She floats and somersaults in a padded spacesuit, her lovely head encased in a bubble helmet as she performs her cosmic striptease at the start of the 1968 film Barbarella. Later, Jane Fonda’s character is introduced to “Mathmos”, a lake composed of “living energy in liquid form”. The film’s outer space theme, its oozing globular forms and psychedelic colour palette characterise a light fixture embedded in the space age of the 1960s. “Stoners stare at these blobs for hours at a time,” reads the entry for lava lamps in the book Pot Culture.
Its creator was just as colourful. A former Royal Air Force squadron leader and accountant who was also the maker of underwater nudist films and a naturist who founded a nudist club, Edward Craven Walker took the idea from a homemade egg-timer he had spotted in a Dorset pub. This comprised a glass cocktail shaker containing an alien-looking brew bubbling on a stove.
Inspired, Craven Walker filled an old orange squash bottle with two mutually insoluble liquids, one water-based, the other wax-based, and combined them with the solvent carbon tetrachloride, adding weight to the wax. When heated from a lightbulb in the lamp’s base, the wax liquefies, floats up to the top, cools and sinks back down again.
Craven Walker set up his company, Crestworth, in 1963 with a factory based in Poole. His “Astro lamps” brightened the dull interiors of postwar homes with a choice of 20 colour combinations, appeared in TV shows The Prisoner and Doctor Who, and popped up in the living rooms of Ringo Starr and David Bowie. By the end of the decade, Craven Walker had sold millions and manufacturing rights to the US.
By the 1980s, sales were declining and the fate of the lava lamp may have gone the way of the teasmade had it not been for Cressida Granger, who became managing director and owner of the company in 1989. She renamed it Mathmos after the lake in Barbarella and lit its light again, bringing the lamp to a new generation of students and to shop window displays (in Carnaby Street, where else?) while also catering to loyal collectors.
“It will always be popular,” Craven Walker once asserted. “It’s like the cycle of life. It grows, breaks up, falls down and then starts all over again.”
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