Edward Craven Walker
| Edward Craven Walker | |
|---|---|
| Born |
4 July 1918 Singapore |
| Died | 15 August 2000 (aged 82) London |
| Occupation | Inventor of lava lamp, founder of Mathmos |
| Spouse(s) | Marjorie Bevan Jones, Christine Baehr |
Edward Craven Walker (4 July 1918 – 15 August 2000) was the inventor of the psychedelic Astro lamp, also known as the lava lamp.
Craven was a pilot in World War II, flying a DeHavilland Mosquito over Germany to take photographs from an unarmed plane. He met his first wife, Marjorie Bevan Jones, at an air base where she was with the WAAF. Craven continued flying after the war.
After the war Craven developed an idea he saw in a country pub in Dorset, England. The pub had a contraption made by a regular, Alfred Dunnett, who had since departed, a one-off device which used two immiscible fluids as an egg timer. While it was rudimentary, Craven saw potential and set about perfecting it and turning into a lamp. He set up a laboratory in a small shed where he mixed ingredients in bottles of different shapes and sizes. He discovered one of the best containers was a Tree Top Orange Squash bottle and its shape defined the Astro Baby Lamp or Astro Mini as it was then called.
Craven with his wife Christine set up a company to produce the lamps, naming it Crestworth. Operating from small buildings on an industrial estate in Poole, Dorset, Crestworth has supplied the world with lamps since 1963, changing its name to Mathmos in 1992. They were a big commercial success through the 1960s and early 1970s and became a symbol of psychedelia. Craven said, "If you buy my lamp, you won't need drugs... I think it will always be popular. It is like the cycle of life. It grows, breaks up, falls down and then starts all over again".
In the late 1970s fashions moved on and lava lamps fell out of fashion. The Walkers kept the company going throughout the 1980s but in a much smaller way.
In the early 1990s, a young couple began manufacturing and selling them successfully. Cressida Granger and David Mulley approached Craven and took over running the company and renamed it Mathmos in 1992. Initially they were in partnership with Edward and Christine Craven Walker and the company was called Crestworth Trading Ltd. Over a period of years they bought out the Walkers bit by bit. They had the rights to produce Astro Lamps and continued to manufacture in the same location, using almost the same staff, machinery and even some of the 1960s components. Edward Craven Walker remained a consultant at Mathmos until his death helping particularly to improve the formula of the lamps. Astro lamp has been in continuous production for 50 years and has been handmade in Britain since 1963. and is still made today by Mathmos in Poole, Dorset. The Mathmos lava lamp formula developed initially by Craven-Walker in the 1960s and then improved with his help in the 1990s is still used. His lava lamp company Mathmos celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013.
...
Wikipedia