Reed Richards Is Useless: Difference between revisions

* [[Spider-Man]]'s webbing. Real life spider silk is, pound for pound, stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar, as flexible as yarn, and incredibly lightweight. It's also prohibitively hard to manufacture, as spiders don't "farm" well. Peter Parker somehow has managed to manufacture synthetic spider silk that's cost-effective enough for him to always be in supply; while it does dissolve after about an hour, no adhesive company seems interested in buying the formula and tweaking it to last longer.

** Parodied in ''[[Avengers Academy]]'': Spidey explains to the students in class how [[Ambition Is Evil|he was wrong for trying at first to use his powers for financial gain]] instead of [[Comes Great Responsibility|helping people]] and the students ask why he didn't just patent his webbing and make millions that he could donate to needy charities. Spidey counters that he'd have to give up his secret identity to patent it, but one of them points out he could have used proxies in the form of shell companies to hide the source of the webbing.

** Finally starting to get averted with Peter working at Horizon Labs. While he hasn't patented and sold his webbing, he is inventing stuff that not only helps out with his crime fighting but is also patented and sold to civilians for more mundane applications.

** Anybody care to share what are some of these "more mundane applications"?