The story
Founded by Edward Craven Walker in 1963.1
The Astro lamp, or lava lamp, was invented around 1963 by Edward Craven Walker. It was adapted from a design for an egg timer spotted in a pub in Dorset, England. Edward and Christine Craven-Walker licensed the product to a number of overseas markets whilst continuing to manufacture for the European market themselves under the original name of the company, Crestworth.
The rights to produce and sell the lamp on the American market for the duration of the patent were sold to Lava Simplex International, in 1966. The American company has now closed the American factory and has the lava lamps made in China.
In Europe Craven-Walker’s original lava lamp designs have been in continuous production since the early 1960s and are still made today by Mathmos in Poole, Dorset, UK. The Mathmos lava lamp formula developed initially by Craven-Walker in the 1960s and then improved with his help in the 1990s is still used.
Lava lamp sales by Mathmos have been through a number of ups and downs. After selling millions of lamps worldwide in the 1960s and 70s, they did not revive until the 1990s. In 1989, Cressida Granger and David Mulley took over the running of Walker's original company, Crestworth, situated in Poole, Dorset, and changed the name to Mathmos in 1992.
The name Mathmos comes from the seething lake of energy resembling lava beneath city Sogo in the 1962 comic Barbarella.
The 1990s re-launch of the original lava lamps saw sales grow strongly for Mathmos again from 10,000 lamps a year in 1989 to 800,000 lamps a year in 1999. Mathmos won two Queens Awards for Export and a number of other business awards. Edward Craven-Walker remained a consultant and company director at Mathmos until his death in 2000.
From Wikipedia’s article on Mathmos, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4