Tyler thatcher holds a penny on a piece of soft black cloth in his open palm, and with a chef's cooking torch heats the penny until it begins to melt. He doesn't flinch. It's a neat parlor trick, the kind that could win him lots of dollar bets at cocktail parties. But Thatcher has bigger goals, as in making a fortune selling CarbonX, the miracle cloth that just saved his hand, to firefighters, steelworkers, chefs and racecar drivers. "We are not aware of any fabric that has the same protection against flame and heat. This is an entirely different approach to the problem," says Thatcher, chief executive of Chapman Innovations, a six-employee startup in Salt Lake City.
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