Who Invented the Lava Lamp?

Has there ever been a chunk of house decor that extra completely encapsulates an period than the Lava Lamp? An icon of the psychedelic and hippie actions of the Sixties and 70s, this mesmerizing tube of undulating, brightly-coloured blobs is the proper mood-setting accent for once you simply wish to lay again in your bean bag chair, devour an unlawful substance – or two – strum just a few strains of your new protest tune, and simply groove, man. Given the lamp’s indelible affiliation with the counterculture, it’s maybe unsurprising that its inventor was one thing of a cultural insurgent himself – although not in the way in which you would possibly assume. And whereas the lava lamp would possibly look like a purely aesthetic object with no sensible purposes, at present this psychedelic machine performs a significant service that helps maintain the web protected and safe. So activate, tune in, and drop out as we dive into the groovy historical past of the Lava Lamp.

Our story begins shortly after the Second World Struggle with English businessman Edward Craven Walker. Whereas outwardly the very mannequin of the institution “sq.” that the lava-lamp loving hippies would later despise, Walker was a extra vibrant determine than he at first appeared. Born in Singapore on July 4, 1918, Walker labored for the British-American Tobacco Firm earlier than enlisting within the Royal Air Drive and flying de Havilland Mosquito plane on reconnaissance missions in the course of the Second World Struggle. After the warfare, he and his first spouse Marjorie – whom he’d met and married in the course of the warfare – returned to England, the place Walker based his personal home-exchange journey enterprise. Amongst his many pursuits, Walker was a loyal follower of the naturalist or nudist motion, a life-style he adopted after visiting a nudist colony on France’s Isle du Levant. Walker would later go on to discovered one of many UK’s hottest nudist colonies, the Bournemouth and District Out of doors Membership, and in 1960 produced and exhibited the underwater nudist artwork movie Travelling Gentle – the primary such movie to be publicly launched within the UK. This was adopted by Sunswept in 1961 and Eves on Skis in 1963.

In 1948, Walker was killing time in a Dorset pub when he observed an odd machine effervescent on the range within the kitchen. Invented and later patented by one Donald Dunnet, the machine was a novel kind of egg timer constructed from a glass cocktail shaker full of two immiscible liquids – primarily paraffin wax and water. Because the pub’s proprietor defined, the machine was positioned in a pot of boiling water together with the eggs; when the blob of wax on the backside melted and floated to the highest, that meant the eggs had been prepared. Walker instantly noticed a enterprise alternative, and he and his third spouse Christine spent the following 15 years perfecting the design for an ornamental lamp based mostly on the identical rules. The preliminary prototype was constructed from a lightbulb, a bottle of Tree High Orange Squash drink syrup, and a mix of liquids together with paraffin wax and the solvent carbon tetrachloride. Nonetheless, the precise method stays a commerce secret to today, with the 1964 patent, filed by Walker’s affiliate George Smith, solely revealing that:

“The liquid through which the globule is suspended is normally dyed water, however not essentially so. The opposite liquid is chosen with very many issues in thoughts, together with the relative densities of the liquids on the desired working temperature of the machine…the truth that the liquids should be immiscible; the truth that the floor stress should be such that the globule doesn’t adhere to the partitions of the container; the fabric of the container; the relative coefficients of thermal growth of the liquids; and the shapes which can be to be obtained throughout operation. An acceptable liquid for the globule has been discovered to comprise mineral oil, paraffin and a dye when it’s supposed to droop it in water, for instance, Ondina 17 with a lightweight paraffin, carbon tetrachloride and a dye or dyes. Nonetheless, undue shaking or sharp impacts, particularly throughout transport of the show machine, may cause whole or partial emulsification of the globule.

Based on the invention, one of many liquids has a melting level above room temperature or so viscous at room temperature that emulsification can’t happen at room temperature. Ideally, the stated one liquid is such that the show properties of the machine are attained at about 45-50. C.

In a single type of the invention, the one liquid consists of an additive within the type of a thickening or gelling agent which is soluble in stated one liquid and causes it to have an elevated viscosity or to gel at room temperature, i.e. when the warmth supply is turned off. On the working temperature when the warmth supply is on, say 45º-50º C., the liquid turns into fluent in order that the machine could then perform its correct operate. An instance of a gelling agent for globules of the aforementioned mineral oil composition is a wax, reminiscent of paraffin wax, or petroleum jelly.”

In 1963, Edward and Christine arrange a small firm known as Crestworth, Ltd. in Poole, Dorset to promote their finalized design, which they dubbed the “Astro Lamp.” The unique Astro featured a modern, rocket-shaped physique, a gold base drilled lined in tiny holes to simulate starlight, and a 1.5 litre glass globe containing both purple or white lava and yellow or blue liquid. But regardless of its later countercultural associations, the Astro Lamp was initially marketed as a classy dialog piece for center and upper-class professionals, with Crestworth even producing an “Government Mannequin” in 1968 mounted on a walnut base with an built-in pen holder. Nonetheless, the lamp quickly caught the eye of the rising psychedelic set, and after examples had been bought by fashionable musicians like David Bowie, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, gross sales went by means of the roof. In 1965, Walker exhibited the Astro Lamp at a novelty conference in Hamburg, Germany, the place it was noticed by two American executives named Adolph Wertheimer and Hy Spector. The pair instantly bought the American rights to the lamp and arrange their very own firm in Chicago known as Lava Model Movement Lamps – AKA LavaLite – to fabricate and distribute them. Marketed as “Head Journeys That Supplied a Movement for Each Emotion”, the American lava lamps bought even higher than the unique British ones, and inside just a few years greater than seven million had been being bought worldwide yearly. By the tip of the last decade the Lava Lamp had turn out to be a cultural icon, making appearances in fashionable tv exhibits reminiscent of Dr Who, The Prisoner, Are You Being Served, and Stick with it Laughing.

By the Seventies, nevertheless, the counterculture motion started to peter out, and the enchantment of the Lava Lamp waned. By 1976, international gross sales had dropped to little over 10,000 a 12 months. The lamp noticed a short resurgence in reputation within the late Eighties because the world went by means of its first cycle of Sixties nostalgia, however ultimately the Craven-Walkers determined to get out of the enterprise and in 1989 bought Crestworth to entrepreneur Cressida Granger, who re-launched the corporate beneath the identify Mathmos – a reference to the sentient pool of lava within the hit 1968 sci-fi movie Barbarella. The timing couldn’t have been higher, for the discharge of the 1997 movie Austin Powers: Worldwide Man of Thriller triggered one other wave of 60s nostalgia, and lava lamps grew to become all the trend as soon as extra. By the next 12 months, Mathmos was promoting practically 1,000,000 models per 12 months. This revival got here as little shock to Edward Craven-Walker, who, waxing poetic on the immortal enchantment of his invention, opined:

“I feel it would all the time be fashionable. It’s just like the cycle of life. It grows, breaks up, falls down after which begins yet again.”

Walker died in Ringwood, Hampshire on August 15, 2000, aged 82 and nonetheless enthusiastically embracing the nudist life-style he helped popularize.

Whereas the lava lamp stays a pop-cultural icon – certainly, an instance is on everlasting show on the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of American Historical past in Washington, DC – it’s, ultimately, little greater than an ornamental novelty with no sensible use – proper? Nope! Stroll into the San Fransisco headquarters of IT Service supplier Cloudflare Inc, and within the foyer you may be confronted with a very surreal sight: a complete wall lined in 100 swirling, effervescent lava lamps. However this groovy set up shouldn’t be merely for adornment. Mounted on the ceiling above the wall is a video digital camera, which information the actions of the lamps and converts them right into a string of random numbers. These numbers are then fed into a chunk of software program known as a cryptographically-secure pseudorandom quantity mills or CSPRNG, which makes use of them to hold out the delicate encryption that retains our on-line information safe.

Whereas this would possibly look like a somewhat Rube Goldberg-esque methodology for producing random numbers, the plain fact is that not all randomness is created equal. For instance, statistically talking the digits of Pi are thought of “random” as a result of no quantity within the sequence seems extra regularly than one other. Nonetheless, for information encryption to be safe, encryption keys – and the numbers used to generate them – should not solely be random, they should be unpredictable – one thing the digits of Pi and different algorithmically-generated pseudorandom strings are most positively not. That is the place the lava lamps are available in. Pushed by an inherently chaotic type of thermodynamic turbulence generally known as Rayleigh-Taylor Instability, the actions of the lamps generate actually random, unpredictable quantity strings superb for digital encryption. And as an added bonus, the very fact the system is displayed in a public space provides to their effectiveness, for the photographs of individuals passing by means of the foyer or stopping to gawk on the lamps simply provides additional random noise to the output. However lava lamps should not the one technique of reaching such randomness; for instance, Cloudflare’s London workplace makes use of a digital camera skilled on a double-pendulum desk toy, whereas its Singapore workplace measures the radioactive decay of a pellet of Uranium. Different firms use methods based mostly on sizzling, turbulent air rising from information servers and different naturally random bodily processes. However as efficient as they is likely to be, I feel we are able to all agree that none of those strategies are wherever as groovy as a large wall of lava lamps. Peace, man.

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