Lava lamp
decorative lamp with container of bolus in clear liquid, which heats up at the bottom and rises before cooling and falling back to the bottom
A lava lamp is a decorative lamp that was invented in 1963 by British entrepreneur Edward Craven Walker, the founder of the lighting company Mathmos.
Lava lamps consist of a bolus of wax and a clear or translucent liquid inside a glass vessel. The vessel is placed on a lamp base with an incandescent light bulb. The heat causes temporary reductions in the wax's density and the liquid's surface tension. As the warmed wax rises through the liquid, it cools, loses its buoyancy, and falls back to the bottom of the vessel in a cycle that is visually suggestive of pāhoehoe lava. The lamps are designed in a variety of styles and colours.
Lava lamps are commonly associated with hippie, psychedelia, and cannabis cultures.
Operation
A classic lava lamp contains a standard incandescent or halogen lamp which heats a tall (often tapered) glass bottle. A formula from a 1968 US patent consisted of water and a transparent, translucent, or opaque mix of mineral oil, paraffin wax, and carbon tetrachloride. The clear water or mineral oil can optionally be coloured with translucent dyes.
The public source identifies “Lava lamp” as decorative lamp with container of bolus in clear liquid, which heats up at the bottom and rises before cooling and falling back to the bottom. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lava, lamp and decorative.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q839679. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1963 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lava lamp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.