The Lava Lamp: Goes Great With Acid

I don't. Actually I never have, really never have had one of you. I've I would love one. I think I had one. I think we had one in college and one of our houses. I doubt very seriously it was a uh trademark original lava lamp. Lava lamp. Yeah, but um it was probably a knockoff because I don't think it worked great. There's a lot of knockoffs from those you can get little cheapis 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 o G stuff handmade in the UK. Yeah, still, yeah, you believe that I do. Actually that's great based on on the woman who owns it now. She seems like the type who would just be like sticking to it. Yep. I could make way more money, but I'm not going to because it's the way it should be done. That is how it started. I'm staying with tradition. That's how

she does it. So we're talking about lavelmps and actually, Chuck, can you just give me a second here before we get started? Can I give a little plug? Okay? So, um, as you know, but I want to share with everybody else. On October eight, 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 pretty great show. Um, there's slides involved, there's um doom and gloom, maybe a

little bit of optimism. Who knows, there's some humor mixed in. It's gonna be a pretty good show. Um. I did a similar show at the Bellhouse 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 eight at the Bellhouse and if you happen to want to go, Tickets are available at the Bellhouse ny dot Com. Dude, I would be there with Bells on. I will list you, but I'll be in California.

Well I'm gonna list you anyway. Yeah. Like, uh, 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 did you uh are you gonna be on the radio for the Chiefs? Do you know you turn it down? I kept forgetting to respond. I was out of town, so it already came and went. Yeah. It was just for those of

you wondering why we're just talking and chit chatting. Uh, And I wish I had his name? Can you find it? The some of the guys from the voice of the Kansas City Chiefs radio that 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 uh it was two family weddings, two out of town family

wedding weekends in a row. So congratulations also to Alex and Catherine, Alex's Emily's cousin. Okay, so we went to Columbus, Ohio, and then Jacksonville, North Carolina. Lucky went to these weddings, and uh, 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 for the preseason game between the Falcons, and it should have been so all over that and

I presumed to help call the game something. Oh yeah, I would guess. I'm pretty sure he would have put us on. Well I told him at email them back said thanks, but if you ever come back, let me know do it. I just remembered I got to respond to him and say thanks, can I come? I just needed fire up the way back machine. So so that's a lot of chit chat. Yeah, if you don't like our sides 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. If done a live show, the net net of all that is that we're about to talk lava lamps. Dude, that's the net Net 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 I Um, 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 he's getting tougher, but um, 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 fat and one of them that came up with this pet Rocks article about laval app 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 prisonomics, 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 um, this article the lava imp 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 way Back Machine. Well, and speaking of we actually have way Back Machine T shirts now, I know in our t public dot com store. Yeah, I got a bunch of different merch now. Alright, but we're on our own version of the way Back Machine, which is better than what's

on that T shirt. Okay, And we're going back to 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 way Back Machine as he's growing. He eventually becomes an r AF pilot in World War Two. Looks like everything's going normal and smoothly. Yeah. He he actually flew recon missions, photographic missions where they would you know, go up in planes and take pictures

of what the enemy is doing. And uh. 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 us uh travel agency. Yeah. He actually created a home swapping program like Airbnb. This is in like the fifties. 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 he's just travel agent ing and doing quite

well at it, I think. And uh, he goes to the southern coast of France and what this author calls a life changing trip. Uh, 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, 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 act. 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. And uh. In nineteen sixty 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 Luck. Probably Avatar is the last one, but probably so so. That was actually Chuck part of a trilogy Tatanic, No we Traveling Light? Oh what were the other two? Sun Swept? Because I was trying to

get information. I was trying to watch it and I couldn't find anything. I'll bet you were Um, I know I couldn't find it either, but I found some mention of it and I saw the movie poster forward or whatever. Um, but it was. It was I think preceded by a movie called eaves On skis New to Skiing Trip. Sun Swept sounded like what what this is describing as um 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 as titilating as we get. I've seen it referred to as new to 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 I porn. That'd be good. We should that. That could be a two parter. That's maybe even like three or four, Yeah, maybe five or six. Yeah, alright, I'm a rusty porn you should know. So. Um, here's the thing about Edwin Craven Walkers film um film career. Yes, he 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 want to do with it. So I'm sure a few of you are like, hose about lava lamps. Chill out now we've reached the part where the lava lamps coming, that's right, and lava apps come in one day. And I think the mid fifties where um Edward Craven Walker and I believe it's hyphenated. Actually craven Walker is his last name. Oh is that the deal? And he's hanging

out in a pub called the Queen's Head. The Queen's Head that's a new forest in the southwest of London and he's sitting at a bar ordering a beer pint and um, 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, glass one too, not like a steel one. Right, And there's actually you can see pictures of it on the matha most site. Oh really

the original thing? Wow? Yeah. 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 uh it, you know, it looks like a little what would become a lava lamp. It's got the oils and little blobs and it's floating around. It's the thing. It 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 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 That's what the lava lamp started out as, is an egg timer. There was a guy

named Great Trivia Question. It is a guy named Alfred Dunnett, who was a regular at the Queen's Head in New Forest, Um had built this thing where it was this glass cocktail shaker on a camp stove, just a little tiny camp stove, Um, and he put oil in the water and when the oil rose to the top, by the time it took the 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 Unnat had passed away, but apparently he had a patent on the same timer. So Edward craven Walker went to to Um, the widow of Alfred Dunnet, and said, hey, how about you saw me this patent the history of bad deals. But here's the thing. You go ahead and I'm going to retort. 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 twenty 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 want to 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 and strictly USD. But there's a site called I am kate which does um

inflation calculation for pounds. Oh interesting, So twenty pounds according to I am kate says, it would be about seven three 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 going to take it and presented to the world. Yeah. So he gets a

bottle um. It's called Treetop Orange Squash. It was a drink that he used to drink as a kid and stud 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 the 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 why acts and they are what's known and we'll get into the science in a minute. But mutually insoluble, meaning uh that they don't dissolve into one another like oil and water. And he adds a few other little chemicals here and there, and it got a little light bulb, screwed it into a base and kind of hooked it all up and bought a being bought a boom. The astro lamp, the astro lamp, as he called it, was born. Yeah, there

was an astro light astro lamp. Okay, the astro lamp. That's another trivia question for you. The original name of the lava lamp was the astro lamp. Should we take a break, I think so. All right, we'll be back right after this and talk about science. All right, Chuck, science, We're gonna 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 how stuff works article that explains the physics. Oh the inside the lamp part, 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 in 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 gonna 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 floating, 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 and look like a lava lamp gone bad, right, exactly. Um, So you've got you've got admissible compounds compounds that don't um dissolve into one another, but you need to have them.

They need to have pretty similar densities, 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 UM Edward Edward Craven Walker used wax and water is because water plane old fresh water has a density of one point Oh, it's basically the set point for densities. Paraffin Wax has a density of point eight, which means that it's slightly less dense

than water, but right very close. So if you heat up UH 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. Uh. And that's why you know, if you want to change this density and then make these molecules

UH spread out. One of the things you can do, especially in the case of a lava lamp, is to heat it up. That's the point of that bulb at the bottom of the lava lamp. Yeah, because if you see lava lamp, it's not turned on. You just see the blob at the bottom and the fluid. It's not water, of course, uh, 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? I thought it was something else too, the some other some other stuff, but the liquid that the blobs are in is mostly water. Yeah. So here's the thing. When you turn on the lava lamp. You turn that that heat that you start the heat of the light bulb, and that wax begins to warm up and it liquefies. And as it liquefies, it becomes less dense, and things get really exciting at that point, right, And then it starts

to flow to the top. Right, You're like, all right, things are happening. It actually forms what are called stalagtites. Yeah, and everyone's like you feeling it yet, right, right? And as it starts to form stealactites, they eventually the tops of them break off and it floats up to the

top and you're like, I'm definitely feeling it. And then um, 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 globe that's on the way to the top, and when it reaches the bottom, the whole process starts over again, and that wax glob gets reheated, and it goes 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 it's 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, and 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, if I mean you think it sounds easy to build one on your own and prepared to be disappointed, and you can you can make one with oil water food coloring and then alca seltzer. It's called it's called a Yankee lava lamp. It's terrible. But this is nothing like this, Yeah, because what 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. You know. 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. Uh. 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. Uh. It says only five or six people actually know that this exact formulas still that who worked for the real lava lamp company, And there are plenty of knockoffs, but that original, uh, that original lava lamp recipe is 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 uh, there was a lot of trial and error because he had to add the water um 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 emulsive fire, but you can also do it by stirring it really really fast, and it'll

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 nine h three years I think it took him to finally get the design right. He called it the astro lamp.

He built a little factory in his backyard and his wife at the time, I think he's married four times, but she was like, you know, he was the type of guy that would finish this thing once he started it, and he did, and originally he decided that it was it fit really well in with this post World War two British demand for very flamboyant, colorful home furnishings. Yeah, 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, groovy as groovy gets right, Um, But he originally envisioned it is like, this is something for a cool bachelor pad. If you were a wealthy bachelor and you're looking to put something that's very interesting and high end as a home furnishing, try the Astro lamp. It was originally envisioned as a

high end home furnishing. Yeah. There there's this one great ad that had a 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 by three yeah, exactly, by three of them. So this actually didn't work out very well for Craven Walker because he and his wife were driving around in their vein in going to places like Herod's and getting a

very chilly reception to these things. Apparently the Herod's buyer thought the lamps were disgusting and ordered them taken away. I don't know why. I can't imagine seeing them as disgusting. Maybe there was like pubic care stuck to the outside of or something that can make a lava lamp disgusting, right, well, I imagined at the time, especially in stuffy old England. Uh, this postwar transition wasn't uh met with open arms by everybody.

I'm sure the traditionalist thought it was disgusting, this blobby thing floating around, especially with the pubic care. So um Craven Walker, Uh, he was like, well, fine, I'm just gonna create my own company and I'll market it myself. So we formed crest Worth, which is the original company that put out the astro lamp, which we know and love is 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 trademarks. So lava lamp seems to be a generic term, lava light, it 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. 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 caused them motion lamps. Well that 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 two thousand five how stuff works, Like call it the generic term. You know, it's not kleenex, it's facial tissue. You know, that's that's totally where why they call it that? Oh goodness, you're so right. Alright, so these things aren't selling to the rich and powerful. They did not see his luxury at him. But then the nineteen sixties are

rolling along l st. He comes on the scene. Pink Floyd is in the back room, the Yardbirds are upfront. Sid Barrett is for freaking out. He's freaking out. And this thing, really, the astro lamp really fit in uh to this whole scene, Like he was just he was miss marketing this thing from the beginning. He was. I I think he didn't predict the sixties psychedelicy. He was more into like the swinging Austin Powers bachelor stuff that

was pre psychedelic and moved into psychedelia. Um, 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, 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 six US, but he knew what people were buying these four They were buying them so that they could take acid and stare at him 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 l seven. Yeah, because the ed should have read this goes great with drugs,

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, all right, we're gonna talk about how they hit America right after this, all right, So they're taking off in England.

He takes these things to a trade show in Germany, and a couple of dudes named Adolf Votheima and William Rubinstein 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'm gonna I want to buy to I want to buy the North American manufacturing rights. We're gonna call it the Lava LIGHTE L I T E. And we have our own drug culture that's starting to

boom over here. And I think he used to be a big hit, and they were, and they got him on TV, they got placement, they got him in Doctor Who that was huge, got in The Avengers, uh not, you know 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 m a guy who who runs a website. Oh, 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 like fan for him. They're like, no idea, Bud, And if we don't know, it didn't happen. So I have no idea what what James Bond film? It was in the first giveaway to me that that's bogus is here's the sentence. A red model debut in the nineteen seventy

I'm Sorry sixty eight episode of Dr Who. This is followed by appearances in The Prisoner, The Avengers, and James Bond. Talk about generic Remember the movie James Bond. We should ask the great Mett Gorley does he know James Bond at the Super Ego podcast? Yeah? Okay, he's an officient not he hosts there you go tast called James Bonding. There you go. I bet Gorley would now so on that for him. Somebody's like, maybe that wouldy allan spoof Casino Royal. But I couldn't find any mention of lava

lamps in that movie either, So who knows. But they made some product placement, uh they were 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 n I love it. He also might know he made it by the fact that he sold seven million of them annually by the end of the sixties. Apparently he was so h eccentric that he would he

drove a fire truck. Yeah, he'd rid around in a fire truck. Yeah. He also, um drove nothing if it was a car, nothing but British made jaguars. Well, yeah, nothing wrong with that. Sure, Um, well, it depends on the year, because they had some pretty terrible jaguars for a while. They're in the eighties. Uh so these uh, like any fad would go away, and in the late seventies, the lava lamp, I remember the lava lamps kind of

just worn't around that much anymore. By the time we were kids, they didn't even have like kitchy appeal any longer. They were just like like everyone became the Herod's 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 nineteen eighties 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 white elephant gift purchases, like, look, this is the dumbest thing I could find. I mean, I guess that's what they were, So a thousand year at that point.

And uh. Then a woman that we mentioned earlier name Cressida Granger or Cressida Granger, she's twenty two years old, ran an antique booth and saw these things were selling, like the vintage ones. These use lava lamps. This is back in I think, yeah, And so she was like, these things are kind of selling. She got in touch with the guy with Craven Walker and said, hey, I'd like to buy your company, your partner with you and

crest Worth. If you're open to it. He said, fine, meet me at this newdist 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, so think about being twenty two and having that kind of like

get up and go. I love it that you're like, I'm starting to sell some intage lava lamps. I'll go see if I can buy the company. But then from from Craven Walker's perspective, You're like, I'm down to selling a thousand of easy year nothing trying. Yeah, if this person wants to like like invest in the company, why not.

And so Crescitter 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 you know, the House of Music and Ecstasy and Raves and uh, Austin Powers, like that whole thing kind of came back. Well, Austin Austin Powers was like a kind of a third wave. Yeah, that was mid to late nineties. Yeah, like I think seven.

So she oversaw a revival of the Lava lamp, a resurgence in it, and like I saw the manufacturing uptick in it too in the late eighties early nineties, and then managed to ride that wave through to the late nineties when it ticked up even further because of Austin Powers, and they started to sell so much crested. Granger says, they sold more in the nineties than they did in

the sixties. That's amazing. Yeah, And she started the whole thing at twenty two, going up to Edward Craven Walker Insaine how about it partner, Yeah, and so uh in nineteen one, the twenty year patent expired and Granger said that, you know, 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 ninety two she renamed the company Mathmas, which apparently was a

to of the cap to Barbarella of the film. Yeah, that's there's like an energy bubble that it lives underneath the city or something, and that's what it's called today if you go to the website. Uh, she moved into the manufacturing facilities. 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 Endorset. And like you said at the beginning, that is still where these

things are made today by hand by British workers. Like I think they said, how many of them can a good worker making a day amazing filling these bottles by hand? Right? So that's if you look at the mathmas Um lava lamps and compare the price to when you just find online like a knockoff um, which technically they're not a knockoff because the patent wore off, but um still a knockoffs. It's like eighty bucks compared to like fifteen or twenty bucks for what looks to be the same thing. And

we're actually more like a hundred seven seven pounds. That's how much Mathemas is now. Yeah, like their standard the original classic lava lamp is seventy seven pounds. Got the reason why they're that much more is because they're handmade in the UK, just as they have been since the sixties. I love it, man, it's pretty cool. And and she said that there's a lot of pressure for her to transfer production overseas where it's going to be way cheaper

and she can make way more money. And she's like, nope, I'm keeping it here. Um, 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 someone rich woman, right, I'm doing all right. I've been I've been pretty well off since twenty two. I'm I've got all the acid I can take. No, uh, all right, should we talk about lava lamp tips? Well, I want to say. I want to say one more thing. Um, another thing. That

another reason I think Kresso Granger is pretty awesome. She kept Um Edward Craven Walker on as a consultant, yeah, up until his death, even though she had full control of the company. I think in whatever um and he was done, she kept him on as a consultant until he died. And it was two years later. But she didn't no one who was going to die unless she

poisoned him with a lot of acid or something. She probably didn't do that, but I thought that was a pretty a mark in her favorite for sure, that she kept the guy 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 lamps, there's actually some things you need to know about how to use it correctly. Yeah. So the h apparently the bottles are replaceable, so they do run out after about two thousand hours of operating time, so they sell replacement bottles, which is really nice. I don't know about this. To to get rid of your old bottle and make a hole in the metal cap with a sharp point. Yeah. I also saw that you were

the liquid out. That seems a little unsafe. You're um, that's what the Mathemas site recommends. Really, Yeah, to they say you can recycle the glass, you just gotta 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 cripts. 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. I don't

know if I do that. Uh, so recycle it. You can get the bottle replaced. The liquid eventually will fade um at least the color in the liquid. Well, yeah, over time. Like we said that, two thousand hours is um. I mean it's a lot of hours. It's a lot of acid, a lot of trips. Uh, 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. Uh. You should have your room be at least sixty decrease fahrenheit celsius celsius because I think it's too cold. It won't work, right. Yeah, and you don't want to near an air conditioner or a draft or anything like that, or the sun necessarily. Well, the sun will make the color fade that much faster. Yeah, right, so you you 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 right and you're 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 your right now. So eight to ten hours, they said, is the max you want to run that thing in a row. So yeah, and in turn it often let it cool. Yeah, that's there, you go, that's your fix. You let it cool and then um so no more than eight hours usually for

normal operation. Um. And then in between uses, let it cool completely. And that's just gonna extend the life of your wax that much longer. Um. 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 them, but 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 assets kicking in faster than you think it's 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. That it's hard to believe, but you sent this over. In two thousand four, a young man named Philip Quinn was twenty four years old and Kent Washington put his lava lamp

on a stove. It exploded, uh, and shards of glass shut 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 like messed up and goofing around. It sounds like he just wanted to heat it up faster. Yeah, that's what I think. He's impatient, wanted his lava lamp heat it up. And then some yahoo drank it right, Yeah, some somebody in the In the article on the Annals of Emergency Medicine, they describe a guy in his mid

sixties who drank the contents of a lava lamp. 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. It's kind of awesome. Um, there's a company called cloud Flare. I didn't understand this at all, So okay, So whenever you're on the web, when you go into a new

a new website, you're actually I done. You're 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. It's not random. That would be funny if you were like the new Internet security guy.

He just starts spitting out numbers and foil all the hackers, well for now, until they employ you. This company, cloud Flare, has a wall of a hundred lava lamps and a camera recording their movement. And the 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 fift of Internet traffic gets their random number security codes generated by a bank of lava lamps that cloud Flare's offices in San Francisco. That's pretty cool. Of course is in San Francisco. Of course they micro dose out there, which I think we've been on the chord is looking down on Uh. Do you want to hear an interesting tidbit about random numbers? And I don't know if this is tricky works? Quick? Give me another random number nine eight six seven five

three o nine. Well that's my story though. Apparently that old song eight six seven five three o nine genny. 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. Try that. Yeah, nice work. Like you're traveling, you go into the bev Moo or bottle of wine, They're like, you got your

bevmo card, Like, oh, I'm just in town. We don't have bedmos in Atlanta. Just say eight six seven five three o nine. That's awesome. And what if they're like, you're the one thousand customer or whatever, you're under arrest, you're chipping and it's bad news from there. It's got to 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 want to know more about Lava lamps, go get one, and maybe you know if you've got the coin, splurge for a handmade one from UK for math. Most if not get one from Lava like here in the US, you won't judge, or just get one on Ali Baba or Amazon. Whatever floats your boat, Okay. Uh And since I said whatever floats your boat, that means it's time for listener mail

called 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, well that too, but we had a lot of kata te and martial arts. Okay, yeah, people right in enthusiast about board breaking. They really were into this. Uh So this is a kind of a two parter with a little correction in 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 it with a close 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 will be too strong. 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.

I hope I was able to say this clearly, guys, I can understand why your source had trouble putting it clearly. I think 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 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. Yeah, 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, no, Joe Dyer wrote that one, and then David Branson of Branson, Missouri, no, I'm just kidding, Okay, he wrote, Well, maybe I don't know,

probably not nice. Missouri's are nice, that's true. Um. Well, thank you David, and thank you Joe, and thank you, like you said to everybody who wrote in, um, including those of you who wrote in while you were on acid. Uh. If you want to get in touch with this, you can follow us on social media. Go to our website stuff you Should Know dot com and you'll find all

the links there. Uh. And you can also send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff podcast at how stuff Where dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com