The 'Lava Lamp' is 60 years old!

Even the lamp is surprised. Look at that exclamation mark!


I've taken a bit of a liberty by putting this in the 'Old things that still work' category, because although the idea is old, as is the lamp in the pictures (albeit with a new bottle), you can still buy a brand new one, made in the same place as the original from 1963. The company is called Mathmos (originally Crestworth Trading Ltd) and is located in Poole, Dorset.

It all started when one-time Mosquito pilot Edward Craven Walker saw a primitive version of the lamp in a West Country pub. From this, the idea developed of using two immiscible substances (basically a saline solution and paraffin wax) in a glass bottle, the shape of which was inspired by a fruit squash bottle, to make a decorative lamp. A conventional low-wattage tungsten 'golfball' bulb in the base heated the wax, melting it, making it less dense, and giving it the ability to rise and fall in the saline solution. This created a slow-moving and - some say hypnotic - effect. Celebrity and media exposure meant that lava lamps (the official trade name was 'Astro' back in the day) were a 'thing' by the mid-to-late Sixties - a trendy, counterculture-'lite' (sorry) artefact, if you like. Diffferent sizes and formats, including 'rockets' appeared (this was the Space Age, after all), and over the years different colours of wax and fluid, together with different finishes for the metal parts, have proliferated. Since their inception, their popularity has waxed (sorry again) and waned on occasion, without their ever quite going away. They have survived the inevitable appearance of Chinese knock-offs, but the original company continues to turn them out and sell them to a world in which they have become almost nostalgic, as opposed to futuristic, but always rather intriguing and amusing. Well, I think they are, anyway!.

I bought mine in 1977 - the year I went to university, and I can remember it featuring in my rooms and student digs. As I said, I can't claim that it's entirely original - the glass bottle and its contents have been replaced at least twice. But, as the makers are keen to point out, if your liquid goes foggy, you don't have to bin the whole lamp.


When you first turn it on, it sits and does nothing but glow gently for a while, until...


...the wax partly melts and starts making weird shapes...


...and finally, blobs and bubbles start rising and falling. Maybe I'll sit and watch mine for a while....