Lava Lamps - Increase the Beauty of Your Room!

Lava lamps are primarily lamps; they are more used to serve the purpose of decor 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.

A 25 to 40 watts bulb is being used normally. It takes wax to approximately three hours to melt and form into blobs. When lamp actually starts working, we need to make sure there's no abrupt movement. Any sudden jerk may lead to emulsifying of two liquids, which means unclear and unclouded blobs. As soon as the lamp starts working continuously, always be careful that no one shakes the lamp as the liquids can emulsify and this would produce unclear and cloudy blobs. To correct this, we need to take the lava lamp and leave it alone for some time.

The inventor is the Singapore-born Englishman Edward Craven-Walker in the'60s. He started a company called Crest worth which was located in Poole, Dorset, UK. The lamps gained enormous popularity in the'60s and 70s and were a great success for many decades.

In the late seventies Spector sold Lava Simplex International to Eddie Sheldon and Larry Haggerty of Haggerty Enterprises. Haggerty Enterprises continues to produce and sell the Lava Lamp in the US, using the name of Lava-world. "Lava lamp" has been used as a generic term but Lava-world has claimed violation of trademarks. Lava-world has closed production in the USA and outsourced their lamps to China. In the'90s, Craven-Walker, who had the rights to England and Western Europe, sold his rights to Cressida Granger whose company, Mathmos, continues to make Lava Lamps and related products. Mathmos lamps are still made in the original factory in Poole.

Philip Quinn, a 24-year old youth residing in Kent, Washington died during an experiment in which he heated a lava lamp on his kitchen stove, observing it from a few feet away. The heat produced from the stove was enough to build up sufficient pressure to make the lamp explode, spraying glass shards everywhere, one of which were sharp and big enough to pierce his heart owing to which he received his death.