The mesmerizing light fixture has risen, sunk, and wobbled it's way through cultural consciousness for decades. The lamp was invented by Edward Craven Walker, a British entrepreneur whose other claim to fame was making underwater "naturist" videography, or in more stark terms, nudist films.
During the late 1960s, these lava lamps came to symbolize all things countercultural and psychedelic—although, as you might expect, those mesmerized by its relaxing glow sometimes had trouble recalling why. It’s like asking, “Why did I just eat an entire bag of dried mangoes?" And while the lamps are peculiar in that they don’t cast much light, the sleek, rocket-like exterior was perfectly pitched to the space age.
However, Craven Walker didn’t envision the lamps as paragons of grooviness. “They weren’t marketed like that—they were almost staid,” Granger says. Indeed, an ad in a 1968 edition of the American Bar Association Journal touted the “executive” model—mounted on a walnut base alongside a ballpoint pen.
His inspiration for the lava lamp came while he was passing the time in a pub: he noticed a homemade egg timer crafted from a cocktail shaker filled with alien-looking liquids bubbling on a stove top. Determined to perfect the design, and to install a light bulb as the heat source, he settled on a bottle used for Orange Squash. He then hired someone named David George Smith to develop the chemical formula needed to make his idea work. The exact recipe is classified information.
The way it works? His lamp paired two mutually insoluble liquids: one water-based, the other wax-based. The heat source at the bottom of the lamp liquefies the waxy blob. As it expands, its density decreases and it rises to the top—where it cools, congeals and begins to sink back down.
By the end of the decade, Craven Walker’s company was manufacturing millions of “Astro Lamps,” as he called them, per year. In 1965, he sold the U.S. manufacturing rights to a company called Lava Lite. Even though sales declined in the 1970s, today, Lava Lite sells millions each year to retailers such as Walmart or Target. The lava lamp has proven its staying power: The company still takes orders from original 1960s-era owners who need replacement bulbs.
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Lava lamps had 2 main periods of popularity that correlated with the 2 different summer of love/hippie movements of the 20th century. The lamps first exploded during the 60s at the same time as the psychedelic culture was booming. The lamps then faded into obscurity only to return to popularity in the 90s after the Ecstacy and MDMA rave parties of the late 80s. It's interesting to me how the popularity of the lamps seems to correlate with the use of recreational drugs that induce hallucination.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://priceonomics.com/the-lava-lamp-just-wont-quit/
Some brands of lava lamps require up to six hours for the lava-like blobs to form properly and flow. There is a limit to how long the lamp should be left on to properly function. It is recommended not to run them for more than eight to ten hours straight.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://www.hunker.com/13412722/how-long-can-i-leave-my-lava-lamp-on
Not only has the lava lamp played a large role in symbolizing psychedelic and counterculture life in the 60’s, it also plays a large role in encrypting the internet (around 10% of it). Cloudforce, a cybersecurity firm based in San Francisco, has a wall of over 100 lava lamps to create superpowered cryptographic keys. As the lava lamps bubble and swirl, a video camera mounted on the ceiling intermittently takes pictures of the lamps. The images they capture are truly random; if we look at the lamps alone, the wax in the lamps never forms in the same exact shape or pattern twice, and the speed at which they wobble around varies. Cloudforce uses this random arrangement of pixels to generate a set of random numbers, which gets converted into the encryption of a website. It’s interesting how a product so simple can play such a large role in keeping us safe from hackers.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.atlasobscura.com/places/encryption-lava-lamps
https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-lava-lamps-protect-from-hackers/
Something a little less "PG" about Edward Walker is that he was also a strong believer in nudism, otherwise known as naturalism or "the nudist lifestyle." In addition to producing several nudist movies, such as "Traveling Light" in 1960, Walker is also credited with establishing the most popular nudist colony in the UK, the District Naturalist Center
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https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/edward-craven-walker
I thought this blog post was very interesting. Adding on to lava lamps being a symbol for psychedelia, I also found it interesting that Walker actually claimed that if you bought his lamp, you wouldn't need drugs again. Additionally, another interesting fact was that Walker was actually a pilot in World War 2.
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https://www.independent.co.uk/property/interiors/the-secret-history-of-the-lava-lamp-2313946.html
I never understood why people loved lava lamps. I always that they were 2 liquids that randomly bubbled once it was switched on. But after reading your blog post I now better understand the history of the lava lamp. I did some extra research on the lava lamp and found out it was originally an egg timer, but it was designed where when the wax floated all the way to the top, the egg should be cooked. The first prototype was shaped like an orange squash, a gross orange syrup drink popular at the time.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/lava-lamps-history-36650881