Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff. I'm Lauren vocal Bomb, and today's episode is
Speaker 1: a classic from our archives. This one is about the
Speaker 1: strange cultural phenomenon that is the water bed. My parents
Speaker 1: had one, our Labrador retriever, figured out how to pop
Speaker 1: holes in it and liked watching the water scored out,
Speaker 1: which was pretty much the end of that. But outside
Speaker 1: of my childhood home, water beds evolved, so could they
Speaker 1: ever make a large scale comeback? Hey brain Stuff, Lauren
Speaker 1: vocal bomb. Here. The water bed was born around half
Speaker 1: a century ago as the counterculture solution to something pretty basic.
Speaker 1: We're talking a lack of sleep, of course, although the
Speaker 1: promise of sloshy love making was definitely a selling point
Speaker 1: back in the day too, it was an almost immediate
Speaker 1: groovylicious success. By the late nineteen eighties, water beds accounted
Speaker 1: for somewhere around fift of the bedding market, or a
Speaker 1: d two billion dollars a year, according to a contemporary
Speaker 1: New York Times article, if you were cool back then,
Speaker 1: or thought you were or wanted to be, or if
Speaker 1: you valued a good night's sleep on gently rolling waves,
Speaker 1: or dreamed of nights filled with wild surfing passion, You
Speaker 1: owned a waterbed or you wanted one, almost as quickly
Speaker 1: as the waterbed revolution began, though it crashed, the novelty
Speaker 1: wore off, the revolution died, the era faded away. These days,
Speaker 1: statistics for waterbed sales are hard to come by, but
Speaker 1: it's clear that things aren't like they were back in
Speaker 1: the swinging seventies and eighties, and even into the nineties.
Speaker 1: The competition, mainly things like air mattresses and memory foam,
Speaker 1: has grown. The number of waterbed manufacturers and sellers has shrunk.
Speaker 1: Do you even know anyone who still owns a water bed?
Speaker 1: Lynn Hardman does. He still sleeps on one every night.
Speaker 1: He's also sold thousands of them over the past few decades.
Speaker 1: Hardman owns Southern Waterbeds and Phutons in at in Georgia
Speaker 1: and admits that business isn't like it was in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, a time when mattress stores didn't dot every
Speaker 1: strip mall in every suburb, and mom and pop shops
Speaker 1: didn't have to compete with the Internet. But there's still
Speaker 1: business out there. Hardman has operated his store for forty
Speaker 1: three years, almost as long as water beds have been around,
Speaker 1: and the water bed is still hanging on. He said,
Speaker 1: it's like night and day. The water bed has really
Speaker 1: followed that Baby Boom generation from the counterculture of the
Speaker 1: late nineteen fifties to where we are today. The early
Speaker 1: customers back then were younger, and today it's almost entirely
Speaker 1: the opposite. The baby boomers are older, much wiser, and
Speaker 1: in some cases buying that final bed. Waterbed manufacturers and
Speaker 1: showrooms like Hardman's are easy enough to find if you're looking.
Speaker 1: Most brands offer hard sided beds that, like the first ones,
Speaker 1: rely on a major piece of wood furniture to hold
Speaker 1: the mattress in place. Newer soft sided water mattresses can
Speaker 1: stand on their own, though they all need some kind
Speaker 1: of a solid base because of the weight of the
Speaker 1: match riss. Depending on size, a water mattress can hold
Speaker 1: up to two hundred gallons that's about seven hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty liters of water, which is more than one thousand,
Speaker 1: six hundred pounds or about seven hundred and twenty five ms.
Speaker 1: And the lure of water beds has of course always
Speaker 1: been that water aficionados swear by it's all around supportive properties.
Speaker 1: Hardman talks about being enveloped in a water mattress, rather
Speaker 1: than lying on top of a standard one. Most water
Speaker 1: mattresses now come with baffles too that control how waveless
Speaker 1: they are for those turned off by that too sloshy feeling.
Speaker 1: Most have heaters that can regulate the temperature of the
Speaker 1: water anywhere from seventy to a hundred degrees fahrenheit about
Speaker 1: one to thirty eight degrees celsius. The newest mattresses are
Speaker 1: split into dual zones too, so one person can enjoy
Speaker 1: a different firmness, temperature, and wave control than his or
Speaker 1: her sleeping partner. The waterbed of the twenty one century
Speaker 1: clearly is not the fur covered playground that you have
Speaker 1: never put on his private jet and flew around on
Speaker 1: in the nine It was round and had a Tasmanian
Speaker 1: possum bedspread. The man credited with inventing and patenting the
Speaker 1: water bed is septagenarian Charlie Hall. He's come up with
Speaker 1: a new one that he's marketing through a string of
Speaker 1: furniture stores in Florida. Here's a quote from the kitsapp
Speaker 1: Son in Bainbridge, Washington. Gone is the wooden frame that
Speaker 1: made the older beds so hard to get out of,
Speaker 1: exchanged for a foam caller that surrounds the water bladder
Speaker 1: expandex covers the top of the mattress to give a
Speaker 1: floating said station. A fiber insert quells waves and keeps
Speaker 1: the water bladder still. An updated temperature system keeps the
Speaker 1: water feeling just right. The innovations Hall is hoping will
Speaker 1: spur nostalgia in some and interest a new generation of
Speaker 1: buyers in a piece of bedroom furniture that they may
Speaker 1: know little about. Hooking that new generation of kids maybe
Speaker 1: the biggest challenge in the water beds potential comeback. Hardman
Speaker 1: occasionally sees some young people in his store now, but
Speaker 1: they're accompanied by parents or grandparents who dragged the kids
Speaker 1: along to show them a relic from the path, a
Speaker 1: novelty item. This would all seem rather quaint if sleep
Speaker 1: wasn't such a deadly serious topic. Research over the past
Speaker 1: few years has shown just how critical a good night's
Speaker 1: sleep is. A continued lack of sufficient sleep has been
Speaker 1: strongly associated with, among other health problems, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension,
Speaker 1: and a decreased life expectancy, and the National Sleep Foundation's
Speaker 1: annual poll shows that only ten percent of Americans prioritize
Speaker 1: sleep over other things in their lives, like work, working out, hobbies,
Speaker 1: or their social life. Most people sixty, the poll found
Speaker 1: say they don't even consider ahead of time how much
Speaker 1: sleep they may need in planning out their days. Hardman
Speaker 1: has a potential answer to that problem. Sitting in his store,
Speaker 1: just as it has been for the past forty three years,
Speaker 1: he said, there's just something about that semi witless state
Speaker 1: that you can only get laying on a waterbed. There's
Speaker 1: something about it that's so soothing and relaxing. We had
Speaker 1: pause it that some rigorous scientific research is in order,
Speaker 1: though it sounds like plenty of people are still running
Speaker 1: their own small time experiments. Today's episode is based on
Speaker 1: the article could waterbeds ever make a comeback? On how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com? Written by John Donovan. Bring Stuff
Speaker 1: is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how
Speaker 1: stuff Work dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler Clay.
Speaker 1: Four more podcasts from my Heart Radio visit the heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.