HAVE A LAVA LITE? by Pam North You may have thought they had disappeared, gone with the Nehru jackets, love beads and other groovy 1960s stuff, but a few of them (both old and new versions) are still alive and well in Gilpin County, and how the Lava Lite came into existence is an interesting story. Shortly after World War II, an Englishman and inventor, Edward Craven-Walker, was relaxing in a British pub. As he downed his pint of ale, his attention was focused on a strange item at the bar. It was concocted from a glass cocktail shaker, inside of which was a solid blob of wax floating in liquid. Fascinated with the contraption, Craven-Walker inquired as to its purpose, and was told that it was an egg-timer. The bartender explained that the device was put in boiling water with the egg; as the hot water cooked the egg it also melted the wax, turning it into goo, and when the substance floated to the top, the egg was done. Craven-Walker imaginatively visualized the item as a lamp that could be marketed, and when he discovered that its inventor, a Mr. Dunnet, had died without patenting his idea, Craven-Walker patented the invention himself. He spent the next fifteen years (during which he also ran an international house-swap agency and made films on nudism) perfecting the delicate balance of chemicals required to ensure that his lamp would perform properly, and in 1965 he introduced it at a novelty convention in Hamburg, Germany as the Astrolite. Two Americans saw his display, and they bought the American rights to the lamp. They renamed it the Lava Lite, and the timing for its introduction in the United States was perfect. The psychedelic movement was in full swing, and much of the merchandising in the 1960s would focus on this trend. Craven-Walker himself declared, "If you buy my lamp, you won't need to buy drugs." He had encased his secret formula of oil, wax and other solids in a 52-ounce glass globe containing red or white "lava" and yellow or blue liquid. The tapered globe rested upon a gold metal base with tiny holes in it to simulate starlight. A frosted 40-watt appliance bulb in the base warmed the lava, causing it to rise, and as the lava reached the top of the globe, it cooled again and sank. As long as the lamp was on, the lava repeated its cycle, forming itself into endless oozing shapes, and the effect was soothing and hypnotic. The love generation embraced the quirky lamp, and more than seven million Lava Lites (or Lava Lamps in England) were sold each year. Sales fell dramatically in the 1970s, as the fad had run its course by then, but demand for the lamp rebounded in the 1980s, and even in the late 1990s more than two million were being sold annually. A classic had been born. An unexpected twist has given the Lava Lite a new role. Researchers at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, California have devised a novel application of the lamp's oozy globules by using their movement as a starting point for generating sequences of random numbers. No numerical recipe used by a computer can produce truly random numbers, as computers merely follow a set procedure, then restart the process with the same initial number, or seed value. Random numbers are an immensely valuable commodity. They are necessary not only for the operation of computer-based slot machines and lotteries, but also for computer simulations and for generating secret strings of digits required to encode and decode sensitive information in crptographic systems. The unpredictable movement of the globs in six Lava Lites are periodically digitally photographed, with electronic noise of the camera itself added to the data. That string is then electronically manipulated according to a scheme known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Secure Hash Algorithm, which compressses and scrambles the 921,600 bytes of the original image into a 140-byte packet of digits, which then serves as seed value for a computer-based random-number generator. Each such value starts a chain of mathematical operations that produces a different string of random digits. Who knows -- maybe Lava Lites are having an influence on our local casino slot machines. Picture of Lava Lite at: http://www.exploratorium.edu/science_explorer/volcano.html Copyright 2002 Pam North