Throwback Thursday – Lava Lamps: Flowing for Over Sixty Years!

– photo courtesy of  lavalamp.co.uk

[For reasons unbeknownst to me, this post seems to be one of the most viewed on The Chicago Files! I wrote it many years ago, so I’m reposting it here in case you’d like to know more about the whimsical Lava Lamp]!

Without further ado:

What is happening here on Earth (or in space!)? Although a current photo, let’s take a timeline walk back to 1965, where we find this rather unassuming building on Irving Park Road here in Chicago:

– photo courtesy of wikipedia.org

Businessmen witnessed what can only be thought of as something “out of this world ” when they saw a strange, odd-looking lamp at a trade show in Belgium. Obtaining the rights from the British inventor, the company “Lava Manufacturing Corporation” set up shop in the building you see in the above photo.

Let’s take a peek inside this “Lava Lite” (its American name) and see what the brouhaha is all about:

– photo courtesy of howstuffworks.com

In a nutshell, there is a special type of wax in a liquid substance heated with a light bulb at the bottom of the lamp.

As the wax is heated, it becomes liquid “blob patterns” that are less dense than the liquid above it. 

When the orbs reach the top of the lamp, they begin to cool and sink, and the process starts again. The blobs resemble molten lava—okay, I guess that’s a bit of a stretch, but I assume that’s why our spectral art received its name in the first place.

– photo courtesy of s3.favim.com

Oh, say, can you see all the colors of wax (and sparkly stuff, too) floating around in their lava-like formations! I daresay that is literally the tip of the waxy iceberg. These lamps come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. 

I find it rather amusing that interest in these spacey-looking lamps has really “waxed and wained” over the decades. Don’t worry; you don’t need to find the humor in that sentence; I have found it for you!

Hippies of the ’60s, college students, and many who simply find it a decorative piece of the peculiar over the past six decades have lit up their lives with these rather spaced-out luminaries. The Smithsonian Institute considers an “icon”.

Have you seen a Lava Lamp? Did/do you own one? 

They are mesmerizing, to say the least. It’s difficult to say what clinched the deal for our Chicago businessmen all those years ago. Was it the blobular (not a word, but I quite like it) shapes of the wax? Were they visionaries who saw the beauty in the bizarre? Or was it good old-fashioned luck that played upon their sensibilities and burnished our North American shores with the now iconic light? 

– photo courtesy of media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com

Do you recall my comment that Lava Lamps come in various shapes, colors, and sizes? Take a look at this:

– photo courtesy of pi.ning.com/files

I can only imagine the conversation in that room: “Today, we have three blobs for a nickel!”

Even though the lamps for the U.S. market are now made in China, I thought it would be fitting to acknowledge the 60th anniversary of its manufacturing inauguration here in Chicago.

Happy Anniversary, Lava Lamp! May your blobs continue to glow with the flow! 🙂