Design Moment: Lava lamp, 1963

Nobody would lose in a “guess the decade” competition for when the Astro lamp was invented. It was the 1960s obviously – when else would such an unashamedly groovy, proudly psychedelic, hippyish object with a nod to space travel be created?

Edward Craven Walker, who went on to found lighting company Mathmos (called after the lake in cult 1968 movie Barbarella), claimed to have gotten the idea in 1963 from watching an egg timer. He commissioned David George Smith to help develop the lamp and explore what chemical cocktail would be required to make blobs of wax melt and move over a heat source while suspended in water.

The light from the bulb in the base, as well as providing a (weak) light source in whatever colour water that filled the tapered rocket-shape glass bottle, heated the wax which rose through the liquid only to cool when it reached the top and fall dreamily back down again.

First made in the 1960s in Chicago in the US and in the UK, they were hugely popular – almost era-defining – but way too kitsch to ever truly come back into fashion.