Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there,
Speaker 1: and we're just here. Jiggle AOI slash slash on our
Speaker 1: pleasure pit. God oh man, it's so funny. When I
Speaker 1: started researching this, so I was like, water beds, that's
Speaker 1: very stuff you should know. So sort of fits right
Speaker 1: in with our historical pop culture phenomena series Phenomenal Do
Speaker 1: do uh and big shout out to The Atlantic, one
Speaker 1: of our favorite rags. A lot of this was taken
Speaker 1: from article by Rebecca Greenfield uh, and then a bunch
Speaker 1: of other cool uh supplementary stuff. New York Times, who else? Uh,
Speaker 1: Washington Post, Washington Yeah, wapop men, all those fake news outlets, right,
Speaker 1: Although I really love the New York Times and the
Speaker 1: Washington Post ones because they were like contemporary articles, like
Speaker 1: the New York Times one was and Wapop was from
Speaker 1: and they're writing about the phenomena of of um water
Speaker 1: beds at the time. I love that, man. I love
Speaker 1: being able to go back read an article and then
Speaker 1: go back and see how it actually unraveled like in
Speaker 1: real time. Basically, yes, see, like sure, it's a little
Speaker 1: time capsule if you will, and you can look back
Speaker 1: now and say, did they get it right? News? I
Speaker 1: don't even like saying the two words together. Neither so
Speaker 1: played out, so played All right, let's talk about the
Speaker 1: water bed. Have you ever had one? No? I kind
Speaker 1: of wanted one. I didn't have one. I kind of
Speaker 1: wanted one to. I think we're just of that age
Speaker 1: and they came about as you'll see, we're going to
Speaker 1: talking about the seventies and eighties. That in the eighties
Speaker 1: is when they peaked sales wise. I think even like
Speaker 1: young uns like us, we're very intrigued. Oh yeah, my
Speaker 1: friend had one. Yeah, did you sleep on it? No,
Speaker 1: never slept on that one. I laid down on it once,
Speaker 1: I think because I was I was like, I gotta
Speaker 1: know what this feels like at least uh, And I
Speaker 1: think it was. They may have called it waveless, but
Speaker 1: I don't even know what the difference was because it
Speaker 1: was pretty wavy. What decade was this, This would have
Speaker 1: been mid to late eighties. Yeah, I don't even they
Speaker 1: had waveless ones back then. I think so they were
Speaker 1: called waveless, but I don't know how it's still slashed
Speaker 1: you around. Yeah, I remember very distinctly laying on it,
Speaker 1: and I remember thinking, I don't know if I could
Speaker 1: sleep on this. It didn't seem like I mean, it
Speaker 1: wasn't uncomfortable like it calls me pain. But I move
Speaker 1: around a lot in my sleep, so it's not it's
Speaker 1: not a good least. The old school water beds are
Speaker 1: not a good match for me. Memory Fund was a
Speaker 1: little better. Actually, supposedly they've come a long way, and
Speaker 1: the new water beds are the bomb. I would be
Speaker 1: curious to lay on one. Well, go to a dealer
Speaker 1: in South Florida. I think City Furniture in South Florida
Speaker 1: is bringing back the water bed. Oh there's other places too,
Speaker 1: because the design now, well, we'll get to it, but
Speaker 1: it's much different. It's not. It's not the good old
Speaker 1: days where you just fill up a big vinyl rubber
Speaker 1: bladder and we were like tripping on some grass and
Speaker 1: listening to Dark Side of the Moon. You know. The
Speaker 1: funny thing about my friend Chris's water bed though, and
Speaker 1: his whole house was a time capsule of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: He had a water bed in front of a wall
Speaker 1: that the wall was a photograph of a like a
Speaker 1: Hawaiian beach sunset. Oh man, we had two of those
Speaker 1: in my house. Really. We had one was a straight
Speaker 1: up forest. So it's like, oh, I'm in the family room,
Speaker 1: I'll walk into the kitchen. Oh my god, I'm in
Speaker 1: the forest basically. And then if you went upstairs, and
Speaker 1: this is my childhood home in Toledo, Ohio, Um, when
Speaker 1: you went upstairs to my sister's rooms, you when you
Speaker 1: got right up to the top landing, there was like
Speaker 1: an outdoor like Coors beer scene, like in the woods
Speaker 1: with like a stream coming through the mountains. Giant murals
Speaker 1: in my house, Yeah, we never It's weird. Like when
Speaker 1: I look back at the house I grew up in,
Speaker 1: it didn't have any of those cool seventies things. But
Speaker 1: now that I look back, I think it's probably you know,
Speaker 1: I was not cool then because we lived in this
Speaker 1: huge house in the woods. But now I look back,
Speaker 1: I'm like, that was where I would like to live now.
Speaker 1: So what was the aesthetic of your house? Sort of
Speaker 1: contempo country Okay, that hip like Jerry Read or something
Speaker 1: lived there. Yeah, I mean we had looking back, we
Speaker 1: had shag carpet, or in shag carpet, there were some
Speaker 1: markings of the day. Um. But then that was replaced
Speaker 1: with hardwoods at some point in the in the eighties. Um.
Speaker 1: But then when I had, you know, not too long ago,
Speaker 1: went back to my childhood home and broke in. It
Speaker 1: was for sale really and empty, and uh you broke in? Well,
Speaker 1: not for sale, it was just sort of derelict and empty.
Speaker 1: Did you break a window to break in? Now? I
Speaker 1: just got in like I used to get in. It
Speaker 1: was family was like it's locked, and I was like,
Speaker 1: watch this. I used to sneak out and read Bible passages.
Speaker 1: So I snuck in through the garage window. And looking back,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of a lot of the same
Speaker 1: stuff was there, and it was very kind of seventies
Speaker 1: tile and linoleum and stuff like that, but it just
Speaker 1: wasn't full on like Brady Bunch stuff more or wall murals.
Speaker 1: And I'm glad I went because sadly it is no
Speaker 1: longer there. I'm glad you went to. Then a couple
Speaker 1: of months later just torn down, and I went back
Speaker 1: and saw a big emptiness and I cried, did you
Speaker 1: the end, I could see that I you me and
Speaker 1: I went to Toledo and then I since went once
Speaker 1: when we went to Cleveland for our show, I went
Speaker 1: by myself and walked around, kind of hoping that the
Speaker 1: people who live in the house would be like, what's
Speaker 1: that weird doing and stick their head out and be
Speaker 1: like can I help you? And I'd be like, yeah, actually,
Speaker 1: can I come in your house? Um? No one did,
Speaker 1: but I did get to walk around the neighborhood. Did
Speaker 1: you cry a little? Nice? But I I saw. I
Speaker 1: want to go back to my elementary school and it's
Speaker 1: just like a grass field. Now, It's like, how do
Speaker 1: you tear down an elementary school? You know? Maybe it
Speaker 1: got like black mold or something. Well, let's hope. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's it's sweet. It's better sweet to go back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: go back to your childhood places. Everyone. I highly highly recommended.
Speaker 1: So water beds, Yeah, water beds. Um, we'll go back
Speaker 1: to the earliest history, I guess. But um. The man
Speaker 1: that we really need to talk about is a man
Speaker 1: named Charles Hall, the inventor of the modern water bed
Speaker 1: as we know it ninety sixty eight. He's a student
Speaker 1: at San Francisco state he's taking a design class. Oh
Speaker 1: he was like a design major. Well, yeah, because he
Speaker 1: submitted this as his master's thesis, was the waterbed. How
Speaker 1: awesome is that? So I saw competing stuff of what
Speaker 1: he actually created like built. Yeah, and the thing that
Speaker 1: I saw, I think it was in that WAPO It
Speaker 1: said what he created was called the pleasure pit, and
Speaker 1: it was an eight foot by eight foot basically waterbed,
Speaker 1: but it was meant to be a conversation pit for
Speaker 1: multiple people that kind of hang around in and there
Speaker 1: was like a bar and there was lighting and like
Speaker 1: shelves and stuff like that, and that that was the
Speaker 1: original his design. Yeah, But was there a water mattress
Speaker 1: function or was it just a sunken going room. No,
Speaker 1: that was the thing that was where everybody sat was
Speaker 1: on a water mattress in the middle. It sounds awful,
Speaker 1: it's just weird, but it really caught everybody's an imagination.
Speaker 1: Supposedly within six months it was on the front page
Speaker 1: of papers across the country. This is in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: The Miami Herald had something on the front page about
Speaker 1: this waterbed exhibit in San Francisco that this twenty four
Speaker 1: year old design student created capital p capital p uh yeah,
Speaker 1: pleasure pit. Everything I've seen is it's capitalized. But that's
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. I think that's what he called the
Speaker 1: first thing. Yeah, but it very quickly got turned into
Speaker 1: a bed. The water bed I used to like. Actually,
Speaker 1: my same friend Chris had at one of those sunken
Speaker 1: living rooms those very seventies. Remember in um, oh, what's
Speaker 1: the big Lebowski when he goes see to see Jackie
Speaker 1: Child or Jackie whatever, Jackie Treehorn. Yeah, Jackie Treehorn and
Speaker 1: his whole house is just amazing. Yeah, he had a
Speaker 1: conversation pit. Uh right, conversation pit, That's what it was called.
Speaker 1: So here's the deal from Time magazine. In Manhattan, the
Speaker 1: waterbed display at Bloomingdale's Department Store, for a while was
Speaker 1: a popular singles meeting place. Sire's, Roebuck and Holiday Inns
Speaker 1: are eyeing the beds, and Lake Tahoe's Kingcastle Hotel has
Speaker 1: already installed them in luxury suites. And this is uh
Speaker 1: I think it continues. Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner has one
Speaker 1: king size, of course and covered with Tasmanian bossom. I thought,
Speaker 1: how gross is that? Because what I know is a
Speaker 1: possum is different, different. I looked up the Tasmanian possibles
Speaker 1: super soft I would imagine. So it's not like American
Speaker 1: road kill on your water bed. Right. It wasn't even
Speaker 1: made from it. It just had a bunch of live
Speaker 1: American possums on his bed, and his water bed was
Speaker 1: really weird. But here's the deal. The water bed that
Speaker 1: Charles hall Cree eventually would go on to create, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about some of his earlier designs aside from
Speaker 1: the pleasure pit, he wanted to revolutionize sleeping. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: meant it very seriously. He wanted to have a pressure
Speaker 1: point free mattress that would envelope your body and give
Speaker 1: you the best night sleep of your life. He had
Speaker 1: no intention of it becoming this, which it very much did.
Speaker 1: A metaphor for the sexy sixties and seventies, right, but
Speaker 1: it definitely did like you say it was. It's a
Speaker 1: really good example of an idea just basically getting hijacked
Speaker 1: big time. And at first he was kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just a twenty four year old design suit. I
Speaker 1: don't care. I'm sure make your own waterbed knockoff. But
Speaker 1: then over time he definitely came to care and spent
Speaker 1: a couple of decades pursuing um uh infringement suits here
Speaker 1: and there, patent infringement suits um which we'll talk about later.
Speaker 1: But at first it was basically like here's the waterbed world,
Speaker 1: and the world went nuts. Uh And again, yeah, he
Speaker 1: meant a revolution. I sleep the hippies and the people
Speaker 1: who owned head shops, which is where you bought your
Speaker 1: water beds early on was at the head shop said no,
Speaker 1: this is all about sex, and that's how that's how
Speaker 1: it was first sold in the late sixties and early seventies.
Speaker 1: I have never had sexual intercourse on a waterbed, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't it doesn't sound appealing to me, right because
Speaker 1: so one of the in this, I think the Washington
Speaker 1: Post article quote a Washington Post article from the seventies saying,
Speaker 1: like a waterbed salesman said, it's very like, very much
Speaker 1: like three people are having sex, because the bed itself
Speaker 1: is like a third warm body participating in the motion
Speaker 1: or something like in the worst possible way. And I
Speaker 1: looked up, Yeah, I was like, it's just weird. And
Speaker 1: I looked up um like sex on a water bed
Speaker 1: on um on a work computer right. Uh oh yeah,
Speaker 1: the work computer supertained now um, and the I found
Speaker 1: like this one. Can't remember the website, but it's basically
Speaker 1: like pros and cons. And it sounds like it comes
Speaker 1: down to your preferences, you know, like what what like
Speaker 1: are you into your motions being exaggerated? You know? And
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, Chuck's laughing because I'm like kind of
Speaker 1: making toward right. Um, if you're into that, great, if
Speaker 1: you're not, or you um, apparently it's really like you.
Speaker 1: It really is pronounced. It's not something going on in
Speaker 1: the background. It's like you know and right. So it
Speaker 1: just depends on your preferences, I think. But I think
Speaker 1: a lot of the earliest water beds were we're bought
Speaker 1: by guys who were pretty confident. They could be like,
Speaker 1: I've got a water bed, you want to try it out,
Speaker 1: and that that would happen. It became a punch line,
Speaker 1: Like I remember, I feel like every other sitcom or
Speaker 1: a movie at some point there was a scene where
Speaker 1: they were like, oh, he's got a water bed, or
Speaker 1: he would just slowly open the door to reveal the
Speaker 1: water bed, and that meant only one thing. It did
Speaker 1: master lover right, so the the and then the waterbed
Speaker 1: invariably like they couldn't make it work because one of
Speaker 1: them would get flopped off or somebody would make it
Speaker 1: spring a leak, and then the leak would just go everywhere.
Speaker 1: Whenever water beds appeared in TV and movies like it,
Speaker 1: it went badly. All right, let's take a break. I'm
Speaker 1: all hot and bothered. We'll come back and we'll talk
Speaker 1: about some of Charles Hall's early designs right after this. Okay,
Speaker 1: so again, that was like the first reception to water beds.
Speaker 1: Heffner had one, he had to actually had one on
Speaker 1: his jet to um he uh, like one of the
Speaker 1: smothers brothers bought one, I guess help his sex life out,
Speaker 1: guys from Jefferson Airplane. And you bought them at head
Speaker 1: shops and they were sold by waterbed manufacturers again, none
Speaker 1: of whom bothered to get a license from the Charles
Speaker 1: Hall of the inventor and patent holder. But they had
Speaker 1: names like wet Dream. Somebody named their company wet Dream
Speaker 1: and that was okay in the seventies. Uh, let me
Speaker 1: see here what else Aquarius Joyapeutic, Aqua Beds, Joyapeutic Um
Speaker 1: Aquarius products like you said, water works, what else that's
Speaker 1: all I have? I think wet dream. We should have
Speaker 1: stopped there. Um, it's definitely the worst of all of them.
Speaker 1: So before this came about, Charles Hall a couple of
Speaker 1: his prototype early prototypes. UM one, it sounds sort of
Speaker 1: like a bean bag chair almost, but it was a
Speaker 1: big bag chair full of three hundred pounds of liquid
Speaker 1: corn starch. That the idea was you would sit in
Speaker 1: it and it would envelop you. It sounds like a nightmare. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like he didn't mean for it to envelop you. It
Speaker 1: was like he hadn't hit upon the water bed yet.
Speaker 1: He was trying out different substances, but yeah, you just
Speaker 1: sink in gross, right. So he moved on to jello
Speaker 1: four real and that didn't work either. That's not a joke, people,
Speaker 1: He'd be put jello in. This thing did not have
Speaker 1: the right temperature or consistency. So eventually he would thanks
Speaker 1: to um, thanks to vinyl really becoming a very popular thing,
Speaker 1: uh and and being used for things other than like
Speaker 1: car parts and tires and things and oh rings, vinyl
Speaker 1: became a hot item. So he filled up this vinyl
Speaker 1: bladder with water. Had a temperature control device on it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the the idea there was not to have some
Speaker 1: hot bed, but to sink up to your body temperature, right,
Speaker 1: so your muscles were relaxed. Yeah, he had the purest
Speaker 1: of intentions, I really did, and he he hit upon
Speaker 1: it finally and again in that Masters thesis. Well was
Speaker 1: part of the problem. Summer of love. People were having
Speaker 1: sex all over the place. And Uh, there's a story
Speaker 1: named Andrew Kirk who said the basically design and then
Speaker 1: late sixties was a free form atmosphere people were really getting.
Speaker 1: And if you've ever, like I love design museums, if
Speaker 1: you ever go to some of these, it's kind of
Speaker 1: cool to see what they were doing in the sixties. Um,
Speaker 1: because it was kind of a crazy time for design. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because a lot of people were open to trying new things.
Speaker 1: Up to this point. You had a mattress and you
Speaker 1: were just thankful that it wasn't filled with Hey you know,
Speaker 1: it had springs, and you liked it. That's the way
Speaker 1: it was, and you liked it. That's right. Um. So
Speaker 1: the idea of this something totally new, like it was
Speaker 1: two things. One, this guy was trying to revolutionized sleep
Speaker 1: and it came at a time when people were willing
Speaker 1: to like, oh, yeah, it's the beds boring, let's try
Speaker 1: something different, and it just kind of came together really well.
Speaker 1: But again it got hijacked by people who owned Headshot well,
Speaker 1: and he was in San Francisco. It all kind of
Speaker 1: converged um work against him, ironically, but he he applied
Speaker 1: for a pet and I think in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't until nineteen seventy one that it was
Speaker 1: granted because prior to his design being um debuted, like
Speaker 1: thirty or so years prior. Robert Heinlein, the very famous
Speaker 1: in prolific science fiction writer, he had basically described water
Speaker 1: beds so frequently and in such detail that he was
Speaker 1: considered the intellectual property holder of waterbed design. The reason
Speaker 1: Heinlan even went to the trouble of he liked to
Speaker 1: describe stuff in his books apparently haven't read any of
Speaker 1: them yet, but very detailed description. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that he kept he that always popped up was
Speaker 1: these water beds. And apparently in the thirties he spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time in hospital beds, so he was
Speaker 1: just imagining how they could be improved, and he described
Speaker 1: waterbeds almost exactly like Charles Hall had described them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he said, UM A pump to control water level, side
Speaker 1: supports to permit one to float rather than simply lying
Speaker 1: on a not very soft water filled mattress, thermostatic control
Speaker 1: of temperature, safety interfaces to avoid all possibility of electric shock,
Speaker 1: which was a big sort of urban legend at the time.
Speaker 1: You'd be electrocuted if you have vigorous sex waterproof box
Speaker 1: to make it leakproof um which was another probably legitimate
Speaker 1: um Cohn for a water bed. Sometimes they would leak
Speaker 1: back then uh, and then some other things. But basically
Speaker 1: it all came together to form such a robust all
Speaker 1: even though it was in a science fiction novel that
Speaker 1: he was he had to like go to court and say,
Speaker 1: I don't know if he was looking for money or who.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how it came out. Highland owned the
Speaker 1: intellectual property of it. If he came out and said
Speaker 1: that's mine or what. But by within three years of
Speaker 1: Chris or Charles Hall coming out with this he UM
Speaker 1: he had the patent for it. And even way back
Speaker 1: in the eighteen hundreds there were doctors who created One
Speaker 1: guy named Dr Neil Are no, or are not created
Speaker 1: a hydrostatic bed. He covered a warm bath with a
Speaker 1: rubber cloth and sealed it with varnish. And another doctor
Speaker 1: in Portsmouth and these were basically to prevent bed sores,
Speaker 1: to relieve bed sores, and even highlands he said, like
Speaker 1: you said, he cooked it up because he had been
Speaker 1: in hospitals a lot. Yeah, He's like, he's getting killed
Speaker 1: in these hard beds. Yeah. And the reason you would
Speaker 1: want some sort of um water filled bed for a
Speaker 1: hospital is because people are laying around in bed all
Speaker 1: the time and when you have skin covering like a
Speaker 1: bony are, you get bed ulcers and you don't want those.
Speaker 1: So this was to prevent bed sores. UM. That's why
Speaker 1: the earliest physicians were coming up with them. But so
Speaker 1: finally by one Charles Hall holds the patent and again
Speaker 1: he was he wanted to create a serious sleep product,
Speaker 1: and he founded a company called Inner Space Environments and
Speaker 1: they were selling like the real deal, legit high end
Speaker 1: water beds. He even named it seriously right. He opened
Speaker 1: like thirty two stores in California in the early seventies,
Speaker 1: and UM had a factory like he was doing it right.
Speaker 1: His did not leak. One of the things that water
Speaker 1: beds were very much known for is that the sheets
Speaker 1: would pop off. Yeah, very well. The sheets fit on
Speaker 1: his um. The temperature control was great. They were like
Speaker 1: really high end water beds made and designed by the
Speaker 1: guy who actually designed them. The problem is he didn't
Speaker 1: really pursue any patents off, and so there were knockoffs
Speaker 1: out of the gate, and it was the knockoffs that leaked.
Speaker 1: It was the knockoffs that had terrible temperature control um
Speaker 1: and it was the knockoffs that gave waterbeds a bad
Speaker 1: name because they were fully embracing the sexy advertising. That
Speaker 1: was part of it too, all the knockoffs manufacturers, and
Speaker 1: apparently he pursued some of these, but it's he would
Speaker 1: have spent all his time and money pursuing a patent
Speaker 1: infringement if he really tried to go after everyone, and
Speaker 1: some of these didn't make a lot of money, and
Speaker 1: it was just sort of useless to even try, so
Speaker 1: it wasn't worth his time and money. A lot of
Speaker 1: times he said to a lot of people who sold
Speaker 1: water beds early, like early waterbed dealers, basically they were
Speaker 1: just trying to make some fast money. So they could
Speaker 1: go start a pot farm in Oregon. That was like,
Speaker 1: that's who was selling water beds in the early seventies.
Speaker 1: It also has one of the creepiest lines ever in
Speaker 1: the Atlantic article that said something about when Charles Hall
Speaker 1: initially selling water beds out of the back of his van, right, like, man,
Speaker 1: that's the creepiest thing every year. Here, let me let
Speaker 1: me open up my van. You can lay on my
Speaker 1: water bed in the back of my van, you with
Speaker 1: with the stallion painted on the side. Oh man, speaking
Speaker 1: of seventies, So I forgot about the murals on the vands.
Speaker 1: Remember we used to do blog posts and stuff I
Speaker 1: made like a slide show. I remember that vans with
Speaker 1: art on the side. We see those every now and
Speaker 1: then gets up. Still, it's good stuff. You want to
Speaker 1: take a break before we get into the the this
Speaker 1: straightening of water beds. Yes, I couldn't come up with
Speaker 1: a better word than straightening. I apologize for that. Let
Speaker 1: me think the I guess legitimizing, but I'm thinking like
Speaker 1: more like boring, suburbanite zing of water beds. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. We say that Hall very much wanted
Speaker 1: to revolution. I sleep and he didn't embrace the sexual
Speaker 1: component of it. But he sold a lot of water beds,
Speaker 1: and he kind of knew why a lot of these
Speaker 1: people were buying him, and he wasn't like I don't
Speaker 1: think he was so pious that he was like, no,
Speaker 1: I don't want to sell them for that reason. I
Speaker 1: think he eventually was kind of like, yeah, you know
Speaker 1: that that's why people bought him, and that was okay.
Speaker 1: But I don't think he just I don't think he
Speaker 1: cheapened his own advertising that way. No, he didn't. And
Speaker 1: he actually he his company went under by the mid seventies,
Speaker 1: and he he likens it to UM basically advertising to
Speaker 1: the wrong market. Like he he made quality, high end
Speaker 1: water beds UM, and it was advertising to people who
Speaker 1: could afford a more expensive quality, actual legitimate water bed went.
Speaker 1: At the time, it was like, you know, Randall pink
Speaker 1: Floyd and his friends were the actual customers of water beds.
Speaker 1: That's who was buying water beds, and they weren't seeing
Speaker 1: the ads that Charles Hall was putting out there, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, in like the New York or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so he missed the heyday. He was sort of
Speaker 1: in the early heyday, but I think in the eighties
Speaker 1: is when it became like a two billion dollar of
Speaker 1: the market share industry, right, Yeah, Like the late seventies,
Speaker 1: I think it was about a thirteen million dollar a
Speaker 1: year industry, and by seven I believe that its peak
Speaker 1: it was like a two point three billion dollar industry
Speaker 1: a year, and then a pretty steep once again grunge
Speaker 1: killed water beds. Yeah, pretty steep fall in the nineties,
Speaker 1: right in the early nineties. Yeah, But the way that
Speaker 1: it built up before it fell was more companies got
Speaker 1: into it, kind of legitimized it. I believe that there
Speaker 1: was a trade association that developed UM and the I
Speaker 1: think it was like it's called the floatation sleep industry
Speaker 1: is really the technical term for it. UM. They really
Speaker 1: wanted to get away from the sex appeal and like
Speaker 1: this stores like you would you wouldn't buy water bed
Speaker 1: in a head shop anymore. To imagine walking to a
Speaker 1: hedgehop and being like, what do you have a water
Speaker 1: bed here? For? Um? You buy water beds out in
Speaker 1: the suburbs at a place called waterbed Plaza or something
Speaker 1: like that. Or did you see that ad I sent
Speaker 1: to the YouTube adroom. Yeah, country Boy water beds. Everybody
Speaker 1: go go onto YouTube and look for country Boy water
Speaker 1: bed at Max Headroom and it's beautiful. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: Max Headroom rip off selling water beds, country Boy water beds,
Speaker 1: water bed h And I think it was from Arkansas,
Speaker 1: like a local waterbed dealer in Arkansas, Texarcana. You mean
Speaker 1: is that right now? I don't know, but that's I mean,
Speaker 1: like you could get water beds everywhere. Well, that's why
Speaker 1: my friend, I mean in seven in suburban Atlanta. For
Speaker 1: my friend to have one in high school, that kind
Speaker 1: of says it all. It's not like his parents were
Speaker 1: like I mean they were. They were a good, god
Speaker 1: fearing family and we're like, yeah, we need to get
Speaker 1: Chris a sex pit. It was more like they were
Speaker 1: supposedly healthy. Yeah, they were like a healthy way to sleep.
Speaker 1: I think that's also how it kind of transitioned the
Speaker 1: legitimacy and away from like just the association with sex. Right, So, um,
Speaker 1: you have you have like an actual bona fide water
Speaker 1: bed industry. Um with actual water beds. One of the
Speaker 1: one of the ways that this industry was able to
Speaker 1: establish itself was they made vast improvements over the early
Speaker 1: models of water beds. It used to be that you
Speaker 1: had a just basically like a big bladder, a vinyl bladder,
Speaker 1: that big water, big wooden box, and when you wanted
Speaker 1: to get out, you had to like kind of like
Speaker 1: work up to it, roll off the side, and yeah,
Speaker 1: you had to bang your knee on the way out.
Speaker 1: They leaked. There was a lot of problems with it.
Speaker 1: But then they started like improving upon it to where
Speaker 1: like the water bed was actually like this one article,
Speaker 1: I think it was a mental fass article that I
Speaker 1: found said that in the eighties, if you were a kid,
Speaker 1: a water bed was as close to a status symbol
Speaker 1: as you could possibly get, you know, Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it was aspirational. Yeah, there's no when I say,
Speaker 1: no chance my parents would have bought me one, it
Speaker 1: wouldn't have even like I wouldn't. I knew better than
Speaker 1: to even ask. I think the same with me. I
Speaker 1: don't remember ever asking for one, although I really wanted one.
Speaker 1: I think it was like a pipe dream. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: not like, oh I really want a water bed. It
Speaker 1: was such so shut down in my mind as a possibility,
Speaker 1: like this is a time where we inherited mattresses from
Speaker 1: our older siblings. It was so gross. It was on
Speaker 1: the slide road. But it looks not even too many
Speaker 1: stains on it. Kind of uh wait, kind of Oh
Speaker 1: did you actually get a mattress from the side of
Speaker 1: the room. I'm making sure you did not know, but
Speaker 1: just short of that, okay. Um, So mattress water beds then,
Speaker 1: and now one of the knocks against them is there
Speaker 1: they are very heavy. There's no way around it. If
Speaker 1: you fill up a mattress with water, even partially, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have a lot of weight. Depending on the size,
Speaker 1: a couple to three gallons of water can weigh between
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred and two thousand pounds. And so they always
Speaker 1: instill do need a lot of structural support underneath them,
Speaker 1: a large, very heavy wooden platform. Supposedly that's why New
Speaker 1: York was known as the um, the city where the
Speaker 1: least number of water beds are ever. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: can't imagine. Part of it is because like in in
Speaker 1: major cities, there were like waterbed bands and leases, like
Speaker 1: if you rented an apartment, you weren't allowed to have
Speaker 1: a water it was just too heavy. Yeah. Um, people
Speaker 1: would leave them behind like here, you take this because
Speaker 1: even when you drain the water, like the thing that
Speaker 1: held the water bed was heavy itself. The frame was
Speaker 1: super super heavy. It was like a bookcase that you
Speaker 1: didn't really want anymore. You just leave it behind. That's
Speaker 1: what happened to water beds. I didn't see and I
Speaker 1: don't How do you fill them up? Is that you water?
Speaker 1: Really that's how people did it, Yes, And then to
Speaker 1: get it out you needed like a pump, and you
Speaker 1: could buy all this stuff in your local waterbeds store.
Speaker 1: But you know, when you buy a better mattress, a
Speaker 1: regular mattress, you don't have to go buy a pump
Speaker 1: two years later because you're moving, you know, and then
Speaker 1: pump the water out of mattress. You just moved the mattress.
Speaker 1: That was a big, big mark against it in the
Speaker 1: popular understanding of it. I imagine in New York too, well,
Speaker 1: the weight is enough probably to disqualify it. But just
Speaker 1: getting a water hose up a seventh floor walk up, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm surprised. I haven't seen that movie scene where they're
Speaker 1: like have a rope tied around a water hose from
Speaker 1: the street level that they're bringing up through a window.
Speaker 1: It sounds like Buster Keaton or something like super Sexy
Speaker 1: in the seventies. Who would that be? I don't know. Okay,
Speaker 1: we should do a podcast on our crumb Have we
Speaker 1: done that any day? Any day? Buddy? That was like
Speaker 1: a dare. I can't remember if I saw them. Was
Speaker 1: it a movie or a documentary on him? It was
Speaker 1: a movie that came out in the early two thousands.
Speaker 1: Well both they did, the Great documentary Crumb Um and
Speaker 1: then American Splendor that he was a character in it,
Speaker 1: but it was largely about Harvey peakr. Yes, the Great
Speaker 1: Harvey Peak. That was a good movie. Um. All right,
Speaker 1: so these days, uh, like you said, they've been brought
Speaker 1: into the modern era. Um, there's a foam collar around
Speaker 1: the bladder. There's spandex on top up. Um. I believe
Speaker 1: they are air pockets and things in between to sort
Speaker 1: of stabilize it. Yeah, they don't, Actually they don't. You
Speaker 1: can't get seasick on them like you used to be
Speaker 1: able to move like that. I really want to try
Speaker 1: one of these out and just see what it feels like.
Speaker 1: I don't want one, I don't think, but I do
Speaker 1: want to see what the sensation is like. One of
Speaker 1: my friends back in high school. Their parents had a
Speaker 1: what he called a motionless water bed. Um. And now
Speaker 1: I understand what he's talking about. It's like waveless or whatever. Um,
Speaker 1: But it just felt like laying on a feather bed,
Speaker 1: just the most comfortable feather bed you've ever been on. Well,
Speaker 1: my friends must not have been waveless, because it was
Speaker 1: it moved. Yeah, this is non and this would have
Speaker 1: been like the nineties or something like that. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure it was like a five thousand dollar mattress or
Speaker 1: something back then, but that seems to be like the
Speaker 1: kind that they have now. It's like you just lay
Speaker 1: on it and you're You're not like, oh, this is
Speaker 1: a water bed. You just like, this is super comfortable.
Speaker 1: I'm floating and weightless, but your mind's not thinking you're
Speaker 1: laying on water. Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't have, like, aside
Speaker 1: from moving a lot. When I sleep, I'm like a
Speaker 1: I like to flop on the bed, like when I
Speaker 1: lay down, I don't lay gently on it. I will
Speaker 1: kind of throw myself into bed. And none of these
Speaker 1: things are conduci of the water beds, especially not in
Speaker 1: the seventies. But apparently now it's fine. You could do
Speaker 1: that well. One of the new salesman they interviewed for
Speaker 1: this article said that he won't say the name water
Speaker 1: bed um. He says, because it turns people off. He said.
Speaker 1: Even if they try it and they like it and
Speaker 1: then they find out it's a water bed, he said,
Speaker 1: sometimes they won't buy it because of that weird seventies
Speaker 1: association like with yeah, or they're worried it's gonna leak,
Speaker 1: or they're you know, they're gonna have to fill it
Speaker 1: with water. There Apparently I couldn't find any any verification
Speaker 1: of this, but there was an urban legend at least
Speaker 1: that you could find aquatic worms floating in your water
Speaker 1: bed and they started down like, oh, well we need
Speaker 1: to add chemicals to the water. Well, then that makes
Speaker 1: it even grosser. Right, So there's like just over time
Speaker 1: people associated a lot of negative things with water beds,
Speaker 1: and then the thing that really killed the water bed
Speaker 1: was that in the nineties. By the by the nineties,
Speaker 1: it was clear that America was like, sure, we'll try
Speaker 1: other things besides an inter spring, mattress, what you got,
Speaker 1: and so like temper pedic came around, or sleep number.
Speaker 1: All these guys who made technically alternative mattresses. Um, the
Speaker 1: same thing that it follows in that tradition that the
Speaker 1: waterbed established. They Charles Hall created that market and showed
Speaker 1: that it was a real thing. And so by the
Speaker 1: time the nineties rolled around, and like I think temper
Speaker 1: Peedick was the first one. Um, it was like all
Speaker 1: the benefits of a waterbed without the hassle of the water,
Speaker 1: why would you want a water bed? And that was
Speaker 1: it for water beds. Yeah, and minus the creeps. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Whereas just a few a few years before, almost one
Speaker 1: in war between one and four and one and five,
Speaker 1: between a quarter and of all water or of all
Speaker 1: mattresses were waterbeds sold in America. It's crazy. It's a
Speaker 1: lot down to nothing, down to just gone. Man. Imagine
Speaker 1: the landfills of America are filled with vinyl bladders just rotting,
Speaker 1: well broughting a thousand years from now probably, yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: They're probably some pretty good shape. So one more thing
Speaker 1: about Charles Hall, well, two more things. One he went
Speaker 1: on to invent the solar shower, you know, the campus
Speaker 1: are great. And then um too, he has a kind
Speaker 1: of a bad name, or he did, at least back
Speaker 1: in one I think um in that WAPO article where
Speaker 1: the waterbed industry, the industry association that formed they they
Speaker 1: didn't like him very much because a couple of years
Speaker 1: before his patent ran out, he'd been gone and then
Speaker 1: came back and said, all y'all owe me money for
Speaker 1: patent infringement. And they were like, what, dude, We like,
Speaker 1: we've built this industry. You know, we thought you were
Speaker 1: cool kind of and he was like, no, I'm not
Speaker 1: give me some money and he started like they apparently
Speaker 1: wanted to settle and it wasn't enough. But one really
Speaker 1: noteworthy thing about one of their one of his lawsuits
Speaker 1: against I think a Taiwanese um manufacturer that Um he
Speaker 1: sold shares in the outcome, so like you could buy
Speaker 1: shares of a lawsuit. Crazy, and there's a there's a
Speaker 1: common law law against it. It's called champ terree, which
Speaker 1: I had never heard of before. Makes total sense. It's
Speaker 1: where somebody like basically pays for legal fees in order
Speaker 1: to get a piece of the action to cut yeah,
Speaker 1: champtere And in California at the time, champtery was not illegal.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it is, but it was not.
Speaker 1: And uh, he sold shares for ten thousand a pop.
Speaker 1: Uh for this, for this, wow, this lawsuit. That's amazing.
Speaker 1: Water beds, they're amazing. Chuck cheez. That's what the episode
Speaker 1: should be titled. It's up to you. Do you got
Speaker 1: anything else? You got nothing else? If you want to
Speaker 1: know more about water beds, well, get in a time machine,
Speaker 1: get in the way back machine and go try and
Speaker 1: one out yourself. Well, we have one in the way
Speaker 1: back machine, so you're lucky. Day it covered in American possum.
Speaker 1: Oh boy. Uh. Since I said that it's time for listening,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this one of the many replies for
Speaker 1: color blindness too. We've got a lot of responses for
Speaker 1: color blindness. What do you mean too well? I called
Speaker 1: the sure all right, Hey guys, I was listening to
Speaker 1: the show about color blindness with an oh you are
Speaker 1: so I assume this? Uh oh, he's Canadian. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say British. It's like British, like he's still under the
Speaker 1: thumb though. Uh. I worked in the electrical field for
Speaker 1: ten years, and in that time I've worked with two
Speaker 1: red green color blind electricians. Remember we talked about that.
Speaker 1: The first one I worked with for a few years. Uh,
Speaker 1: and he said, it wasn't that difficult to tell the
Speaker 1: difference between red and green conductors. They just looked like
Speaker 1: every Uh, they looked like very obvious different shades of
Speaker 1: the same color. It only took a couple of mistakes
Speaker 1: before he was able to tell the difference. An electrical
Speaker 1: red is a current carrying conductor, while green is used
Speaker 1: for grounding and bonding like a rat and a science experiment.
Speaker 1: He explained, it only took a couple of shocks of
Speaker 1: what he thought it was a bonding wire to really
Speaker 1: notice the difference. So dangerous, I know. Man. Uh. The
Speaker 1: other I worked with for only a short while because
Speaker 1: he died, but he had been an electrician for twenty
Speaker 1: plus years. Wasn't until he asked a co worker why
Speaker 1: they thought the ground wire and a current carrying conductor
Speaker 1: were the same color that he even realized he was
Speaker 1: color on. Wow, how about that? A little slow on
Speaker 1: the uptake, perhaps, so, even though it costs some issues
Speaker 1: early on their careers, they're both great electricians. I guess
Speaker 1: the human brain always finds a way. And that is
Speaker 1: James from Cape Breton, Nova, Scotia, Canada. That's cool, man,
Speaker 1: great Area, Eastern Canada, Great Area, Western Canada, Fantastic Central Canada.
Speaker 1: We love it all. Yes what we do. If you're
Speaker 1: Canadian you want to say hi, We'll get in touch
Speaker 1: of this go to stuff you should know and uh
Speaker 1: click on our social media links or send us an email.
Speaker 1: This stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
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