In 1948, while in a Dorset pub, British accountant, movie maker, entrepreneur, and (as it happens) naturist Edward Craven-Walker noticed something on a stove top “made out of a cocktail-shaker, old tins, wax and things”. The cocktail shaker had been put into water alongside an egg and, as the water heated, the wax would melt and float to the top in the time it took to perfectly boil the egg.
Craven-Walker was mesmerised by the bubbling fluids and inspired to develop what would become a definitive symbol of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and a design classic
Craven-Walker hired British inventor David George Smith to develop the device and the chemical formula it required. He named the first lava lamp “Astro”, and founded a company called Crestworth to manufacture and market his creation. Crestworth was later renamed “Mathmos” after the bubbling liquid force that lived under the City of Sogo in the cult 1960s French Sci-fi comic strip, Barbarella … which was later made into the film staring Jane Fonda.
Showing a true grasp of his 1960s market, Craven-Walker once said: "If you buy my lamp you won't need to buy drugs.”
The Astro Lamp quickly gained in popularity. Its psychedelic appearance and soothing motion made it an icon of the era. As mentioned, the lava lamp became synonymous with hippie culture. Having said that, the appeal was also somewhat mainstream. Our favourite piece of copy is this very British caption from a magazine ad at the time: “An ever changing ‘living jewel’ - the never ending topic of conversation. The perfect gift for one’s relatives, one’s friends - and, dash it all, oneself.”
In the 1970s, the popularity of lava lamps declined with the end of the psychedelic era, but they experienced a resurgence in the 1990s as a retro novelty item. Today, lava lamps continue to be produced and enjoyed by people around the world. They are considered both as decorative pieces and as objects that provide a sense of relaxation and visual stimulation. The original Mathmos company still produces lava lamps in Poole, Dorset, but many other manufacturers have entered the market, offering a wide range of designs and styles.
Another interesting thing about lava lamps relates to the notion of randomness.
Randomness is extremely important for secure data encryption. To produce the unpredictable, chaotic data necessary for strong encryption, a computer must have a source of random data. As one might expect, lava lamps are consistently random. The "lava" in a lava lamp never takes the same shape twice, and as a result, observing a group of lava lamps is a great source for random data. To collect this data, the Internet security company Cloudflare has arranged about 100 lava lamps on one of the walls in the lobby of the Cloudflare headquarters in San Francisco and mounted a camera pointing at the lamps. The camera takes photos of the lamps at regular intervals and sends the images to Cloudflare servers for storage as a string of totally random numbers that the servers can then use as a starting point for creating secure encryption keys. Thus, with the help of lava lamps, Cloudflare is able to offer extremely strong (and sufficiently random) encryption to its customers.
Story Idea: Remo Giuffré
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Astro Lavas Lamp exists in printed form as chapter 7 of RR#1 … available to order HERE
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References
wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_lamp
mathmos.com
woodstockwhisperer.info/2020/07/04/lava-blobs
independent.co.uk/property/interiors/the-secret-history-of-the-lava-lamp
cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption
Video: The Lava Lamps That Help Keep The Internet Secure by Tom Scott
Images
1. Astro Lava Lamp by Mathmos
2. Early prototype using cocktail shaker. Credit: mathmos.com.
3. Lava Lamp US Patent from 1968
4. Edward Craven-Walker and his wife and business partner Christine with the company van in the 1960s. Image Credit: Dorset Magazine.
5. Astro Lamp ad from the 1960s. Credit: mathmos.com.
6. Ringo Starr in his living room with a classic Copper Astro Lava Lamp
7. Jane Fonda as Barbarella in the 1968 Roger Vadim directed film of the same name. Image via Matong
8. Video: The Lava Lamps That Help Keep The Internet Secure by Tom Scott
9. The Mathmos factory in Poole, Dorset. Credit: mathmos.com.
