Borax goes with the flow
March 2001

Like bell-bottom pants and platform shoes, they're back. Lava lamps - now celebrating their 35th birthday - are still glowing brightly and selling steadily all around the world. Actually, they never went away: more lamps have been sold in the '90s than throughout the '60s '70s and '80s combined. But this undying fad may never have seen the light of day without borates.

The first lava lamp was designed in 1963 by English engineer Edward Craven Walker, the man credited with stumbling upon the top-secret lava formula that remains, to this day, as fiercely protected as the engineering enigma of the Hula Hoop. He heated the mixture in a glass container, added light to stream up through the primordial ooze - and the lava lamp was born.

"I think it will always be popular," Edward Walker once said of his lava lamp. "It's like the cycle of life. It grows, breaks up, falls down, and then starts all over again."

Haggerty Enterprises, Inc. in Chicago, Illinois, manufactures the lamp in North America today. How long borates have been a part of the equation is another mystery, but Borax has been selling its Neobor® Borax Pentahydrate to Kimble/Kontes, the manufacturers of the lamp glass, for more than 20 years.

"Borosilicate glass is important for the lamps," says Ray Helton, account manager at Kimble/Kontes. Kimble also makes borosilicate glass for more serious applications in the pharmaceutical, drug and medical fields.

The more than 150 colors, shapes and sizes of today's lava lamps are as varied as the people who own them. Whether yours is an original - well-worn and redolent of patchouli oil - or fresh from the factory, know that Borax is in the groove and has been since the beginning, baby.

Borax offers this celebration of the lava lamp as a tribute to Edward Craven Walker, who died this August.