Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren focal bomb here. The water bed was born around
Speaker 1: half a century ago as the counterculture solution to something
Speaker 1: pretty basic. We're talking a lack of sleep, of course.
Speaker 1: Although the promise of sloshy love making was definitely a
Speaker 1: selling point back in the day too, it was an
Speaker 1: almost immediate, groovy, delicious success. By the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: waterbeds accounted for somewhere around fifteen percent of the bedding market,
Speaker 1: or a tidy two billion dollars a year, according to
Speaker 1: a contemporary New York Times article, if you were cool
Speaker 1: back then, or thought you were or wanted to be,
Speaker 1: or if you valued a good night's sleep on gently
Speaker 1: rolling waves, or dreamed of nights filled with wild surfing passion,
Speaker 1: you owned a water bed or you wanted one. Almost
Speaker 1: as quickly as the waterbed revolution began, though it crashed,
Speaker 1: the novelty wore off, the revolution died, the era faded away.
Speaker 1: These days, statistics for waterbed sales are hard to come by,
Speaker 1: but it's clear that things aren't like they were back
Speaker 1: in 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 water Beds and Phutons in Athens, 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 waterbed has really followed
Speaker 1: that Baby Boom generation from the counterculture of the late
Speaker 1: seen fifties to where we are today. The early customers
Speaker 1: back then were younger, and today it's almost entirely the opposite.
Speaker 1: The baby boomers are older, much wiser, and in some
Speaker 1: cases buying that final bed. Waterbed manufacturers and showrooms like
Speaker 1: Hardman's are easy enough to find if you're looking. Most
Speaker 1: 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 mattress.
Speaker 1: Depending on size, a water mattress can hold up to
Speaker 1: two hundred gallons that's about seven hundred and sixty liters
Speaker 1: of water, which is more than one thousand, six hundred
Speaker 1: pounds or about seven hundred and twenty fives and the
Speaker 1: lure of water beds has of course always been that
Speaker 1: water aficionados swear by its all around supportive properties. Hardman
Speaker 1: talks about being enveloped in a water mattress rather than
Speaker 1: lying on top of a standard one. Most water matt
Speaker 1: says now come with baffles too that control how waveless
Speaker 1: they are for those turned off by that too slashy 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: thirty eight degrees celsius. The newest mattresses are split into
Speaker 1: dual zones too, so one person can enjoy a different firmness, temperature,
Speaker 1: and wave control than his or her sleeping partner. The
Speaker 1: waterbed of the twenty one century clearly is not the
Speaker 1: fur covered playground that Hugh Hefner put on his private
Speaker 1: jet and flew around on in the nineteen seventies. It
Speaker 1: was round and had a Tasmanian possum bedspread. The man
Speaker 1: credited with inventing and patenting the water bed is septagenarian
Speaker 1: Charlie Hall. He's come up with a new one that
Speaker 1: he's marketing through a string of furniture stores in Florida.
Speaker 1: Here's a quote from the kitsap Son in Bainbridge, Washington.
Speaker 1: Gone is the wooden frame that made the older beds
Speaker 1: so hard to get out of, exchanged for a foam
Speaker 1: caller that surrounds the water bladder expandex covers the top
Speaker 1: of the mattress to give a floating said sation. Fiber
Speaker 1: insert quells waves and keeps the water bladder still. An
Speaker 1: updated temperature system keeps the water feeling just right. The
Speaker 1: innovations Hall is hoping will spur nostalgia in some and
Speaker 1: interest a new generation of buyers in a piece of
Speaker 1: bedroom furniture that they may know little about. Hooking that
Speaker 1: new generation of kids maybe the biggest challenge in the
Speaker 1: waterbeds potential comeback. Hardman occasionally sees some young people in
Speaker 1: his store now, but they're accompanied by parents or grandparents
Speaker 1: who dragged the kids along to show them a relic
Speaker 1: from the past, a novelty item. This would all seem
Speaker 1: rather quaint if sleep wasn't such a deadly serious topic.
Speaker 1: Research over the past few years has shown just how
Speaker 1: critical a good night's sleep is. A continued lack of
Speaker 1: sufficient sleep has been strongly associated with, among other health problems, obesity, diabetes,
Speaker 1: heart disease, hypertension, and a decreased life expectancy, and the
Speaker 1: National Sleep Foundation's annual poll shows that only ten percent
Speaker 1: of Americans prior ties sleep over other things in their lives,
Speaker 1: like work, working out, hobbies, or their social life. Most people,
Speaker 1: six the poll found say they don't even consider ahead
Speaker 1: of time how much sleep they may need in planning
Speaker 1: out their days. Hardman has a potential answer to that problem.
Speaker 1: Sitting in his store, just as it has been for
Speaker 1: the past forty three years. He said, There's just something
Speaker 1: about that semi waitless state that you can only get
Speaker 1: laying on a waterbed. There's something about it that's so
Speaker 1: soothing and relaxing. We'd pause it that some rigorous scientific
Speaker 1: research is in order, though it sounds like plenty of
Speaker 1: people are still running their own small time experiments. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other soothing topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how Stuff works dot com.