When Eliot Harris drenched his phone while washing his fishing boat, he tried putting it in rice. After the technique failed (and left a grain wedged in his charging port), he paused for a beef jerky snack. The snack bag’s silica gel packet gave him the idea for DryOut, a multilayer material that pulls water away from a device, absorbs and traps it, then lets moisture evaporate when exposed to sunlight so it can be reused. “A panel of DryOut the size of a smartphone pulled 900 times more moisture than a silica gel packet,” says CEO Romney Williams. Urban Armor Gear made a pouch with the material to save wet electronics.
