Stuff You Should Know - The Lava Lamp: Goes Great With Acid

Episode Date: September 6, 2018

What started out as an egg timer at a London pub became a furnishing for bachelor pads before it took its rightful place as the most recognizable icon of psychedelia. The lava lamp became popular with people on LSD not once, but twice, decades apart. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry over there. Lights are turned down here. We got our groovy pad going, super swinging style. Why, I couldn't get square, could I? Couldn't get more squares, is that what you're saying? Square or? Square, yeah. Square.

Square. Well, could I answer my question? You're not square. I bet you got a lava lamp in your house. I don't actually, I never have. Really? Never have had one of you. I would love one.

I think I had one, I think we had one in college in one of our houses. I doubt very seriously it was a trademark original lava lamp, lava lamp. But it was probably a knockoff because I don't think it worked great. There's a lot of knockoffs for those. Yeah, you can get little cheapies now

that there's no good. Right, you want the real one. Yeah, and I think if for no other reason than to support the original, the OG. Stuff handmade in the UK. Yeah, still. Yeah. I do actually.

That's great. Based on the woman who owns it now, she seems like the type who would just be like, sticking to it. Yep. Yep, I could make way more money, but I'm not going to because this, the way it should be done is how it started

and staying with tradition. That's how she does it. So we're talking about lava lamps. And actually Chuck, can you just give me a second here? Yes. Before we get started. Can I give a little plug? Sure.

Okay, so as you know, but I want to share with everybody else on October 8th, I will be doing a live show on existential risks. It's called existential risks or how I learned to start worrying and love humanity. It's a pretty great show. Yeah.

There's slides involved. There's doom and gloom. Maybe a little bit of optimism. Who knows? There's some humor mixed in. It's going to be a pretty good show. I did a similar show at the Bell House a couple of years back.

This is a totally brand new show. So even if you saw it, then this will be new to you. But it's October 8th at the Bell House. And if you happen to want to go, tickets are available at thebellhouseny.com. Dude, I would be there with bells on. I will list you. But I'll be in California.

Well, I'm going to list you anyway. Yeah, like a former Falcons coach, Jerry Glanville, used to leave tickets for Elvis at every Falcons game. That's smart. It's stupid. Because those are two tickets, it could have gone to me. Oh, that's a good point. Just dumb.

Oh, hey, are you going to be on the radio for the Chiefs? No. Yeah, you turned it down. I kept forgetting to respond. I was out of town. So it already came and went? Yeah, for those of you wondering why we're just talking and chit chatting, and I wish I had his name.

Can you find it? Some of the guys from the voice of the Kansas City Chiefs radio, they played a preseason game against the Falcons this last Friday in Atlanta and invited us to be on the field and in the booth. And I was out of town for my niece's wedding. Congratulations, Shelby and Dan. Oh, hey, yeah, congrats.

And it was two family weddings, two out-of-town family wedding weekends in a row. So congratulations also to Alex and Catherine. Alex is Emily's cousin. So we went to Columbus, Ohio, and then Jacksonville, North Carolina. Lucky. Went to these weddings and I was not able to go

to the Falcons game. Well, that's quite a sacrifice because a guy named Dan Israel. Dan. Dan invited us to hang out in the broadcast booth for the preseason game between the Falcons and the Chiefs. I would have been so all over there. And I presumed to help call the game some. Oh, yeah?

I would guess. I'm pretty sure he would have put us on. Well, I told him at email and back said thanks, but if you ever come back, let me know. I'm into it. I just remembered I got to respond to him and say thanks. Can I come? I just needed to fire up the way back machine.

So... So that's a lot of chit chat. Yeah, if you don't like our size and tangents and stuff, I'll bet you hate this episode already. But the net net of all that is... I'm doing a live show at the Bell House. Josh is doing a live show at the Bell House. The net net of all that is that we're about

to talk lava lamps, dude. That's the net net. You corporate goon. This was, I think you've wanted to do this one for a bit, right? No. No, okay. I just made that up then.

No, I was like trying to come up with an episode idea. Sometimes it's harder than others. I don't know if you've noticed. It's getting tougher. But... The world's getting smaller. I remembered we did that one on food fads. I was like, that was an interesting episode.

Let me go see if I can find another fad. And one of them that came up was this... Pet rocks. An article about lava lamps. Ooh, maybe we should do Pet Rocks one day. So I was like, all right, let me see if this is any good. And it was okay, but then I found an article by Zachary Crockett on Priceonomics,

which is one of the better websites of all time. Zachary Crockett is one of the better like nonfiction magazine writers of all time. Agreed. On the web. And this article, the lava lamp just won't quit. Really kind of gave a boost to the stuff on how stuff works.

Yeah, so let's go back in time. Let's hop in the old Wayback Machine. Well, and speaking of, we actually have Wayback Machine t-shirts now. I know, at our tpublic.com store. Got a bunch of different merch now. All right, but we're in our own version of the Wayback Machine,

which is better than what's on that t-shirt. Okay. And we're going back to 1918 in the county of Dorset in England. And a little boy named Edward Craven Walker is born. He would grow up, and we follow him in the Wayback Machine as he's growing. He eventually becomes an RAF pilot in World War II.

Right, looks like everything's going normal and smoothly. Yeah, he actually flew recon missions, photographic missions, where they would go up in planes and take pictures of what the enemy's doing. And he eventually, the war ended. And after the war, he said, I'm gonna go live in this little trailer

in London, behind a pub, and build this travel agency. Yeah, he actually created a home-swapping program, like Airbnb, but this is in like the 50s. Interesting. Yeah, he's pretty ahead of his time. He was, in a lot of ways, it seemed like. So again, everything's going pretty normally, right?

Yeah, he's just travel agenting and doing quite well at it, I think. And he goes to the Southern coast of France and what this author calls a life-changing trip. And he comes back, a nudist filmmaker. Underwater nudist filmmaker. I think he did drugs down there. What do you think what that means?

I just think he took his clothes off for the first time ever, and was like, well, I had never really noticed the breeze before. This is nice. You think? It just feels like drugs were involved. It's possible, but he seemed to not really think too highly of drugs, so I think it was more just like.

Actually, you're probably right. He became a nudist is what it was. Yeah, I think you're right. So he took his clothes off for the first time. He was a never nude before that. Right. And in 1960, he actually, under a pseudonym, made a movie called Traveling Light.

It was a short film with a naked lady performing underwater ballet that, believe it or not, did okay in London. Had a six-month run. When's the last movie you knew had a six-month run at a major theater in London? Titanic. Maybe.

It was lucky. Probably Avatar is the last one. Probably so. So that was actually part of a trilogy. Titanic? No, Traveling Light. Oh, what were the other two? Sunswept.

Cause I was trying to get information. I was trying to watch it and I couldn't find any. I'll bet you were. I know I couldn't find it either, but I found some mention of it and I saw the movie poster for it or whatever. Yeah, I saw that. But it was, I think, preceded by a movie called

Eaves on Ski's, New to Skiing Trip. Okay. Sunswept sounded like what this is describing as Traveling Light. And then Traveling Light was actually, I think, the second of the three. It's actually a sweet little... Trilogy.

Pre-porn time and humanity, when like... Yeah. Like, hey, here's just a naked person skiing. That's as titillating as we get. I've seen it referred to as nudist propaganda films, which is basically like, look, this is like, this is the life. I went to the South of France, now you can too.

And it's certainly not pre-porn. I was kidding about that. We should do an episode on pornography. I was gonna say, we've done one on nudism. New beaches, at least. Yeah, we should do one on porn. That'd be good. We should.

That could be a two-parter. Maybe even like three or four. Yeah. Maybe five or six. Yeah. We'll be like, I'm Rusty and this is Eugene. This is porn you should know. So, here's the thing about Edwin Craven Walker's film...

Career? Yes. He was very successful at it. He became something of a legend and he invested his money in building a nudist camp. Yeah, he's like, I got all this dough. And here's what I wanna do with it. So, I'm sure a few of you are like,

I thought this was about lava lamps. Yeah. Chill out. Now we've reached the part where the lava lamps come in. That's right. And the lava lamps come in one day and I think the mid-50s where Edward Craven Walker, and I believe it's hyphenated actually,

Craven Walker is his last name. Oh, is that the deal? Yep. And he's hanging out in a pub called the Queen's Head. The Queen's Head that's in New Forest in the Southwest of London. And he's sitting at a bar ordering a beer, a pint. And he notices on the bar along with the liquor bottles,

there's a cocktail shaker, but there's weird bubbles floating around in it. Yeah, a glass one, not like a steel one. Right, and there's actually, you can see pictures of it on the Mathemos site. Oh, really? The original thing. Wow.

Yeah, so he's sitting there about to drink, like you said, and it's got water and oil, and there's a little camp stove underneath it, heating it, and it looks like a little, what would become a lava lamp. It's got the oils and little blobs and it's floating around, and it's the thing that we all recognize now, but when this dude sees it back then,

and no one had ever seen anything like this, he was like, wow, what is that? Right, and the bartender was like, that's an egg timer. Yeah, kind of a weird answer. But that's weird, I mean, that's what the lava lamp started out as, is an egg timer. There was a guy named Alfred. It's a great trivia question.

It is, a guy named Alfred Dunnett, who was a regular at the Queen's Head in New Forest, had built this thing where it was this glass cocktail shaker on a camp stove, just a little tiny camp stove, and he put oil in the water, and when the oil rose to the top, by the time it took to heat up and rise to the top, it meant that your egg was fully hard boiled.

It was an egg timer, but Edward Craven Walker saw this and said, no, no, no, this is way more than an egg timer. This is the most mesmerizing thing I've ever seen. And so he did it right. He found out that Alfred Dunnett had passed away, but apparently he had a patent on this egg timer. So Edward Craven Walker went to the widow of Alfred Dunnett

and said, hey, how about you sell me this patent? The history of bad deals. But here's the thing, you go ahead and I'm gonna retort, okay? Well, I mean, I might even retort for you because when you look at the history of business and bad deals, he got this patent for less than 20 pounds, but at the same time, Dunnett's widow was probably like,

what in the world? Why would anyone ever care about this? Right, it's just sitting there. And not only that, this guy doesn't wanna make an egg timer. He wants to make something bigger out of this thing. So he actually rescued a patent from obscurity and improved on it. And by the way, West Egg doesn't convert for pounds,

it's strictly USD, but there's a site called IMKate, which does inflation calculation for pounds. Oh, interesting. So 20 pounds according to IMKate says it would be about 783 pounds today. Which is about a thousand dollars. Roughly. So that's not bad.

Yeah. Here's a thousand bucks that you were totally not expecting for something you were never going to do anything with. I'm gonna take it and present it to the world. Yeah, so he gets a bottle. It's called Treetop Orange Squash. It was a drink that he used to drink as a kid in England. I think it's still around.

I think so. I don't think it has this original shape, but the shape of that bottle more or less is sort of what the shape of the glass of any lava lamp that you see today looks like. Yeah, you look at it and you're like, oh yeah, of course, that would be the prototype. And so he gets a thing, he gets a couple of liquids.

It is not oil and water. Like I probably thought before I researched this, it is water and wax and they are what's known and we'll get into the science in a minute, but mutually insoluble, meaning that they don't dissolve into one another, like oil and water. And he adds a few other little chemicals here and there and got a little light bulb, screwed it into a base

and kind of hooked it all up and Bada Bing, Bada Boom, the Astrolamp, the Astrolamp as he called it was born. Yeah. Was it Astrolight? Astrolamp. Okay, the Astrolamp. That's another trivia question for you. The original name of the lava lamp was the Astrolamp.

Should we take a break? I think so. All right, we'll be back right after this and talk about science. What about rocks? Tell me about it. What over here? What about rocks?

Just get a sense. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck.

Science. We're going to talk science because there's actually some physics behind the lava lamp. And we're going to explain it because it's actually understandable. Yeah, who was the guy who wrote this again? Zachary Crockett, but this is a House to Forks article that explains the physics.

Oh, the inside the lamp part? Yep. Because I thought that was kind of cute, actually. The bullet points for that are the things that you need are a compound that makes up floating blobs. Blobs and quotes. A compound that the blob floats in. There wasn't quotes that time.

And then a lamp that illuminates the display and provides the necessary heat to move the blobs. Again, no quotes. Yeah. That's it, though. But that's what, yeah, what you need. But we're going to talk about more science as far as mutually insoluble liquids go.

Right, because it sounds really easy, right? You got your blobs, you got your liquid, the blobs float in, you got your light to heat the whole thing up. Easy peasy. It's actually really hard. Because what you're walking is a very fine line between something that will work as a lava lamp and something that will just not work at all.

Yeah. Or look like a lava lamp gone bad. Right, exactly. So you've got, you've got immiscible compounds, compounds that don't dissolve into one another. But you need to have them, they need to have pretty similar densities. Yeah.

Not exactly the same, because then it won't work. But not too different either, because then that won't work either. And you'll understand why in a second. They need to be fairly close. And so the reason why Edward Craven Walker used wax and water is because water, plain old fresh water has a density of 1.0.

It's basically the set point for densities. Paraffin wax has a density of 0.8, which means that it's slightly less dense than water. But close. Right, very close. So if you heat up something, it tends to expand, right? Correct. When it expands, it becomes less dense,

which means that something that was more dense before will be less dense, meaning that if it's in some other liquid that's denser, this less dense thing will float to the top. Yeah. If it's less dense, it rises. If it's more dense, it will fall. And that's why, if you want to change this density

and then make these molecules spread out, one of the things you can do, especially in the case of a lava lamp, is to heat it up. Right. That's the point of that bulb at the bottom of the lava lamp. Yeah, because if you see a lava lamp that's not turned on, you just see the blob at the bottom. Right.

And the fluid, it's not water, of course, sitting at the top and they're separated, but they're just sitting on top of one another. Right, and it actually is water. Oh, is it really? Uh-huh. I thought it was something else too. They add some other stuff,

but the liquid that the blobs are in is mostly water. Oh, okay. Yeah. So here's the thing, when you turn on a lava lamp, you turn that, you start the heat of the light bulb. Yes. And that wax begins to warm up and it liquefies,

and as it liquefies, it becomes less dense. Yeah, and things get really exciting at that point. Right, and then it starts to flow to the top, right? Yeah. You're like, all right, things are happening. It actually forms what are called stalactites. Yeah, and everyone's like, you feeling it yet? Right, right, and as it starts to form stalactites,

they eventually, the tops of them break off. Yep. And it floats up to the top, and you're like, this is awesome. I'm definitely feeling it. And then as it gets to the top of the lamp, it's far enough away from the heat source that it starts to cool down,

and so it sinks again to the bottom, and as it does, it passes another glob that's on the way to the top, and then when it reaches the bottom, the whole process starts over again, and that wax glob gets reheated, and it glows back up, and it passes on the way up, the glob that it just passed coming back down,

and that's a lava lamp. And again, it sounds simple, but to get the wax density and the water density just right, you have to add some other ingredients, and so going back to the original prototype that was created by Edward Craven Walker, it's really impressive that this guy with zero chemistry training whatsoever,

managed to do this ever, let alone in just less than a decade. Yeah, I mean, I imagine there was a lot of trial and error trying to get that thing just right, because again, like I said, I mean, you think it sounds easy, go build one on your own, and prepare to be disappointed.

And you can, you can make one with oil, water, food coloring, and then Alka Seltzer. It's called a janky lava lamp, it's terrible, but this is nothing like this. Yeah, because the whole point of a lava lamp is to create this mood, and to have these amorphous blobs separating, and floating around, and rising and falling,

and that's the whole effect. It wasn't meant to be a lamp to give much light, it's to create mood and atmosphere, and as we will see, we keep making little druggy jokes, that was a big part of why they sold. But we'll get to that in a minute. But you were talking about the fact that it was impressive,

it says only five or six people actually know this exact formula still, that who work for the real lava lamp company. And there are plenty of knockoffs, but that original lava lamp recipe is not known by many people, very closely guarded. Yeah, even in Craven Walker's original patent, it has the ingredients,

but it doesn't say in what quantities or anything like that, it's still a trade secret to this day. Yeah, and you also, he figured you had to, there was a lot of trial and error, because he had to add the water very slowly, apparently, or else it becomes what's known as an emulsion, meaning it's just sort of mixed together.

Yeah, like you can conceivably mix oil and water together, especially if you have an emulsifier, but you can also do it by stirring it really, really fast, and it'll mix together, and that's not what you want. You want them to be separate from the first moment they come in contact together in the lamp globe. Right, so 1963, three years I think it took him to finally get the design right,

he called it the astrolamp, he built a little factory in his backyard, and his wife at the time, I think he was married four times, but she was like, he was the type of guy that would finish this thing once he started it. Right, and he did, and originally he decided that it was, it fit really well with this post-World War II British demand

for very flamboyant, colorful home furnishings. He's like, this is nothing if not flamboyant and colorful. The original lava lamp was yellow liquid water and red wax globs on a gold base. Great looking, I bet. Groovy, as groovy gets, right? But he originally envisioned it as like, this is something for a cool bachelor pad.

If you're a wealthy bachelor and you're looking to put something that's very interesting and high-end as a home furnishing, try the astrolamp. It was originally envisioned as a high-end home furnishing. Yeah, there's this one great ad that had the scene of a bachelor pad on a magazine page, and the caption said, the perfect gift for one's relatives, one's friends,

and dash it all oneself. Yeah, why not buy three? Yeah, exactly, buy three of them. Yeah, so this actually didn't work out very well for Craven Walker because he and his wife were driving around in their van, going to places like Harrods, and getting a very chilly reception to these things.

Apparently, the Harrods buyer thought the lamps were disgusting and ordered them taken away. I don't know why, can't imagine seeing them as disgusting. Maybe there was like, pubic hair stuck to the outside or something that could make a lava lamp disgusting, right? Well, I imagined at the time, especially in stuffy Old England, this post-war transition wasn't met

with open arms by everybody, I'm sure the traditionalists thought it was disgusting. This blobby thing floating around. Especially with the pubic hair. So Craven Walker, he was like, well, fine, I'm just gonna create my own company and I'll market it myself. So we formed Crestworth,

which is the original company that put out the Astro lamp, which we know and love as lava lamps. And I should say, there are a lot of different names for lava lamps and it's really tough to distinguish which one is actual trademark. So lava lamp seems to be a generic term. Lava light seems to be generic, but lava, all caps, is a trademark name

for the American version. But there doesn't seem to be a trademark name for the lava lamp, the original one in England. Oh really? They just call it a lava lamp. I thought it was lava lamp was the trademarked because- Not that I can see.

Our dumb article calls them motion lamps. Well, that's the- And I thought that was to avoid- The generic term. Yeah, I thought they were doing that to avoid saying lava lamp. No, that's so like 2005, how stuff works. Like call it the generic term.

It's not Kleenex, it's facial tissue, you know? That's totally why they call it that. Oh goodness, you're so right. All right, so these things aren't selling to the rich and powerful. They did not seed as a luxury item, but then the 1960s are rolling along, LSD comes on the scene, pink Floyd is in the back room,

the yard birds are up front. Sid Barrett is freaking out. He's freaking out. And this thing really, the Astrolamp really fit in to this whole scene. Like he was just, he was mismarketing this thing from the beginning. He was, I think he didn't predict the 60s psychedelic.

He was more into like the swinging Austin Power's bachelor stuff that was pre-psychedelic and moved into psychedelia. But he should thank his lucky stars. And I'm sure he did more than once that the psychedelic thing happened because when that happened and the hippies in London found out about lava lamps, lava lamps took off.

Oh yeah. Just shot off like a rocket. And at first Edward Craven Walker was not not entirely cool with this. I mean, he was happy to have the money and his lamp was finally a success. But he knew what people were buying these for. They were buying them so that they could take acid

and stare at them for eight hours, right? And he actually had an ad where he said, if you buy my lamp, you won't need drugs, which is L7. Yeah, because the ad should have read, this goes great with drugs. Right. Like drugs, you're gonna love my lamp.

Like that is the level of dedication this guy should have had to LSD because LSD made him a very wealthy person like in a very short amount of time. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, we're gonna talk about how they hit America right after this.

MUSIC On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing could be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so they're taking off in England.

He takes these things to a trade show in Germany in 1965 and a couple of dudes named Adolf Wertheimer and William Rubenstein. I'm pretty sure they didn't say their names like that. They're from Chicago. Yeah, so they were just good Midwestern Germans. And they said, I want to buy the North American manufacturing rights.

We're going to call it the Lava Light, L-I-T-E. And we have our own drug culture that's starting to boom over here, and I think these would be a big hit. And they were. And they got them on TV, they got placement, they got them in doctor, who? That was huge. Got it in the Avengers, not the old TV show,

the Avengers. Yeah, it says here though, it was on James Bond. And I looked high and low for what they were talking about. And I actually came across a post on the internet of all places by a guy who runs a website. Anthony Vaz runs a website. I can't remember the name of it. I think maybe Lava Love or something like that.

But he was on there saying, I saw this in an article that it says it was in a James Bond film. What James Bond film are they talking about? I'm like a James Bond fan forum. They're like, no idea, bud. And if we don't know, it didn't happen. So I have no idea what James Bond film it was in. The first giveaway to me that that's bogus is,

here's the sentence. A red model debuted in a 1978 episode of Doctor Who. This is followed by appearances in The Prisoner, The Avengers, and James Bond. Right, talk about generic. Remember that movie, James Bond? Sure. I wanted to ask the great Matt Gorley.

Does he know James Bond? Of the Super Ego podcast, yeah. Okay. He's an aficionado. He hosted a podcast called James Bonding. There you go. I bet Gorley would know. So on that forum, somebody's like,

maybe that Woody Allen spoof Casino Royale, but I couldn't find any mention of Lava Lamps in that movie either. So who knows? But they made some product placement. They were starting to pop up all over the place. And apparently Edward Craven Walker knew that he'd made it.

His wife later recounted when they found out that Ringo Starr had just bought one in 1968. I love it. He also might know he made it by the fact that he sold 7 million of them annually by the end of the 60s. Apparently he was so eccentric that he drove a fire truck.

Yeah, he'd ride around a fire truck. He also drove nothing. If it was a car, nothing but British made Jaguars. Oh, well, yeah. Nothing wrong with that. Sure. Well, it depends on the year

because they made some pretty terrible Jaguars for a while during the 80s. So these, like any fad would go away. And in the late 70s, the Lava Lamp, I remember the Lava Lamps kind of just weren't around that much anymore. No. By the time we were kids.

They didn't even have like kitschy appeal any longer. They were just like everyone became the Harrods buyer. Like these are disgusting. Get them out of here. But he was smart enough to know that fads come back around. He did not shut down the business. He did not just sell it off for pennies on the dollar.

No, he kept releasing new stuff. Yeah, nothing really took. I tried to find any like his other little inventions, but I couldn't really get much. So nothing made the waves that the Astro Lamp did. And by the late 1980s, they declined to about a thousand lamps per year. That is so few.

From seven million a year. Yeah, I mean, even, you would think you'd get a thousand like wide elephant gift purchases. Sure. Like, look, this is the dumbest thing I could find. I mean, I guess it's what they were. So a thousand a year at that point.

And then a woman that we mentioned earlier name, Cressida Granger, or Cressida Granger. Great name. 22 years old, ran an antique booth and saw these things were selling like the vintage ones, these used lava lamps. This is back in like 1989, I think. Yeah, and so she was like,

these things are kind of selling. She got in touch with a guy with Craven Walker and said, hey, I'd like to buy your company, your partner with you and Crestworth. If you're open to it. He said, fine, meet me at this nudist camp. And she went, all right, keep your pants on and I'll do so.

And by all accounts, they were fully clothed and struck up a deal where she would take over operations and managing as managing director. And they had a deal in place and a great deal for her. Where she could slowly buy his company from him over time. Right, so think about being 22 and having that kind of like get up and go. I love it.

That you're like, I'm starting to sell some vintage lava lamps. I'll go see if I can buy the company. But then from Craven Walker's perspective, you're like, I'm down to selling a thousand of these a year. Why not take a fire? Yeah, if this person wants to like invest in the company, why not?

And so Crestworth Granger's timing could not have been better. Like she was really prescient to notice that like the vintage lava lamps were selling. The reason the vintage lava lamps were selling was because there was an acid revival going on. The same reason lava lamps sold the first time around is the reason they sold the second time around. Everybody discovered that they really, really like LSD

and lava lamps go really, really well with LSD. Well, and not only that, but that was with house music and ecstasy and raves and Austin Powers. Like that whole thing kind of came back in a big way. Austin Powers was like a kind of a third wave. Yeah, that was mid to late 90s. Yeah, like I think 97. So she oversaw a revival of the lava lamp

or resurgence in it and like saw the manufacturing uptick in it too in the late 80s, early 90s. And then managed to ride that wave through to the late 90s when it ticked up even further because of Austin Powers. And they started to sell so much. Crestworth Granger says they sold more in the 90s than they did in the 60s. That's amazing.

Yeah, and she started the whole thing at 22 going up to Edward Craven Walker and saying, how about it partner? Yeah, and so in 1991, the 20 year patent expired and Granger said that, no one realized this thankfully. And so we just kind of kept monopolizing the business and she slowly bought it out over time. And I think by 92, she renamed the company Mathmos

which apparently was a tip of the cap to Barbarella of the film. Yeah, there's like an energy bubble that it lives underneath the city or something called Mathmos. And that's what it's called today. If you go to the website, she moved into the manufacturing facility.

So she didn't say, hey, let's take this state side or take it to China. She said, we're gonna keep doing it right here in Dorset. And like you said at the beginning, that is still where these things are made today by hand by British workers. In Dorset. Like I think they said, how many of them can

a good worker make in a day? 400. Amazing. Fill in these bottles by hand. Right, so that's if you look at the Mathmos lava lamps and compare the price to one you just find online, like a knockoff, which technically they're not a knockoff because the patent wore off.

Right. But. Still a knockoff. It's like 80 bucks compared to like 15 or 20 bucks for what looks to be the same thing. Yeah, actually more than a hundred, 77 pounds. That's how much Mathmos is now? Yeah, like they're standard.

The original classic lava lamp is 77 pounds. Gotcha. The reason why they're that much more is because they're handmade in the UK just as they have been since the 60s. I love it, man. It's pretty cool. And she said that there's a lot of pressure

for her to transfer production overseas where it's gonna be way cheaper and she can make way more money. And she's like, nope, I'm keeping it here. Yeah, they're more expensive. And yeah, we would sell more if they were cheaper, but I'm just not doing it. If you haven't noticed, I'm a rich woman.

Right, I'm doing all right. I've been pretty well off since 22. I've got all the acid I can take. No. All right, should we talk about lava lamp tips? Well, I wanna say one more thing. Another thing that, another reason I think Cressida Granger is pretty awesome.

She kept Edward Craven Walker on as a consultant. Yeah. Up into his death. Yeah. She had full control of the company, I think in 1998 or whatever, and he was done. She kept him on as a consultant until he died. And it was two years later,

but she didn't know when he was gonna die. Sure. Unless she poisoned him with a lot of acid or something. Quite, there's been a lot. She probably didn't do that. But I thought that was a pretty, a mark in her favor for sure that she kept the eye on. The original creator, the second creator on as a consultant.

I'd like to meet her one day. So yeah, I think we should give some lava lamp tips because frankly, if I were out there listening, and this happened to me during research, hearing all this stuff, I'd be like, I want a lava lamp. Yeah. So if you buy a lava lamp, there's actually some things you need to know

about how to use it correctly. Yeah, so apparently the bottles are replaceable. So they do run out after about 2,000 hours of operating time. So they sell replacement bottles, which is really nice. I don't know about this. To get rid of your old bottle, make a hole in the metal cap with a sharp point.

Yeah, I also saw that you can pour the liquid out. That seems a little unsafe. You're, that's what the Mathemos site recommends. Really? Yeah, they say you can recycle the glass. You just got to get rid of the contents inside. I also saw there's an SF gate article on how to revitalize vintage lava lamps.

And they say you can get that cap off with vice grips. You should not do that. Don't do that. Josh and Chuck didn't tell you to do that. I'm just saying I saw that on SF gate. Yeah, I don't know if I'd do that. So recycle it. You can get the bottle replaced.

The liquid eventually will fade. At least the color in the liquid will. Yeah, over time, like we said, that 2,000 hours is, I mean, it's a lot of hours. Sure. It's a lot of acid. A lot of trips. Here's another one.

The lamp, the very first time you take it out of the box, it may take up to an hour and a half to start working. But once you have used it, it doesn't take quite that long. You should have your room be at least 68 degrees Fahrenheit. 20 Celsius. 20 Celsius, because I think if it's too cold, it won't work right. Yeah, and you don't want it near an air conditioner

or a draft or anything like that. Or in the sun, necessarily. Well, the sun will make the color fade that much faster. If it's too cold, it won't work. But then they also have a tendency to overheat, too. Yeah, if you come in your room and you're flying, and your lava lamp is just a single blob and it's just a big blob, that means it's overheated.

Or the universe is ending around you right now. So eight to 10 hours, they said, is the max you want to run that thing in a row. So turn it off and let it cool. Yeah, there you go, that's your fix. You let it cool. So no more than eight hours, usually for normal operation. And then in between uses, let it cool completely.

And that's just gonna extend the life of your wax that much longer. But then another reason you don't want to overheat it is because it is possible, and it's probably not possible for it to overheat with the bulb itself, like the glass. But one thing they say is never, ever, ever put that thing on a stove,

which some people have done. And you can understand why you'd want to do that. You got a hot date or your ass is kicking in faster than you think. And the lamp's not heated up yet. Right, it's taking too long, so you'd put it on the stove. You don't want to do that. And seriously, at least one person has died

from putting a lava lamp on a hot stove. Yeah, it's hard to believe, but you sent this over. In 2004, a young man named Philip Quinn was 24 years old in Kent, Washington, put his lava lamp on a stove, it exploded, and shards of glass shot into his heart. He stumbled in his bedroom and died. And apparently no drugs or alcohol were involved, so it wasn't like he was just messed up and goofing around.

It sounded like he just wanted to heat it up faster. Yeah, that's what I think. He was impatient, wanted his lava lamp heated up. And then some yahoo drank it, right? Yeah, somebody in a 1996 article on the annals of emergency medicine, they describe a guy in his mid-60s who drank the contents of a lava lamp.

Wavy gravy. Yeah, and then immediately regretted it because he spent three months recovering from kidney failure. Man, what a dummy. And then there's one more thing about lava lamps. This is pretty recent, kind of awesome. There's a company called Cloudflare.

Yeah, they don't understand this at all, so. Okay, so whenever you're on the web, when you go into a new website, you're actually, you're assigned a code that you use on that website, and it's supposed to be random, or else for some somehow hackers can impersonate you if it's not a random code.

Humans are not capable of generating random numbers, and the computers we program by extension aren't either, okay? I can generate a random number. You can't. Eight, nine, seven, six, four to 10. It's not random. That would be funny if you were like the new internet security guy.

You just start spitting out numbers and foil all the hackers. Well, for now, until they employ you, this company, Cloudflare, has a wall of 100 lava lamps in a camera recording their movement, and the completely random, unpredictable movement of these globs on the video screen gets turned into pixels,

and those pixels get turned into a random number. So this random number is generated by the movement of lava lamps, and that's how about 15% of internet traffic gets their random number security codes generated by a bank of lava lamps that Cloudflare's office is in San Francisco. And that's pretty cool.

Of course it's in San Francisco. Of course. They microdose out there, which I think we've been on the record as looking down on. Do you wanna hear an interesting tidbit about random numbers? And I don't know if this trick works. Quick, give me another random number.

Nine, eight, six, seven, five, three, oh, nine. That was a good one. Well, that's my story though. Apparently that old song, eight, six, seven, five, three, oh, nine, Jenny, if you go to a store where you have a rewards program, and they say enter your number, apparently enough people sign up using that number

that you can go to any store in the country and spit that number out, and you will get the whatever discount. Oh, I'm gonna try that. Yeah. Nice work. You know, like you're traveling, you go into the Bevmo for a bottle of wine.

They're like, you got your Bevmo card? I'm like, oh, I'm just in town. We don't have Bevmo's in Atlanta. Just say eight, six, seven, five, three, oh, nine. That's awesome. And what if they're like, you're the 1,000 customer or whatever. You're under arrest.

You're tripping and it's bad news from there. It's gotta be the last acid reference. I don't know. Is there one in this listener mail coming up? I bet we can work one in. So if you wanna know more about lava lamps, go get one. And maybe, you know, if you've got the coin splurge for a handmade one from the UK, from Athmos.

If not, get one from Lava Light here in the US. You won't judge or just get one on Alibaba or Amazon. Whatever floats your boat, okay? And since I said whatever floats your boat, that means it's time for listener mail. I call this board breaking follow up. Sometimes episodes that I think like, yeah, it was fine.

We get tons of reactions. Well, this one, we just got something wrong, right? Physics, right? That too, but we had a lot of catate in martial arts. Oh, okay, yeah. People write in enthusiasts about board breaking. They really were into this. So this is kind of a two-parter

with a little correction at the end. Hey guys, listening to board breaking, it sounds like you had a confusing source. I hope I can clear it up. You said that when breaking a board with a karate chop, you want the grain parallel to your hand, but you weren't sure what to do with the grain when striking with a closed fist.

What matters isn't the orientation of the grain compared to the hand, but the orientation relative to how the board is supported. When stressed, the board naturally wants to crack along the grain, not across it. So you want to be sure that the grain isn't oriented so that the fibers in the wood span from one support to the other,

like the person holding it, or it'll be too strong. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, when oriented correctly, the grain will be parallel to the hand for an open-handed chop. But that's just coincidental with being oriented correctly compared to the supports. Okay.

I hope I was able to say this clearly, guys. Totally. I understand why your source had trouble putting it clearly. I think by source, they mean you. That's from David Branson. And then we also got a little bit of the formula wrong for... Force equals mass times acceleration? Yes, he said it's force equals mass times acceleration,

not force equals mass times velocity. The thing is with physics, like most of those terms are interchangeable. It means the same thing. Joe Dyer says acceleration is the derivative of velocity, velocity is the derivative of position. And Joe also says, yes, I'm an engineer, so I won't bust your chops over this too bad.

So thanks, Joe, for being nice, and thanks to everyone who wrote in with those corrections and your enthusiasm for board breaking. So Joe wrote both of those? No, no, no, Joe Dyer wrote that one, and then David Branson of Branson, Missouri. No. No, I'm just kidding.

Okay. He wrote one, maybe, I don't know. Probably not. Nice. Miserons are nice. Yeah, that's true. Well, thank you, David, and thank you, Joe, and thank you, like you said, to everybody who wrote in, including those of you who wrote in while you were on acid.

If you want to get in touch with us, you can follow us on social media. Go to our website, StuffYouShouldKnow.com, and you'll find all the links there. And you can also send us an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,

visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

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