Who can remember the warm glow of the lava lamp? Maybe you still have one you saved all those years and maybe you still plug it in from time to time. Young or old, hippie or square, a lava lamp has the power to bring a smile to the face of everyone that owns one and I for one am no different.
For those who don’t know what a lava lamp is, it is a decorative novelty lamp which contains blobs of colored wax inside a glass vessel filled with a clear or translucent liquid. The wax rises and falls as its density changes due to heating from a small light bulb underneath the vessel creating a lava-like effect. Thanks to How Stuff Works we learn it works like this:
Pretty simple really. But sometimes the best things are. Right?
I can remember having a lava lamp or two in the house when I was a kid growing up in the seventies. No matter what color the flowing ooze inside was, they were all pretty much the same. Now days, you can buy lava lamps in a myriad of shapes to go along with all of the colors, I even think there is a Hello Kitty lava lamp available somewhere. My grandpa had one that had little metal flakes which rose and sunk like the lava but it was not nearly as cool.
The lava lamp, or astro lamp as it is called in some parts of the world, got its start back in 1963 when British accountant, Edward Craven-Walker got the idea by watching an egg timer that had been fashioned out of a cocktail shaker. His company, Crestworth, was the first to develop and manufacture the lava lamp which is virtually unchanged from its original design.
Whether you call it an astro lamp, lava lite or a lava lamp, the fact remains that they will always bring back happy memories of a more simple time when people could sit down and watch the bubbling ooze for hours on end without the interruption of the internet, Facebook or smart phones. Speaking of smart phones, there is a mobile app that enables the user to take a virtual lava lamp along with them everywhere they go. It’s like a mobile smile app as it will always bring an immediate smile to the user’s face.
Of course, there is no substitute for the real thing. As a child, my lava lamp brought a smile to my face and, even now as an adult, when I plug it in, it still does. Granted, you do have to wait a bit for the action of the lava to start as with anything original to that era, but to me, the wait is well worth it when that smile spreads across my face reflecting fond memories and the glow of that old lava lamp.
Did you ever have a lava lamp? What color was it? Share your thoughts in the comments. Would love to hear from you.
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