Lava lamps

A lava lamp (or Astro lamp) is a decorative novelty item, invented in 1963 by British accountant Edward Craven Walker, the founder of the British lighting company Mathmos. The lamp consists of a bolus of a special coloured wax mixture inside a glass vessel the remainder of which contains clear or translucent liquid; the vessel is then placed on a box containing an incandescent light bulb whose heat causes temporary reductions in the density and viscosity of the wax. The warmed wax rises through the surrounding liquid, cools, loses its buoyancy, and falls back to the bottom of the vessel in a cycle that is visually suggestive of pāhoehoe lava, hence the name. The lamps are designed in a variety of styles and colours.

A classic lava lamp contains a standard incandescent or halogen lamp which heats a tall (often tapered) glass bottle. A formula from 1968 US patent consisted of water and a transparent, translucent, or opaque mix of mineral oil, paraffin wax, and carbon tetrachloride.^{p. 2, line 30} The clear water or mineral oil can optionally be coloured with transparent dyes.

Common wax has a density much lower than that of water, and would float on top under any temperature. However, carbon tetrachloride is heavier than water (also nonflammable and miscible with wax) and is added to the wax to make its density at room temperature slightly higher than that of the water. When heated, the wax mixture becomes less dense than the water, because the wax expands more than water when both are heated.^{p. 1, lines 40 & 45} It also becomes fluid, and blobs of wax ascend to the top of the device where they cool (which increases their density relative to that of the water) and then they descend.^{p. 1, line 47} A metallic wire coil in the base of the bottle acts as a surface tension breaker to recombine the cooled blobs of wax after they descend.

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