THE WAFFLEMAN: History Of The Lava Lamp

Yo! Here we go again with this tale of the lava lamp. I remembered them when I saw one for sale at a flea market. My interest was to know just how they worked, so off to the trusty internet to get these facts about them.

Edward Craven-Walker visited a pub in Hampshire, England not long after he left the Royal Air Force at the end of World War II. He noticed an odd item behind the bar. It was a glass cocktail shaker containing some kind of ‘blob’ floating in a liquid.

He asked the bartender what is was and was told that it was of – of all things – a boiled-egg timer! To operate it, one put the shaker container into boiling water, and then put their eggs into water. As the boiling water cooked the eggs, it also melted the wax in the liquid in the container, turning it into a ‘blob’ of goo that floated to the top of the shaker, indicating the egg was cooked.

Craven-Walker saw this as a money-making opportunity. He was going to sell them to the public as a lamp instead of an egg timer. He discovered the inventor, named Dunnet, was dead. Dunnet had died without patenting the egg timer – so Craven-Walker did – as a lamp.

In 1965, Craven-Walker introduced his “AstroLight” at a novelty convention in Hamburg, West Germany, where two Americans saw it. They negotiated for the American sales rights to the AstroLight, which they brought to America and renamed them as the “LavaLite.” This fad lamp arrived on the American scene – luckily, just in time for the psychedelic era of the 1960s. It was an instant success.

Over 7 million LavaLites were sold around the world each year until the 1970s, when sales, for some reason, dropped dramatically. But by the late 1980s, sales rebounded and by 1998, worldwide sales were again over two million per year. I think nostalgia had something to do with the new sales.

I had a LavaLite. Did you? I loved the hypnotic motion; it was irresistible. I was sorely tempted to purchase the lamp I saw at the flea market but didn’t. I should have; for now, as I write this column, I miss my LavaLite. I gotta find another one for sale. I wonder where I can get one just like the one that I had way back when. Hmm….

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