Lava Lamps in the Lab

Lava lamps used to be essential to the properly furnished 60's style room. Now they can be found and bedrooms and dorms. But where did they come from, and who invented such a retro luminescent? For starters, this mystical art piece was invented by Edward Craven Walker, after 15 years of trying to make a liquid motion lamp that could be mass produced. He got the design idea from a contraption he saw in a pub in Hampshire, England. This contraption had been invented by Mr. Dunnett. Initially retailers found the lamps to be ugly and disgusting, but the "Psychedelic Movement" and the "Love Generation" of the 60's made merchandise like the lava lamp fly off the shelves. He and his company, the Crestworth Company of Dorset, England, marketed the lamp in Europe under the name of Astro Lamp.Two Americans bought the rights to manufacture the lamp in North America, calling it the Lava Lite lamp.

Commercial lava lamps contain a regular incandescent bulb, wax, and water, all contained in a glass bottle. The bulb heats the wax, making its relative density decrease and blobs of wax float to the top, where they cool and ascend back to the bottom. Usually, a wire coil in the base of the glass breaks the surface tension and recombines the blobs of wax. 



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Homemade lava lamps can be made in a simple science experiment, as I did in my biology class. All that is needed is a large empty bottle, food coloring, vegetable oil, water, and Alka Seltzer tablets or salt. I used Alka Seltzer in my experiment. First, the empty container is filled 3/4 with oil. Then water is added to fill the container the rest of the way. As most would easily observe, the oil "floats" on top of the water. This is because oil is less dense than water, and is hydrophobic. The next step is to add a couple drops of food coloring. The food coloring sinks down to the water because food coloring is hydrophilic (water "loving"), so it bonds with water, not oil. The last step is to add the Alka Seltzer, and watch the "lava" flow! The tablet's reaction to the water pushes the water upwards through the oil and mixes the food coloring and water, creating the lava. The water flows in blobs of colored water as the oil pushes the water away from it and back down.

 

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