Lighting Up Our Lives

Clive Beautyman shines a light on the history of the lava lamp, a British design classic, which was launched almost 60 years ago

- Clive Beautyman

Sometime in the late 1950s, Edward Craven Walker walked into the Queen’s Head pub in the village of Burley, near Ringwood in the New Forest. What he saw inside led to the invention of an instant design classic which defined an entire era and sold millions worldwide: the lava lamp.

The story starts with the engineer and prolific amateur inventor Donald Dunnet. In 1954 he patented a curious device that operated like an inverted egg timer. His patent shows a glass bottle containing two layers of immiscible liquid separated by a sloping plate. When the lower liquid is heated with a lightbulb its density reduces and small bubbles of it rise through a hole in the plate into the upper liquid layer where they cool and sink back to the bottom of the vessel.

Dunnet, who died in 1960, made several prototypes of his device, and Craven Walker became fascinated by it.

Edward Craven Walker (19182000) was a man of many talents: inventor, entrepreneur and eccentric. Born in Singapore, he was educated at Charterhouse and, in the 1930s, he worked for British American Tobacco in Southampton. During World War Two, he was a squadron leader and flew photo reconnaissance missions in Mosquitoes.

After the war, with a friend called Simon Templar, he set up a travel agency which enabled him to pursue his enthusiasm for naturism. He was a regular visitor to naturist camps in southern Europe and, in 1959, he produced the naturist film Travelling Light set in Corsica which included an innovative underwater ballet sequence. This was the first naturist film to be passed by the British Board of Film Classification.