Astro Lava Lamp
What does this icon of the psychedelic era have to do with internet security?
In 1948, while in a Dorset pub, British accountant, movie maker, entrepreneur and (as it happens) naturist [Ed: nudie] Edward Craven-Walker noticed something on a stove top “made out of a cocktail-shaker, old tins, wax and things”. The cocktail shaker had been put into water alongside an egg and, as the water heated, the wax would melt and float to the top in the time it took to perfectly boil the egg.
Craven-Walker was mesmerised by the bubbling fluids and inspired to develop a lamp that would become a definitive symbol of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and a design classic.
Craven-Walker hired British inventor David George Smith to develop the device and the chemical formula it required. He named the first lava lamp “Astro”, and founded a company called “Crestworth” to manufacture and market his creation. Crestworth was later renamed “Mathmos” after the bubbling liquid force that lived under the City of Sogo in the cult 1960s French sci-fi comic strip, Barbarella – which was later made into the film starring Jane Fonda.
Showing a true grasp of his 1960s market, Craven-Walker once said: “If you buy my lamp you won’t need to buy drugs.”
The Astro Lamp quickly gained in popularity. Its psychedelic appearance and soothing motion made it an icon of the era. Although the lava lamp became synonymous with hippie culture, the appeal was also somewhat mainstream. Our favourite piece of copy is this very British caption from a magazine ad at the time: “An ever changing ‘living jewel’ – the never ending topic of conversation. The perfect gift for one’s relatives, one’s friends – and, dash it all, oneself.”
The popularity of lava lamps declined with the end of the psychedelic era of the 1970s, but they experienced a resurgence in the 1990s as a retro novelty item. Today, lava lamps continue to be produced and enjoyed by people around the world. They are considered both as decorative pieces and as objects that provide a sense of relaxation and visual stimulation. The original Mathmos company still produces lava lamps in Poole, Dorset, but many other manufacturers have entered the market, offering a wide range of designs and styles.
BUT that’s not all. The most interesting thing about lava lamps relates to the notion of randomness, something that is extremely important for secure (SSL) data encryption.
To produce the unpredictable, chaotic data necessary for strong encryption, a computer must have a source of random data. As one might expect, lava lamps are consistently random. The “lava” in a lava lamp never takes the same shape twice, and as a result, observing a group of lava lamps is a great source for random data. To collect this data, the website security company Cloudflare has arranged about a hundred lava lamps on one of the walls in the lobby of the Cloudflare headquarters in San Francisco and mounted a camera pointing at the lamps. The camera takes photos of the lamps at regular intervals and sends the images to Cloudflare servers for storage as a string of totally random numbers that the servers can then use as a starting point for creating secure encryption keys. Thus, with the help of lava lamps, Cloudflare is able to offer extremely strong (and sufficiently random) encryption to its customers. Watch the Tom Scott video below.
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