Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Mary Bellis. Inventions Expert. Mary Bellis covered inventions and inventors for ThoughtCo for 18 years.
She is known for her independent films and documentaries, including one about Alexander Graham Bell. Updated February 02, Featured Video.
Cite this Article Format. Bellis, Mary. The Origins of the Term, 'Horsepower'. Thomas Edison's Greatest Inventions. This is said to have a strangely enchanting, soothing, almost mesmerizing effect on humans and cats. As was stated before there are other, sometimes cheaper, varieties. Some are formed together in one piece, which means when the bulb burns out, the lamp either becomes a paperweight or trash.
Craven-Walker got the idea for the original lamp design after walking into a pub in Hampshire, England and noticing a rather odd item sitting on the counter behind the bar. It was a glass cocktail shaker that contained some kind of mucus-like blob floating in liquid. Upon inquiry, the bartender told him it was an egg-timer. The 'blob' was actually a clump of solid wax in clear liquid.
The bartender explained You put the shaker in the boiling water with your egg, and as the boiling water cooks the egg it also melts the wax turning it into an amorphous blob of goo. When the wax then floated to the top of the jar, your egg was done.
Craven-Walker saw a money-making opportunity in front of him - turn the egg-timer into a lamp with thicker oil that would form sculptural shapes and sell it to the public. He set about tracking down the inventor of the original design. The inventor, known only by his last name of Dunnet, was deceased, allowing for Craven-Walker to patent the invention for himself. Craven-Walker spent the next 15 years perfecting Dunnet's invention so that it could be mass-produced. In the meantime, he supported himself by making 'art-house' films about his other passion: nudity2.
Travelling Light, one of these so-called 'art-house' films, was the first naturalist film to receive public release in the UK. Described as an underwater ballet, this film was shot off Corsica and was released in The Astro Lamp was launched in , just ahead of the craze for all things psychedelic. Craven-Walker's factory was built in Poole, Dorset where it still is in production today.
Craven-Walker sold rights to his creation to Mathmos, one of Britain's fastest-growing companies3, staying on as a consultant until his death at age 82 of cancer. Two Americans named Adolph Wertheimer and Hy Spector, in awe with the lamp's beauty, asked to purchase the American rights to the lamp.
Lava Brand Motion Lamp sales peaked in the late '60s when slow-swirling coloured wax happened to coincide perfectly with the undulating aesthetics of psychedelia. They were advertised as 'head trips that offered a motion for every emotion'4. At their peak, more than seven million Lava Lamps were sold around the world each year, but by the early s the fad had run its course and sales fell dramatically.
The next part of the process is metal spinning, a process that takes a thin sheet of steel and bends it around a spinning tool to create the right shape. Once these two components are finished, the lamp is ready to be filled. The liquid is added along with a metal spring that helps distribute heat. The exact formula of the fluid is a well-guarded secret. But there's one key to it: density.
There are two main components in a lava lamp: a colored wax the lava and the colored solution that it sits in. As the lamp heats up, the density of the wax changes and it begins to float in the liquid.
When it hits the top, it cools and falls back down. Getting the density of these two ingredients just right, though, is where the secret knowledge comes in. The lamp was invented by Edward Craven Walker, a British accountant whose other claim to fame was making underwater nudist films. He was passing the time in a pub when he noticed a homemade egg timer crafted from a cocktail shaker filled with alien-looking liquids bubbling on a stove top.
The exact recipe is a proprietary secret, but a key ingredient is the solvent carbon tetrachloride, which adds weight to the otherwise buoyant wax. 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.
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