I’ve had a lot of hits in the last two days from searches for Pykrete. Someone must have a class project going on. So another quick recap on this wierd stuff is due.

Pykrete is made by mixing water and sawdust or wood pulp and then freezing it. A rather eccentric British inventor called Geoffrey Pyke dreamt it up as a material to build super huge ships from, based upon an idea of Churchill’s to create floating airbases. A 60 foot long test model was created in a Canadian lake, but the project never went any further than this, except in fiction.

The number of Pykrete resources on the web have increased since my first posts about the stuff in relation to Heavensent. Cabinet magazine fills out some biographical details of Pyke in their overview of the project, the story has been adapted for kids’ science TV, there’s been a radio play about it (I haven’t read the full text yet) and the Guardian has the obituary of Max Perutz, who also worked on the project.