Who Invented the Lava Lamp?

Has there ever been a piece of home decor that more perfectly encapsulates an era than the Lava Lamp? An icon of the psychedelic and hippie movements of the 1960s and 70s, this mesmerizing tube of undulating, brightly-coloured blobs is the perfect mood-setting accessory for when you just want to lay back in your bean bag chair, consume an illegal substance – or two – strum a few lines of your new protest song, and just groove, man. Given the lamp’s indelible association with the counterculture, it is perhaps unsurprising that its inventor was something of a cultural rebel himself – though not in the way you might think. And while the lava lamp might seem like a purely aesthetic object with no practical applications, today this psychedelic device performs a vital service that helps keep the internet safe and secure. So turn on, tune in, and drop out as we dive into the groovy history of the Lava Lamp.

Our story begins shortly after the Second World War with English businessman Edward Craven Walker. While outwardly the very model of the establishment “square” that the lava-lamp loving hippies would later despise, Walker was a more colourful figure than he at first appeared. Born in Singapore on July 4, 1918, Walker worked for the British-American Tobacco Company before enlisting in the Royal Air Force and flying de Havilland Mosquito aircraft on reconnaissance missions during the Second World War. After the war, he and his first wife Marjorie – whom he’d met and married during the war – returned to England, where Walker founded his own home-exchange travel business. Among his many interests, Walker was a devoted follower of the naturalist or nudist movement, a lifestyle he adopted after visiting a nudist colony on France’s Isle du Levant. Walker would later go on to found one of the UK’s most popular nudist colonies, the Bournemouth and District Outdoor Club, and in 1960 produced and exhibited the underwater nudist art film Travelling Light – the first such film to be publicly released in the UK. This was followed by Sunswept in 1961 and Eves on Skis in 1963.

In 1948, Walker was killing time in a Dorset pub when he noticed a strange device bubbling on the stove in the kitchen. Invented and later patented by one Donald Dunnet, the device was a novel type of egg timer constructed from a glass cocktail shaker filled with two immiscible liquids – mainly paraffin wax and water. As the pub’s owner explained, the device was placed in a pot of boiling water along with the eggs; when the blob of wax at the bottom melted and floated to the top, that meant the eggs were ready. Walker immediately saw a business opportunity, and he and his third wife Christine spent the next 15 years perfecting the design for a decorative lamp based on the same principles. The initial prototype was constructed from a lightbulb, a bottle of Tree Top Orange Squash drink syrup, and a mixture of liquids including paraffin wax and the solvent carbon tetrachloride. However, the exact formula remains a trade secret to this day, with the 1964 patent, filed by Walker’s associate George Smith, only revealing that:

“The liquid in which the globule is suspended is usually dyed water, but not necessarily so. The other liquid is chosen with very many considerations in mind, including the relative densities of the liquids at the desired operating temperature of the device…the fact that the liquids must be immiscible; the fact that the surface tension must be such that the globule does not adhere to the walls of the container; the material of the container; the relative coefficients of thermal expansion of the liquids; and the shapes that are to be obtained during operation. A suitable liquid for the globule has been found to comprise mineral oil, paraffin and a dye when it is intended to suspend it in water, for example, Ondina 17 with a light paraffin, carbon tetrachloride and a dye or dyes. However, undue shaking or sharp impacts, especially during transport of the display device, can cause total or partial emulsification of the globule.

According to the invention, one of the liquids has a melting point above room temperature or so viscous at room temperature that emulsification cannot take place at room temperature. Preferably, the said one liquid is such that the display properties of the device are attained at about 45-50. C.

In one form of the invention, the one liquid includes an additive in the form of a thickening or gelling agent which is soluble in said one liquid and causes it to have an increased viscosity or to gel at room temperature, i.e. when the heat source is turned off. At the operating temperature when the heat source is on, say 45º-50º C., the liquid becomes fluent so that the device may then carry out its proper function. An example of a gelling agent for globules of the aforementioned mineral oil composition is a wax, such as paraffin wax, or petroleum jelly.”

In 1963, Edward and Christine set up a small company called Crestworth, Ltd. in Poole, Dorset to sell their finalized design, which they dubbed the “Astro Lamp.” The original Astro featured a sleek, rocket-shaped body, a gold base drilled covered in tiny holes to simulate starlight, and a 1.5 litre glass globe containing either red or white lava and yellow or blue liquid. Yet despite its later countercultural associations, the Astro Lamp was originally marketed as a sophisticated conversation piece for middle and upper-class professionals, with Crestworth even producing an “Executive Model” in 1968 mounted on a walnut base with an integrated pen holder. However, the lamp soon caught the attention of the emerging psychedelic set, and after examples were purchased by popular musicians like David Bowie, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, sales went through the roof. In 1965, Walker exhibited the Astro Lamp at a novelty convention in Hamburg, Germany, where it was spotted by two American executives named Adolph Wertheimer and Hy Spector. The pair immediately purchased the American rights to the lamp and set up their own company in Chicago called Lava Brand Motion Lamps – AKA LavaLite – to manufacture and distribute them. Advertised as “Head Trips That Offered a Motion for Every Emotion”, the American lava lamps sold even better than the original British ones, and within a few years more than seven million were being sold worldwide every year. By the end of the decade the Lava Lamp had become a cultural icon, making appearances in popular television shows such as Dr Who, The Prisoner, Are You Being Served, and Carry on Laughing.

By the 1970s, however, the counterculture movement began to peter out, and the appeal of the Lava Lamp waned. By 1976, global sales had dropped to little over 10,000 a year. The lamp saw a brief resurgence in popularity in the late 1980s as the world went through its first cycle of 1960s nostalgia, but eventually the Craven-Walkers decided to get out of the business and in 1989 sold Crestworth to entrepreneur Cressida Granger, who re-launched the company under the name Mathmos – a reference to the sentient pool of lava in the hit 1968 sci-fi film Barbarella. The timing could not have been better, for the release of the 1997 film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery triggered another wave of 60s nostalgia, and lava lamps became all the rage once more. By the following year, Mathmos was selling nearly a million units per year. This revival came as little surprise to Edward Craven-Walker, who, waxing poetic on the immortal appeal of his invention, opined:

“I think it will always be popular. It’s like the cycle of life. It grows, breaks up, falls down and then starts all over again.”

Walker died in Ringwood, Hampshire on August 15, 2000, aged 82 and still enthusiastically embracing the nudist lifestyle he helped popularize.

While the lava lamp remains a pop-cultural icon – indeed, an example is on permanent display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC – it is, in the end, little more than a decorative novelty with no practical use – right? Nope! Walk into the San Fransisco headquarters of IT Service provider Cloudflare Inc, and in the lobby you will be confronted with a truly surreal sight: an entire wall covered in 100 swirling, bubbling lava lamps. But this groovy installation is not merely for decoration. Mounted on the ceiling above the wall is a video camera, which records the movements of the lamps and converts them into a string of random numbers. These numbers are then fed into a piece of software called a cryptographically-secure pseudorandom number generators or CSPRNG, which uses them to carry out the sophisticated encryption that keeps our online data secure.

While this might seem like a rather Rube Goldberg-esque method for generating random numbers, the plain truth is that not all randomness is created equal. For example, statistically speaking the digits of Pi are considered “random” because no number in the sequence appears more frequently than another. However, for data encryption to be secure, encryption keys – and the numbers used to generate them – must not only be random, they must be unpredictable – something the digits of Pi and other algorithmically-generated pseudorandom strings are most definitely not. This is where the lava lamps come in. Driven by an inherently chaotic form of thermodynamic turbulence known as Rayleigh-Taylor Instability, the movements of the lamps generate truly random, unpredictable number strings ideal for digital encryption. And as an added bonus, the fact the system is displayed in a public area adds to their effectiveness, for the images of people passing through the lobby or stopping to gawk at the lamps just adds further random noise to the output. But lava lamps are not the only means of achieving such randomness; for example, Cloudflare’s London office uses a camera trained on a double-pendulum desk toy, while its Singapore office measures the radioactive decay of a pellet of Uranium. Other companies use systems based on hot, turbulent air rising from data servers and other naturally random physical processes. But as effective as they might be, I think we can all agree that none of these methods are anywhere as groovy as a giant wall of lava lamps. Peace, man.

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