Waterbeds: The Sexiest Bed?

Waterbeds came and went pretty quickly in the United States, but despite their marketing as sex beds, they were actually invented to deliver a great night's sleep. Learn all about these super 70's beds in today's episode. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there,
and we're just here. Jiggle AOI slash slash on our

(00:21):
pleasure pit. God oh man, it's so funny. When I
started researching this, so I was like, water beds, that's
very stuff you should know. So sort of fits right
in with our historical pop culture phenomena series Phenomenal Do
do uh and big shout out to The Atlantic, one

(00:44):
of our favorite rags. A lot of this was taken
from article by Rebecca Greenfield uh, and then a bunch
of other cool uh supplementary stuff. New York Times, who else? Uh,
Washington Post, Washington Yeah, wapop men, all those fake news outlets, right,
Although I really love the New York Times and the
Washington Post ones because they were like contemporary articles, like

(01:07):
the New York Times one was and Wapop was from
and they're writing about the phenomena of of um water
beds at the time. I love that, man. I love
being able to go back read an article and then
go back and see how it actually unraveled like in
real time. Basically, yes, see, like sure, it's a little

(01:31):
time capsule if you will, and you can look back
now and say, did they get it right? News? I
don't even like saying the two words together. Neither so
played out, so played All right, let's talk about the
water bed. Have you ever had one? No? I kind

(01:51):
of wanted one. I didn't have one. I kind of
wanted one to. I think we're just of that age
and they came about as you'll see, we're going to
talking about the seventies and eighties. That in the eighties
is when they peaked sales wise. I think even like
young uns like us, we're very intrigued. Oh yeah, my
friend had one. Yeah, did you sleep on it? No,

(02:13):
never slept on that one. I laid down on it once,
I think because I was I was like, I gotta
know what this feels like at least uh, And I
think it was. They may have called it waveless, but
I don't even know what the difference was because it
was pretty wavy. What decade was this, This would have
been mid to late eighties. Yeah, I don't even they

(02:34):
had waveless ones back then. I think so they were
called waveless, but I don't know how it's still slashed
you around. Yeah, I remember very distinctly laying on it,
and I remember thinking, I don't know if I could
sleep on this. It didn't seem like I mean, it
wasn't uncomfortable like it calls me pain. But I move
around a lot in my sleep, so it's not it's

(02:59):
not a good least. The old school water beds are
not a good match for me. Memory Fund was a
little better. Actually, supposedly they've come a long way, and
the new water beds are the bomb. I would be
curious to lay on one. Well, go to a dealer
in South Florida. I think City Furniture in South Florida
is bringing back the water bed. Oh there's other places too,

(03:20):
because the design now, well, we'll get to it, but
it's much different. It's not. It's not the good old
days where you just fill up a big vinyl rubber
bladder and we were like tripping on some grass and
listening to Dark Side of the Moon. You know. The
funny thing about my friend Chris's water bed though, and
his whole house was a time capsule of the nineteen seventies.

(03:41):
He had a water bed in front of a wall
that the wall was a photograph of a like a
Hawaiian beach sunset. Oh man, we had two of those
in my house. Really. We had one was a straight
up forest. So it's like, oh, I'm in the family room,
I'll walk into the kitchen. Oh my god, I'm in
the forest basically. And then if you went upstairs, and

(04:04):
this is my childhood home in Toledo, Ohio, Um, when
you went upstairs to my sister's rooms, you when you
got right up to the top landing, there was like
an outdoor like Coors beer scene, like in the woods
with like a stream coming through the mountains. Giant murals
in my house, Yeah, we never It's weird. Like when

(04:26):
I look back at the house I grew up in,
it didn't have any of those cool seventies things. But
now that I look back, I think it's probably you know,
I was not cool then because we lived in this
huge house in the woods. But now I look back,
I'm like, that was where I would like to live now.
So what was the aesthetic of your house? Sort of

(04:46):
contempo country Okay, that hip like Jerry Read or something
lived there. Yeah, I mean we had looking back, we
had shag carpet, or in shag carpet, there were some
markings of the day. Um. But then that was replaced
with hardwoods at some point in the in the eighties. Um.
But then when I had, you know, not too long ago,

(05:07):
went back to my childhood home and broke in. It
was for sale really and empty, and uh you broke in? Well,
not for sale, it was just sort of derelict and empty.
Did you break a window to break in? Now? I
just got in like I used to get in. It
was family was like it's locked, and I was like,
watch this. I used to sneak out and read Bible passages.

(05:28):
So I snuck in through the garage window. And looking back,
there was a lot of a lot of the same
stuff was there, and it was very kind of seventies
tile and linoleum and stuff like that, but it just
wasn't full on like Brady Bunch stuff more or wall murals.
And I'm glad I went because sadly it is no
longer there. I'm glad you went to. Then a couple

(05:50):
of months later just torn down, and I went back
and saw a big emptiness and I cried, did you
the end, I could see that I you me and
I went to Toledo and then I since went once
when we went to Cleveland for our show, I went
by myself and walked around, kind of hoping that the
people who live in the house would be like, what's

(06:11):
that weird doing and stick their head out and be
like can I help you? And I'd be like, yeah, actually,
can I come in your house? Um? No one did,
but I did get to walk around the neighborhood. Did
you cry a little? Nice? But I I saw. I
want to go back to my elementary school and it's
just like a grass field. Now, It's like, how do
you tear down an elementary school? You know? Maybe it

(06:32):
got like black mold or something. Well, let's hope. Yeah,
but it's it's sweet. It's better sweet to go back. Yeah,
go back to your childhood places. Everyone. I highly highly recommended.
So water beds, Yeah, water beds. Um, we'll go back
to the earliest history, I guess. But um. The man
that we really need to talk about is a man

(06:53):
named Charles Hall, the inventor of the modern water bed
as we know it ninety sixty eight. He's a student
at San Francisco state he's taking a design class. Oh
he was like a design major. Well, yeah, because he
submitted this as his master's thesis, was the waterbed. How
awesome is that? So I saw competing stuff of what

(07:15):
he actually created like built. Yeah, and the thing that
I saw, I think it was in that WAPO It
said what he created was called the pleasure pit, and
it was an eight foot by eight foot basically waterbed,
but it was meant to be a conversation pit for
multiple people that kind of hang around in and there

(07:37):
was like a bar and there was lighting and like
shelves and stuff like that, and that that was the
original his design. Yeah, But was there a water mattress
function or was it just a sunken going room. No,
that was the thing that was where everybody sat was
on a water mattress in the middle. It sounds awful,
it's just weird, but it really caught everybody's an imagination.

(08:01):
Supposedly within six months it was on the front page
of papers across the country. This is in San Francisco.
The Miami Herald had something on the front page about
this waterbed exhibit in San Francisco that this twenty four
year old design student created capital p capital p uh yeah,

(08:21):
pleasure pit. Everything I've seen is it's capitalized. But that's
what I'm saying. I think that's what he called the
first thing. Yeah, but it very quickly got turned into
a bed. The water bed I used to like. Actually,
my same friend Chris had at one of those sunken
living rooms those very seventies. Remember in um, oh, what's

(08:42):
the big Lebowski when he goes see to see Jackie
Child or Jackie whatever, Jackie Treehorn. Yeah, Jackie Treehorn and
his whole house is just amazing. Yeah, he had a
conversation pit. Uh right, conversation pit, That's what it was called.
So here's the deal from Time magazine. In Manhattan, the

(09:03):
waterbed display at Bloomingdale's Department Store, for a while was
a popular singles meeting place. Sire's, Roebuck and Holiday Inns
are eyeing the beds, and Lake Tahoe's Kingcastle Hotel has
already installed them in luxury suites. And this is uh
I think it continues. Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner has one
king size, of course and covered with Tasmanian bossom. I thought,

(09:28):
how gross is that? Because what I know is a
possum is different, different. I looked up the Tasmanian possibles
super soft I would imagine. So it's not like American
road kill on your water bed. Right. It wasn't even
made from it. It just had a bunch of live
American possums on his bed, and his water bed was
really weird. But here's the deal. The water bed that

(09:51):
Charles hall Cree eventually would go on to create, and
we'll talk about some of his earlier designs aside from
the pleasure pit, he wanted to revolutionize sleeping. Yeah, he
meant it very seriously. He wanted to have a pressure
point free mattress that would envelope your body and give
you the best night sleep of your life. He had

(10:12):
no intention of it becoming this, which it very much did.
A metaphor for the sexy sixties and seventies, right, but
it definitely did like you say it was. It's a
really good example of an idea just basically getting hijacked
big time. And at first he was kind of like, yeah,
I'm just a twenty four year old design suit. I

(10:34):
don't care. I'm sure make your own waterbed knockoff. But
then over time he definitely came to care and spent
a couple of decades pursuing um uh infringement suits here
and there, patent infringement suits um which we'll talk about later.
But at first it was basically like here's the waterbed world,

(10:55):
and the world went nuts. Uh And again, yeah, he
meant a revolution. I sleep the hippies and the people
who owned head shops, which is where you bought your
water beds early on was at the head shop said no,
this is all about sex, and that's how that's how
it was first sold in the late sixties and early seventies.
I have never had sexual intercourse on a waterbed, but

(11:18):
it doesn't it doesn't sound appealing to me, right because
so one of the in this, I think the Washington
Post article quote a Washington Post article from the seventies saying,
like a waterbed salesman said, it's very like, very much
like three people are having sex, because the bed itself
is like a third warm body participating in the motion

(11:39):
or something like in the worst possible way. And I
looked up, Yeah, I was like, it's just weird. And
I looked up um like sex on a water bed
on um on a work computer right. Uh oh yeah,
the work computer supertained now um, and the I found
like this one. Can't remember the website, but it's basically

(12:01):
like pros and cons. And it sounds like it comes
down to your preferences, you know, like what what like
are you into your motions being exaggerated? You know? And
I guess, yeah, Chuck's laughing because I'm like kind of
making toward right. Um, if you're into that, great, if
you're not, or you um, apparently it's really like you.

(12:26):
It really is pronounced. It's not something going on in
the background. It's like you know and right. So it
just depends on your preferences, I think. But I think
a lot of the earliest water beds were we're bought
by guys who were pretty confident. They could be like,
I've got a water bed, you want to try it out,
and that that would happen. It became a punch line,

(12:48):
Like I remember, I feel like every other sitcom or
a movie at some point there was a scene where
they were like, oh, he's got a water bed, or
he would just slowly open the door to reveal the
water bed, and that meant only one thing. It did
master lover right, so the the and then the waterbed
invariably like they couldn't make it work because one of

(13:09):
them would get flopped off or somebody would make it
spring a leak, and then the leak would just go everywhere.
Whenever water beds appeared in TV and movies like it,
it went badly. All right, let's take a break. I'm
all hot and bothered. We'll come back and we'll talk
about some of Charles Hall's early designs right after this. Okay,

(13:53):
so again, that was like the first reception to water beds.
Heffner had one, he had to actually had one on
his jet to um he uh, like one of the
smothers brothers bought one, I guess help his sex life out,
guys from Jefferson Airplane. And you bought them at head
shops and they were sold by waterbed manufacturers again, none

(14:13):
of whom bothered to get a license from the Charles
Hall of the inventor and patent holder. But they had
names like wet Dream. Somebody named their company wet Dream
and that was okay in the seventies. Uh, let me
see here what else Aquarius Joyapeutic, Aqua Beds, Joyapeutic Um
Aquarius products like you said, water works, what else that's

(14:37):
all I have? I think wet dream. We should have
stopped there. Um, it's definitely the worst of all of them.
So before this came about, Charles Hall a couple of
his prototype early prototypes. UM one, it sounds sort of
like a bean bag chair almost, but it was a
big bag chair full of three hundred pounds of liquid

(15:00):
corn starch. That the idea was you would sit in
it and it would envelop you. It sounds like a nightmare. Yeah,
Like he didn't mean for it to envelop you. It
was like he hadn't hit upon the water bed yet.
He was trying out different substances, but yeah, you just
sink in gross, right. So he moved on to jello
four real and that didn't work either. That's not a joke, people,

(15:22):
He'd be put jello in. This thing did not have
the right temperature or consistency. So eventually he would thanks
to um, thanks to vinyl really becoming a very popular thing,
uh and and being used for things other than like
car parts and tires and things and oh rings, vinyl

(15:45):
became a hot item. So he filled up this vinyl
bladder with water. Had a temperature control device on it. Uh.
And the the idea there was not to have some
hot bed, but to sink up to your body temperature, right,
so your muscles were relaxed. Yeah, he had the purest
of intentions, I really did, and he he hit upon

(16:05):
it finally and again in that Masters thesis. Well was
part of the problem. Summer of love. People were having
sex all over the place. And Uh, there's a story
named Andrew Kirk who said the basically design and then
late sixties was a free form atmosphere people were really getting.

(16:26):
And if you've ever, like I love design museums, if
you ever go to some of these, it's kind of
cool to see what they were doing in the sixties. Um,
because it was kind of a crazy time for design. Yeah,
because a lot of people were open to trying new things.
Up to this point. You had a mattress and you
were just thankful that it wasn't filled with Hey you know,
it had springs, and you liked it. That's the way

(16:46):
it was, and you liked it. That's right. Um. So
the idea of this something totally new, like it was
two things. One, this guy was trying to revolutionized sleep
and it came at a time when people were willing
to like, oh, yeah, it's the beds boring, let's try
something different, and it just kind of came together really well.
But again it got hijacked by people who owned Headshot well,

(17:08):
and he was in San Francisco. It all kind of
converged um work against him, ironically, but he he applied
for a pet and I think in nineteen sixty eight,
but it wasn't until nineteen seventy one that it was
granted because prior to his design being um debuted, like
thirty or so years prior. Robert Heinlein, the very famous

(17:31):
in prolific science fiction writer, he had basically described water
beds so frequently and in such detail that he was
considered the intellectual property holder of waterbed design. The reason
Heinlan even went to the trouble of he liked to
describe stuff in his books apparently haven't read any of
them yet, but very detailed description. And one of the

(17:52):
things that he kept he that always popped up was
these water beds. And apparently in the thirties he spent
a lot of time in hospital beds, so he was
just imagining how they could be improved, and he described
waterbeds almost exactly like Charles Hall had described them. Yeah,
he said, UM A pump to control water level, side

(18:13):
supports to permit one to float rather than simply lying
on a not very soft water filled mattress, thermostatic control
of temperature, safety interfaces to avoid all possibility of electric shock,
which was a big sort of urban legend at the time.
You'd be electrocuted if you have vigorous sex waterproof box
to make it leakproof um which was another probably legitimate

(18:39):
um Cohn for a water bed. Sometimes they would leak
back then uh, and then some other things. But basically
it all came together to form such a robust all
even though it was in a science fiction novel that
he was he had to like go to court and say,
I don't know if he was looking for money or who.
I'm not sure how it came out. Highland owned the

(19:01):
intellectual property of it. If he came out and said
that's mine or what. But by within three years of
Chris or Charles Hall coming out with this he UM
he had the patent for it. And even way back
in the eighteen hundreds there were doctors who created One
guy named Dr Neil Are no, or are not created

(19:21):
a hydrostatic bed. He covered a warm bath with a
rubber cloth and sealed it with varnish. And another doctor
in Portsmouth and these were basically to prevent bed sores,
to relieve bed sores, and even highlands he said, like
you said, he cooked it up because he had been

(19:42):
in hospitals a lot. Yeah, He's like, he's getting killed
in these hard beds. Yeah. And the reason you would
want some sort of um water filled bed for a
hospital is because people are laying around in bed all
the time and when you have skin covering like a
bony are, you get bed ulcers and you don't want those.

(20:04):
So this was to prevent bed sores. UM. That's why
the earliest physicians were coming up with them. But so
finally by one Charles Hall holds the patent and again
he was he wanted to create a serious sleep product,
and he founded a company called Inner Space Environments and

(20:24):
they were selling like the real deal, legit high end
water beds. He even named it seriously right. He opened
like thirty two stores in California in the early seventies,
and UM had a factory like he was doing it right.
His did not leak. One of the things that water
beds were very much known for is that the sheets
would pop off. Yeah, very well. The sheets fit on

(20:47):
his um. The temperature control was great. They were like
really high end water beds made and designed by the
guy who actually designed them. The problem is he didn't
really pursue any patents off, and so there were knockoffs
out of the gate, and it was the knockoffs that leaked.
It was the knockoffs that had terrible temperature control um

(21:08):
and it was the knockoffs that gave waterbeds a bad
name because they were fully embracing the sexy advertising. That
was part of it too, all the knockoffs manufacturers, and
apparently he pursued some of these, but it's he would
have spent all his time and money pursuing a patent
infringement if he really tried to go after everyone, and

(21:32):
some of these didn't make a lot of money, and
it was just sort of useless to even try, so
it wasn't worth his time and money. A lot of
times he said to a lot of people who sold
water beds early, like early waterbed dealers, basically they were
just trying to make some fast money. So they could
go start a pot farm in Oregon. That was like,
that's who was selling water beds in the early seventies.

(21:54):
It also has one of the creepiest lines ever in
the Atlantic article that said something about when Charles Hall
initially selling water beds out of the back of his van, right, like, man,
that's the creepiest thing every year. Here, let me let
me open up my van. You can lay on my
water bed in the back of my van, you with
with the stallion painted on the side. Oh man, speaking

(22:15):
of seventies, So I forgot about the murals on the vands.
Remember we used to do blog posts and stuff I
made like a slide show. I remember that vans with
art on the side. We see those every now and
then gets up. Still, it's good stuff. You want to
take a break before we get into the the this
straightening of water beds. Yes, I couldn't come up with

(23:00):
a better word than straightening. I apologize for that. Let
me think the I guess legitimizing, but I'm thinking like
more like boring, suburbanite zing of water beds. Yeah, I mean,
here's the thing. We say that Hall very much wanted
to revolution. I sleep and he didn't embrace the sexual
component of it. But he sold a lot of water beds,

(23:23):
and he kind of knew why a lot of these
people were buying him, and he wasn't like I don't
think he was so pious that he was like, no,
I don't want to sell them for that reason. I
think he eventually was kind of like, yeah, you know
that that's why people bought him, and that was okay.
But I don't think he just I don't think he
cheapened his own advertising that way. No, he didn't. And
he actually he his company went under by the mid seventies,

(23:47):
and he he likens it to UM basically advertising to
the wrong market. Like he he made quality, high end
water beds UM, and it was advertising to people who
could afford a more expensive quality, actual legitimate water bed went.
At the time, it was like, you know, Randall pink

(24:08):
Floyd and his friends were the actual customers of water beds.
That's who was buying water beds, and they weren't seeing
the ads that Charles Hall was putting out there, you
know what I'm saying, in like the New York or whatever. Yeah,
And so he missed the heyday. He was sort of
in the early heyday, but I think in the eighties
is when it became like a two billion dollar of
the market share industry, right, Yeah, Like the late seventies,

(24:29):
I think it was about a thirteen million dollar a
year industry, and by seven I believe that its peak
it was like a two point three billion dollar industry
a year, and then a pretty steep once again grunge
killed water beds. Yeah, pretty steep fall in the nineties,
right in the early nineties. Yeah, But the way that

(24:50):
it built up before it fell was more companies got
into it, kind of legitimized it. I believe that there
was a trade association that developed UM and the I
think it was like it's called the floatation sleep industry
is really the technical term for it. UM. They really
wanted to get away from the sex appeal and like

(25:12):
this stores like you would you wouldn't buy water bed
in a head shop anymore. To imagine walking to a
hedgehop and being like, what do you have a water
bed here? For? Um? You buy water beds out in
the suburbs at a place called waterbed Plaza or something
like that. Or did you see that ad I sent
to the YouTube adroom. Yeah, country Boy water beds. Everybody

(25:33):
go go onto YouTube and look for country Boy water
bed at Max Headroom and it's beautiful. Yeah, it's a
Max Headroom rip off selling water beds, country Boy water beds,
water bed h And I think it was from Arkansas,
like a local waterbed dealer in Arkansas, Texarcana. You mean

(25:54):
is that right now? I don't know, but that's I mean,
like you could get water beds everywhere. Well, that's why
my friend, I mean in seven in suburban Atlanta. For
my friend to have one in high school, that kind
of says it all. It's not like his parents were
like I mean they were. They were a good, god
fearing family and we're like, yeah, we need to get

(26:15):
Chris a sex pit. It was more like they were
supposedly healthy. Yeah, they were like a healthy way to sleep.
I think that's also how it kind of transitioned the
legitimacy and away from like just the association with sex. Right, So, um,
you have you have like an actual bona fide water

(26:36):
bed industry. Um with actual water beds. One of the
one of the ways that this industry was able to
establish itself was they made vast improvements over the early
models of water beds. It used to be that you
had a just basically like a big bladder, a vinyl bladder,
that big water, big wooden box, and when you wanted

(26:57):
to get out, you had to like kind of like
work up to it, roll off the side, and yeah,
you had to bang your knee on the way out.
They leaked. There was a lot of problems with it.
But then they started like improving upon it to where
like the water bed was actually like this one article,
I think it was a mental fass article that I
found said that in the eighties, if you were a kid,

(27:20):
a water bed was as close to a status symbol
as you could possibly get, you know, Oh yeah, I
mean it was aspirational. Yeah, there's no when I say,
no chance my parents would have bought me one, it
wouldn't have even like I wouldn't. I knew better than
to even ask. I think the same with me. I
don't remember ever asking for one, although I really wanted one.
I think it was like a pipe dream. Maybe it's

(27:43):
not like, oh I really want a water bed. It
was such so shut down in my mind as a possibility,
like this is a time where we inherited mattresses from
our older siblings. It was so gross. It was on
the slide road. But it looks not even too many
stains on it. Kind of uh wait, kind of Oh
did you actually get a mattress from the side of

(28:03):
the room. I'm making sure you did not know, but
just short of that, okay. Um, So mattress water beds then,
and now one of the knocks against them is there
they are very heavy. There's no way around it. If
you fill up a mattress with water, even partially, you're
gonna have a lot of weight. Depending on the size,

(28:24):
a couple to three gallons of water can weigh between
fifteen hundred and two thousand pounds. And so they always
instill do need a lot of structural support underneath them,
a large, very heavy wooden platform. Supposedly that's why New
York was known as the um, the city where the
least number of water beds are ever. So yeah, I

(28:46):
can't imagine. Part of it is because like in in
major cities, there were like waterbed bands and leases, like
if you rented an apartment, you weren't allowed to have
a water it was just too heavy. Yeah. Um, people
would leave them behind like here, you take this because
even when you drain the water, like the thing that

(29:07):
held the water bed was heavy itself. The frame was
super super heavy. It was like a bookcase that you
didn't really want anymore. You just leave it behind. That's
what happened to water beds. I didn't see and I
don't How do you fill them up? Is that you water?
Really that's how people did it, Yes, And then to
get it out you needed like a pump, and you

(29:29):
could buy all this stuff in your local waterbeds store.
But you know, when you buy a better mattress, a
regular mattress, you don't have to go buy a pump
two years later because you're moving, you know, and then
pump the water out of mattress. You just moved the mattress.
That was a big, big mark against it in the
popular understanding of it. I imagine in New York too, well,
the weight is enough probably to disqualify it. But just

(29:50):
getting a water hose up a seventh floor walk up, yeah,
I'm surprised. I haven't seen that movie scene where they're
like have a rope tied around a water hose from
the street level that they're bringing up through a window.
It sounds like Buster Keaton or something like super Sexy
in the seventies. Who would that be? I don't know. Okay,

(30:16):
we should do a podcast on our crumb Have we
done that any day? Any day? Buddy? That was like
a dare. I can't remember if I saw them. Was
it a movie or a documentary on him? It was
a movie that came out in the early two thousands.
Well both they did, the Great documentary Crumb Um and
then American Splendor that he was a character in it,

(30:38):
but it was largely about Harvey peakr. Yes, the Great
Harvey Peak. That was a good movie. Um. All right,
so these days, uh, like you said, they've been brought
into the modern era. Um, there's a foam collar around
the bladder. There's spandex on top up. Um. I believe

(31:01):
they are air pockets and things in between to sort
of stabilize it. Yeah, they don't, Actually they don't. You
can't get seasick on them like you used to be
able to move like that. I really want to try
one of these out and just see what it feels like.
I don't want one, I don't think, but I do
want to see what the sensation is like. One of
my friends back in high school. Their parents had a

(31:24):
what he called a motionless water bed. Um. And now
I understand what he's talking about. It's like waveless or whatever. Um,
But it just felt like laying on a feather bed,
just the most comfortable feather bed you've ever been on. Well,
my friends must not have been waveless, because it was
it moved. Yeah, this is non and this would have
been like the nineties or something like that. And I'm
sure it was like a five thousand dollar mattress or

(31:45):
something back then, but that seems to be like the
kind that they have now. It's like you just lay
on it and you're You're not like, oh, this is
a water bed. You just like, this is super comfortable.
I'm floating and weightless, but your mind's not thinking you're
laying on water. Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't have, like, aside
from moving a lot. When I sleep, I'm like a
I like to flop on the bed, like when I
lay down, I don't lay gently on it. I will

(32:07):
kind of throw myself into bed. And none of these
things are conduci of the water beds, especially not in
the seventies. But apparently now it's fine. You could do
that well. One of the new salesman they interviewed for
this article said that he won't say the name water
bed um. He says, because it turns people off. He said.
Even if they try it and they like it and
then they find out it's a water bed, he said,

(32:29):
sometimes they won't buy it because of that weird seventies
association like with yeah, or they're worried it's gonna leak,
or they're you know, they're gonna have to fill it
with water. There Apparently I couldn't find any any verification
of this, but there was an urban legend at least
that you could find aquatic worms floating in your water

(32:51):
bed and they started down like, oh, well we need
to add chemicals to the water. Well, then that makes
it even grosser. Right, So there's like just over time
people associated a lot of negative things with water beds,
and then the thing that really killed the water bed
was that in the nineties. By the by the nineties,
it was clear that America was like, sure, we'll try

(33:13):
other things besides an inter spring, mattress, what you got,
and so like temper pedic came around, or sleep number.
All these guys who made technically alternative mattresses. Um, the
same thing that it follows in that tradition that the
waterbed established. They Charles Hall created that market and showed

(33:37):
that it was a real thing. And so by the
time the nineties rolled around, and like I think temper
Peedick was the first one. Um, it was like all
the benefits of a waterbed without the hassle of the water,
why would you want a water bed? And that was
it for water beds. Yeah, and minus the creeps. Yeah.
Whereas just a few a few years before, almost one

(33:59):
in war between one and four and one and five,
between a quarter and of all water or of all
mattresses were waterbeds sold in America. It's crazy. It's a
lot down to nothing, down to just gone. Man. Imagine
the landfills of America are filled with vinyl bladders just rotting,

(34:21):
well broughting a thousand years from now probably, yeah, that's true.
They're probably some pretty good shape. So one more thing
about Charles Hall, well, two more things. One he went
on to invent the solar shower, you know, the campus
are great. And then um too, he has a kind
of a bad name, or he did, at least back
in one I think um in that WAPO article where

(34:45):
the waterbed industry, the industry association that formed they they
didn't like him very much because a couple of years
before his patent ran out, he'd been gone and then
came back and said, all y'all owe me money for
patent infringement. And they were like, what, dude, We like,
we've built this industry. You know, we thought you were

(35:07):
cool kind of and he was like, no, I'm not
give me some money and he started like they apparently
wanted to settle and it wasn't enough. But one really
noteworthy thing about one of their one of his lawsuits
against I think a Taiwanese um manufacturer that Um he
sold shares in the outcome, so like you could buy

(35:31):
shares of a lawsuit. Crazy, and there's a there's a
common law law against it. It's called champ terree, which
I had never heard of before. Makes total sense. It's
where somebody like basically pays for legal fees in order
to get a piece of the action to cut yeah,

(35:51):
champtere And in California at the time, champtery was not illegal.
I don't know if it is, but it was not.
And uh, he sold shares for ten thousand a pop.
Uh for this, for this, wow, this lawsuit. That's amazing.
Water beds, they're amazing. Chuck cheez. That's what the episode

(36:14):
should be titled. It's up to you. Do you got
anything else? You got nothing else? If you want to
know more about water beds, well, get in a time machine,
get in the way back machine and go try and
one out yourself. Well, we have one in the way
back machine, so you're lucky. Day it covered in American possum.
Oh boy. Uh. Since I said that it's time for listening,

(36:38):
I'm gonna call this one of the many replies for
color blindness too. We've got a lot of responses for
color blindness. What do you mean too well? I called
the sure all right, Hey guys, I was listening to
the show about color blindness with an oh you are
so I assume this? Uh oh, he's Canadian. I'm gonna
say British. It's like British, like he's still under the

(37:00):
thumb though. Uh. I worked in the electrical field for
ten years, and in that time I've worked with two
red green color blind electricians. Remember we talked about that.
The first one I worked with for a few years. Uh,
and he said, it wasn't that difficult to tell the
difference between red and green conductors. They just looked like
every Uh, they looked like very obvious different shades of

(37:23):
the same color. It only took a couple of mistakes
before he was able to tell the difference. An electrical
red is a current carrying conductor, while green is used
for grounding and bonding like a rat and a science experiment.
He explained, it only took a couple of shocks of
what he thought it was a bonding wire to really
notice the difference. So dangerous, I know. Man. Uh. The

(37:45):
other I worked with for only a short while because
he died, but he had been an electrician for twenty
plus years. Wasn't until he asked a co worker why
they thought the ground wire and a current carrying conductor
were the same color that he even realized he was
color on. Wow, how about that? A little slow on
the uptake, perhaps, so, even though it costs some issues

(38:06):
early on their careers, they're both great electricians. I guess
the human brain always finds a way. And that is
James from Cape Breton, Nova, Scotia, Canada. That's cool, man,
great Area, Eastern Canada, Great Area, Western Canada, Fantastic Central Canada.

(38:27):
We love it all. Yes what we do. If you're
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This stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
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(38:47):
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