling markers and paint to the police services.
He used part of his factory as a set up for these police guys to train in.
He had basically built a four or five room domestic type set up used to train those guys in shooting at close range and not making mistakes, it was filmed for training purposes with cameras everywhere to cover all the shots made ... they didn't use conventional paint in their paint guns, they used the paint that seems to be being described now.
It was a perfectly constructed paintball shell seemingly made out of a very thin plastic with what looked like a water-fill inside in some of them and a dry fill in others.
I did ask him at the time why these hadn't leaked out into the main paintball market because it was obvious to me, we were looking at the next evolution of the paintball .... he told me the price was making it prohibitive in that they couldn't manufacture the ball at that time to make it competitive with the existing priced paintball back then ..... it looks as though things have changed maybes???
Paul [Baca], you know Tom I'm sure, did you ever see that ball over in Chi Town back then?