The story of the beloved object began immediately after World War II, in an English pub in the county of Dorset. The owners of the pub used a clever homemade timer for cooking eggs, which was made by one of their regular customers, Alfred Dunnett. A glass shaker was filled with a liquid containing blobs of oil. It was then thrown together with the eggs into boiling water, and the blobs in it rose through the thickness of the liquid exactly in the time it took to hard-boil the egg. This clever device interested another frequent guest of the pub — Edward Craven Walker, a British accountant. He bought the patent from the widow of Alfred Dunnett and spent the next 10+ years modifying the device in his backyard. The Dunnett timer became the prototype of the lava lamp.