Lava Lamp

Lava lamps are primarily lamps; they are more used to serve the purpose of décor instead of lighting ever since they came into existence.

The movement of wax in blobs mesmerizes and relaxes the watcher so much that it creates an enchanting effect. The wax moves in the shape of blobs in the lamp, which gives it the name “Lava lamp”. They are sold in numerous shapes and sizes. Different wax colors are also available.

Glitter lamps work with confetti instead of wax blobs which is the major difference between these lamps and others. But Glitter lamps hold a major advantage over lava lamps. They take 30 minutes to start instead of hours in case of others.

It works by an intriguing process. It has incandescent bulb or halogen bulb which warms a glass tube containing water and translucent or opaque mixture of wax and carbon tetrachloride. There are plenty of formulas but this is the most used one. The wax is minutely denser than water at room temperature whereas it decreases as it gets warmer. The wax eventually melts into liquid and travels to the surface in the shape of blobs. The blobs gradually cool downs.

Generally a bulb of 25 to 40 watts is used. The wax takes about three hours to melt and forms in to blobs. As soon as the lamp starts working continuously, be cautious that anyone doesn’t shake or drop the lamp. That’s because liquids can emulsify and this would produce unclear and cloudy blobs. If this occurs, lamp will be needed to be left alone for a few hours until the wax settles down.

The inventor is the Singapore-born Englishman Edward Craven-Walker in the 1960s. He started a company called Crest worth which was located in Poole, Dorset, UK. The lamps gained enormous popularity in the 1960s and 70s and were a great success for many decades.

Lava Simplex International was sold to Eddie Sheldon and Larry Haggerty of Haggerty Enterprises by Specter in the late seventies. It still continues to manufacture and sells these lamps under the name of Lava world. Lava world does not produce currently in USA and has given its manufacturing rights to China. In the 1990s, Craven-Walker, who had the constitutional rights to England and Western Europe, sold his rights to Cressida Granger whose company, Mathmos, continues to make Lava Lamps and related products. They are still prepared in the older plant in Poole.

A youth from Kent, Washington, Philip Quinn, 24 died in an experiment in which he was trying to heat a lava lamp on a kitchen stove to see what would happen. He observed it from a few feet away. The heat made the pressure so intense that the lamp exploded and a single shard was sharp enough to pierce the heart, and caused his death eventually.