Speaker 1: Hello everyone. It's Chuck here on a Saturday, and today's
Speaker 1: select episode is called water Beds Colan the Sexiest bed
Speaker 1: Oh me thinks, yes, indeed, this episode is from October,
Speaker 1: also the sexiest month. Check it out now. Water Beds.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
Speaker 1: and we're just here jiggling away slash slash on our
Speaker 1: pleasure pit. God oh man, it's so funny. When I
Speaker 1: started researching and 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 uh
Speaker 1: and big shout out to The Atlantic, one of our
Speaker 1: favorite rags. A lot of this was taken from article
Speaker 1: by Rebecca Greenfield. Uh, and then a bunch of other
Speaker 1: cool uh supplementary stuff. New York Times, who else? Uh?
Speaker 1: Washington Post, Washington Yeah, wap open 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. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the New York Times one was six and Wapo
Speaker 1: was from and they're writing about the phenomena of of
Speaker 1: um water beds at the time. I love that, man.
Speaker 1: I love being able to go back read an article
Speaker 1: and then go back and see how it actually unraveled,
Speaker 1: like in real time. Basically, yes, see, like sure, it's
Speaker 1: a little time capsule if you will, and you can
Speaker 1: look back now and say, they get it right. What's
Speaker 1: the big news? I don't even like saying this two
Speaker 1: words together. I know neither so played out, so played
Speaker 1: All right, let's talk about the water bed. Have you
Speaker 1: ever had one? No, I kind of wanted one. I
Speaker 1: didn't have one. I kind of wanted one to. I
Speaker 1: think we're just of that age and they came about,
Speaker 1: as you'll see, we're gonna talking about the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 1: That in the eighties is when they peaked sales wise.
Speaker 1: I think even like young uns like us, we're very intrigued.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, my friend had one. Yeah, did you sleep
Speaker 1: on it? No, never slept on that one. I laid
Speaker 1: down on it once, I think because I was I
Speaker 1: was like, I gotta know what this feels like at
Speaker 1: least uh, And I think it was. They may have
Speaker 1: called it waveless, but I don't even know what the
Speaker 1: difference was because it was pretty wavy. What decade was this,
Speaker 1: This would have been mid to late eighties. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't even they had waveless ones back then. I think
Speaker 1: so they were called waveless, but I don't know how
Speaker 1: it's still slashed you around. Yeah, I remember very distinctively
Speaker 1: laying on it, and I remember thinking, I don't know
Speaker 1: if I could sleep on this. It didn't seem like
Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't uncomfortable like it caused me pain,
Speaker 1: but I move around a lot in my sleep, so
Speaker 1: it's not It's not a good or at least the
Speaker 1: old school water beds are not a good match for me.
Speaker 1: Memory phone is a little better. Actually, supposedly they've come
Speaker 1: a long way, and then the new water beds are
Speaker 1: the bomb. I would be curious to lay on one. Well,
Speaker 1: go to a dealer in South Florida. I think City
Speaker 1: Furniture in South Florida is bringing back the water bed.
Speaker 1: Oh there's other places too, because the design now, well
Speaker 1: we'll get to it, but it's much different. It's not
Speaker 1: it's not the good old days where you just fill
Speaker 1: up a big vinyl rubber bladder and tripping on some
Speaker 1: grass and listening to Dark Side of the Moon. You know.
Speaker 1: The funny thing about my friend Chris's water bed, though,
Speaker 1: in his whole house was a time capsule of the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. He had a water bed in front of
Speaker 1: a wall that the wall was a photograph of a
Speaker 1: like a Hawaiian beach sunset. Oh man, we had two
Speaker 1: of those in my house. Really. We had one was
Speaker 1: a straight up forest. So I was like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: in the family room. I'll walk into the kitchen. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, I'm in the forest basically. And then if
Speaker 1: you went upstairs, and this is my childhood home in Toledo, Ohio, Um,
Speaker 1: when you went upstairs to my sister's rooms, you when
Speaker 1: you got right up to the top landing, there was
Speaker 1: like an outdoor like Coors beer scene, like in the
Speaker 1: woods 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, like that hip like Jerry Read or
Speaker 1: something lived there. Yeah, I mean we had looking back,
Speaker 1: we had shag carpet, range, 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. That's so cool
Speaker 1: more or wall murals, and I'm glad I went because
Speaker 1: sadly it is no longer there. I'm glad you went to.
Speaker 1: Then a couple of months later just torn down, and
Speaker 1: I went back and saw a big emptiness, and I cried,
Speaker 1: did you the end? I could see that, you mean?
Speaker 1: And 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 of doing and stick their head out and
Speaker 1: be like can I help you? And I'd be like, yeah, actually,
Speaker 1: can I come in your house? Um? But 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: wanted to go back to my elementary school, and it's
Speaker 1: just like a grass field now. Man, It's like, how
Speaker 1: do you tear down an elementary school? You know? Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe it got like black mold or something, well tube,
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
Speaker 1: recommended so water bed Yeah, water beds Um, we'll go
Speaker 1: back to the earliest history, I guess. But um, the
Speaker 1: man that we really need to talk about is a
Speaker 1: man named Charles Hall, the inventor of the modern water
Speaker 1: bed as we know it. He's a student at San
Speaker 1: Francisco State. He's taking a design class. Oh he was
Speaker 1: like a design major. Well, yeah, because he submitted this
Speaker 1: as his master's thesis, was the waterbed. How awesome is that?
Speaker 1: So I saw competing stuff of what he actually created
Speaker 1: like built, yeah. Yeah. And the thing that I saw,
Speaker 1: I think it was in that WAPO It said what
Speaker 1: he created was called the pleasure pit, and it was
Speaker 1: an eight foot by eight foot basically water bed tub
Speaker 1: of pudding, but it was meant to be a conversation
Speaker 1: pit from mold pull people that kind of hang around
Speaker 1: in and there was like a bar and there was
Speaker 1: lighting and like shelves and stuff like that, and that
Speaker 1: that was the original his design. Yeah. But was there
Speaker 1: a water mattress function or was it just a sunken
Speaker 1: going room. No, that was the thing that was where
Speaker 1: everybody sat was on a water mattress in the middle.
Speaker 1: It sounds awful, it's just weird, but it really caught
Speaker 1: everybody's imagination. Supposedly, within six months it was on the
Speaker 1: front page of papers across the country. This is in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. The Miami Herald had something on the front
Speaker 1: page about this waterbed exhibit in San Francisco that this
Speaker 1: four year old design student created capital p capital p
Speaker 1: uh yeah, pleasure pit. Everything I've seen is it's capitalized.
Speaker 1: But that's what I'm saying. I think that's what he
Speaker 1: called the first thing. But it very quickly got turned
Speaker 1: into a bed. The water bed I used to like. Actually,
Speaker 1: my same friend Chris had one of those sunken living
Speaker 1: rooms very seventies. Remember in um, oh, what's the big
Speaker 1: Lebowski when you go see to see Jackie Child or
Speaker 1: Jackie whatever. Jackie Treehorn. Yeah, Jackie Treehorn. His whole house
Speaker 1: is just amazing. Yeah. He had a conversation pit. Uh right,
Speaker 1: conversation pit, that's what it was called. So here's the
Speaker 1: deal from Time magazine. In Manhattan, the waterbed display at
Speaker 1: Bloomingdale's Department store for a while was a popular singles
Speaker 1: meeting place. Sire's Roebuck and Holiday Inns are eyeing the
Speaker 1: beds and Lake Tahoe's King Castle Hotel has already installed
Speaker 1: them in luxury sweets and this is uh. I think
Speaker 1: it continues. Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner has one king's size,
Speaker 1: of course and covered with Tasmanian bossom. I thought, how
Speaker 1: gross is that? Because what I know is a possum
Speaker 1: is different different. I looked up the TASMANI impossible, super soft,
Speaker 1: I would imagine. And so it's not like American road
Speaker 1: kill on your water bed. Right, It wasn't even made
Speaker 1: from it. It It just had a bunch of live American
Speaker 1: possums on his bed and his water bed you have
Speaker 1: was really weird. But here's the deal. The water bed
Speaker 1: that Charles hall Cree eventually would go on to create,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about some of his earlier designs aside
Speaker 1: from the pleasure bit, he wanted to revolutionize sleeping. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he meant it very seriously. He wanted to have a
Speaker 1: pressure point free mattress that would envelope your body and
Speaker 1: give you the best night sleep of your life. He
Speaker 1: had no intention of it becoming this, which it very
Speaker 1: much did. A metaphor for the sexy sixties and seventies, right,
Speaker 1: but it definitely did like you say it was. It's
Speaker 1: a really good example of an idea just basically getting
Speaker 1: hijacked big time. And at first he was kind of like,
Speaker 1: I'm just a twenty four year old design suit. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't care. 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 infringement suits here and there,
Speaker 1: patent infringement suits um, which we'll talk about later. But
Speaker 1: 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 revolutionized sleep, but 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
Speaker 1: saying like a waterbed salesman said, it's very like, very
Speaker 1: much like three people are having sex because the bed
Speaker 1: itself is like a third warm body participating in the
Speaker 1: motion or something like in the worst possible way. And
Speaker 1: I looked up Yeah, I was like, it's just weird.
Speaker 1: And I looked up um like sex on a water
Speaker 1: bed on um on a work computer? Right, uh oh yeah,
Speaker 1: the word computer is supertained now um. And the I
Speaker 1: found like this one. I can't remember the website, but
Speaker 1: it's basically like pros and cons. And it sounds like
Speaker 1: it comes down to your preferences, you know, like what
Speaker 1: what like are you into your motions being exaggerated? You know?
Speaker 1: And I guess, yeah, Chuck's laughing because I'm like kind
Speaker 1: of making right, Um, if you're into that, great, if
Speaker 1: you're not, or you're 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 prefer says I think. But I
Speaker 1: think a lot of the earliest water beds were we're
Speaker 1: bought 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: went badly. All right, let's take a break. I'm all
Speaker 1: hot and bothered. We'll come back and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: 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: Hefner 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: guy 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. Let me see here,
Speaker 1: what else Aquarius, Joyapeutic, aqua beds, Joyapeutic, Um, Aquarius products.
Speaker 1: Like you said, water work, what else? That's all I have?
Speaker 1: I think wet Dream. We should have stopped there. Um,
Speaker 1: it's definitely the worst of all of them. So before
Speaker 1: this came about, Charles Hall a couple of his prototype
Speaker 1: early prototypes. Um. One, it sounds sort of like a
Speaker 1: bean bag chair almost, but it was a big bag
Speaker 1: chair full of three hundred pounds of liquid corn starch
Speaker 1: that the idea was you would sit in it and
Speaker 1: 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 sink.
Speaker 1: Can't gross, all right? So he moved on to jello
Speaker 1: for real, and that didn't work either. That's not a joke, people.
Speaker 1: He put jello in this thing did not have the
Speaker 1: right temperature or consistency. So eventually he would thanks to
Speaker 1: um thanks to vinyl really but coming 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 would relax. Yeah, he had the purest
Speaker 1: of intentions, I really did, and he he hit upon
Speaker 1: it finally and again in the Masters thesis. Well, was
Speaker 1: part of the problem. Summer of love. People are 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 I 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. Um. So the idea
Speaker 1: of this something totally new, like it was two things. One,
Speaker 1: this guy was trying to revolutionized sleep, and it came
Speaker 1: at a time when people were willing to like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the beds boring, let's try something different. And it
Speaker 1: just kind of came together really well. But again it
Speaker 1: got hijacked by people who owned Headshot well, and he
Speaker 1: was in San Francisco. It all kind of converged um
Speaker 1: to work against him, ironically, but he he applied for
Speaker 1: a pet and I think in nineteen sixty eight, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't until nineteen seventy one that it was granted
Speaker 1: because prior to his design being UM debuted, like thirty
Speaker 1: or so years prior, Robert Heinlein, the very famous in
Speaker 1: prolific science fiction writer, he had basically described water beds
Speaker 1: so frequently and in such detail that he was considered
Speaker 1: the intellectual property holder of waterbed design. Yeah, the reason
Speaker 1: Heinlin 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 descriptions. Yeah, and one of
Speaker 1: the things that he kept he that always popped up
Speaker 1: was these water beds. And apparently in the thirties he
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time in hospital beds, so he
Speaker 1: was just imagining how they could be improved. And he
Speaker 1: described water beds 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 can be electrocuted if you have vigorous sex. Waterproof
Speaker 1: box to make it leakproof um, which was another probably
Speaker 1: legitimate um Cohn for a water bed. Sometimes they would
Speaker 1: leak back then uh, and then some other things. But
Speaker 1: basically it all came together to form such a robust
Speaker 1: all even though it was in a science fiction novel
Speaker 1: that he was he had to like go to court
Speaker 1: and say, I don't know if he was looking for
Speaker 1: money or who. I'm not sure how it came out
Speaker 1: that Highland owned the intellectual property of it. If he
Speaker 1: came out and said that's mine or what. But by
Speaker 1: within three years of Chris or Charles Hall coming out
Speaker 1: with this he um, he had the patent for it.
Speaker 1: And even way back in the eighteen hundreds there were
Speaker 1: doctors who created One guy named Dr Neil or No
Speaker 1: or are Not created a hydrostatic bed. He covered a
Speaker 1: warm bath with a rubber cloth and sealed it with varnish.
Speaker 1: And another doctor in Portsmouth, and these were based to
Speaker 1: prevent bed sores, to relieve bed sores, and even highlands
Speaker 1: he said, like you said, he cooked it up because
Speaker 1: he had been in hospitals a lot. Yeah, he's like
Speaker 1: he's getting killed in these hard beds. Yeah. And the
Speaker 1: reason you would want some sort of um water filled
Speaker 1: bed for a hospital is because people are laying around
Speaker 1: in bed all the time and when you have skin
Speaker 1: covering like a bony layer, you get bed ulcers and
Speaker 1: you don't want those now. So this was to prevent
Speaker 1: bed sores. Um that's why the earliest physicians were coming
Speaker 1: up with them. But so finally by one Charles Hall
Speaker 1: holds the patent and again he was he wanted to
Speaker 1: create a serious sleep product and he founded a company
Speaker 1: called Inner space environments, and they were selling like the
Speaker 1: real deal, legit high end water beds. He even named
Speaker 1: it seriously right. He opened like thirty two stores in
Speaker 1: California in the early seventies, and and UM had a
Speaker 1: factory like he was doing it right. His did not leak.
Speaker 1: One of the things that water beds were very much
Speaker 1: known for is that the sheets would pop off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very well, because sheets fit on his UM. The temperature
Speaker 1: control was great. They were like really high end water
Speaker 1: beds made and designed by the guy who actually designed them.
Speaker 1: The problem is he didn't really pursue any patent stuff,
Speaker 1: and so there were knockoffs out of the gate, and
Speaker 1: it was the knockoffs that leaked. It was the knockoffs
Speaker 1: that had terrible temperature control UM and it was the
Speaker 1: knockoffs that gave water beds a bad name because they
Speaker 1: were fully embracing the sexy advertising. That was part of
Speaker 1: it too, all the knockoffs manufacturers and apparently he pursued
Speaker 1: some of these, but it's he would have spent all
Speaker 1: his time and money pursuing a patent infringement if he
Speaker 1: really tried to go after everyone. And some of these
Speaker 1: didn't make a lot of money, and it was just
Speaker 1: sort of use list to even try, so it wasn't
Speaker 1: worth his time and money. A lot of times he
Speaker 1: said to a lot of people who sold water beds early,
Speaker 1: like early waterbed dealers. Basically they were just trying to
Speaker 1: make some fast money so they could go start a
Speaker 1: pot farm in Oregon. That was like, that's who was
Speaker 1: selling water beds in the early seventies. It also has
Speaker 1: one of the creepiest lines ever in the Atlantic article
Speaker 1: that said something about when Charles Hall initially was selling
Speaker 1: water beds out of the back of his van, right like, man,
Speaker 1: that's the creepiest thing ever. Yeah 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 with with
Speaker 1: the stallion painted on the side. Oh man, speaking of seventies,
Speaker 1: I forgot about the murals on the vands. Remember we
Speaker 1: used to do blog posts and stuff I made like
Speaker 1: a slide show. I remember that vans with art on
Speaker 1: the side, see those every now and then? Gets up. Still,
Speaker 1: it's good stuff. You want to take a break before
Speaker 1: we get into the the this straightening of water beds. Yes, sorry,
Speaker 1: I couldn't come up with a better word than straightening.
Speaker 1: I apologize for that. Let me think, I guess legitimizing,
Speaker 1: but I'm thinking like more like a boring, suburbanite zing
Speaker 1: of water beds. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. We
Speaker 1: say that Hall very much wanted to revolution I sleep
Speaker 1: and he didn't embrace the sexual component of it. But
Speaker 1: he sold a lot of water beds, and he kind
Speaker 1: of knew why a lot of these people were buying him,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't like, I don't think he was so
Speaker 1: pious that he was like, no, I don't want to
Speaker 1: sell them for that reason. I think he eventually was
Speaker 1: kind of like, you know that that's why people bought him,
Speaker 1: and that was okay. But I don't think he just
Speaker 1: I don't think he cheapened his own advertising that way. No,
Speaker 1: he didn't, and he actually he his company went under
Speaker 1: by the mid seventies and he he likens it to
Speaker 1: UM basically advertising to the wrong market, Like he he
Speaker 1: made quality, high end water beds UM and it was
Speaker 1: advertising to people who could afford a more expensive quality,
Speaker 1: actual legitimate water bed wearing. At the time, it was like,
Speaker 1: you know, Randall Pink Floyd and his friends were the
Speaker 1: actual customers of water beds. That's who was buying water beds,
Speaker 1: and they weren't seeing the ads that Charles Hall was
Speaker 1: putting out there, you know what I'm saying, in like
Speaker 1: the New York or whatever. Yeah, and so he missed
Speaker 1: the heyday. He was sort of in the early heyday.
Speaker 1: But I think in the eighties is when it became
Speaker 1: like a two billion dollar of the market share industry. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the late seventies, I think it was about a
Speaker 1: thirteen million dollar a year industry, and by seven I
Speaker 1: believe at its peak it was like a two point
Speaker 1: three billion dollar industry a year, and then a pretty
Speaker 1: steep once again grunge killed water beds. Yeah, pretty steep
Speaker 1: fall in the nineties, right in the early nineties. But
Speaker 1: the way that it built up before it fell was
Speaker 1: more companies got into it, kind of legitimized it. I
Speaker 1: believe that there was a trade association that developed UM
Speaker 1: and the I think it was like it's called the
Speaker 1: floatation sleep industry is really the technical term for it. UM.
Speaker 1: They really wanted to get away from the sex appeal
Speaker 1: and like this stores like you would you wouldn't buy
Speaker 1: a water bed in a head shop anymore. To imagine
Speaker 1: walking to a hedgehop and being like, what do you
Speaker 1: have a water bed here? For? Um? You buy water
Speaker 1: beds out in the suburbs at a place called waterbed
Speaker 1: Plaza or something like that. Or did you see that
Speaker 1: ad I sent to the YouTube adom. Yeah, country Boy
Speaker 1: water beds. Everybody, go go under you YouTube and look
Speaker 1: for country Boy water bed at Max Headroom and it's beautiful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's Max Headroom rip off selling water beds country Boy
Speaker 1: water beds by water bed h And I think it
Speaker 1: was from Arkansas, like a local waterbed dealer in Arkansas,
Speaker 1: tex Arcana. You mean, oh, is there right now? I
Speaker 1: don't know, but that's I mean, like you could get
Speaker 1: water beds everywhere. Well that's why my friend, I mean
Speaker 1: in seven in suburban Atlanta. For my friend to have
Speaker 1: one in high school, that kind of says it all.
Speaker 1: It's not like his parents were like I mean they were.
Speaker 1: They were a good, god fearing family and we're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we need to get Chris a sex pit. It was
Speaker 1: more like they were supposedly healthy. Yeah, they were like
Speaker 1: a healthy way to sleep. I think that's also how
Speaker 1: it kind of transitioned the legitimacy and away from like
Speaker 1: just the association with sex. Right, So um, you have
Speaker 1: you have like an actual bona fide water bed industry.
Speaker 1: Um with actual water beds. One of the one of
Speaker 1: the ways that this industry was able to establish itself
Speaker 1: was they made vast improvements over the early models of
Speaker 1: water beds. It used to be that you had a
Speaker 1: just basically like a big bladder, a vinyl bladder that
Speaker 1: big water, big wooden box, and when you wanted to
Speaker 1: get out, you had to like kind of like work
Speaker 1: up to it and roll off the side and knee. 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 floss 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 a new bed are
Speaker 1: than to even ask I think the same with me.
Speaker 1: I don't remember 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 the 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 too many stains on
Speaker 1: kind of uh wait, kind of Oh did you actually
Speaker 1: get a mattress from the side of the road. I'm
Speaker 1: making sure you did not know, but just short of that, okay, um,
Speaker 1: so mattress. The water beds then, and now one of
Speaker 1: the knocks against them is there they are very heavy.
Speaker 1: There's no way around it. If you fill up a
Speaker 1: mattress with water, even partially, you're gonna have a lot
Speaker 1: of weight. Depending on the size, a couple to three
Speaker 1: gallons of water can weigh between fifteen hundred and two
Speaker 1: thousand pounds. And so they always instilled do need a
Speaker 1: lot of structural support underneath them, a large, very heavy
Speaker 1: wooden platform. Supposedly that's why New York was known as
Speaker 1: the the city where the least number of water beds
Speaker 1: were ever so I can't imagine. Part of it is
Speaker 1: because like in in major cities there were like waterbed
Speaker 1: bands and leases, like if you rented an apartment, you
Speaker 1: weren't allowed to have a water It was just too heavy. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: people would leave them behind. Like here you take this
Speaker 1: because even when you drain the water, like the thing
Speaker 1: that held the water bed was heavy itself. The frame
Speaker 1: was super super heavy. It was like a bookcase that
Speaker 1: you didn't really want anymore. You just leave it behind.
Speaker 1: That's what happened to water beds. I didn't see, and
Speaker 1: I don't How do you fill them up? Is that
Speaker 1: you water? That's how people did it. Yes, And then
Speaker 1: to get it out you needed like a pump, and
Speaker 1: you could buy all the 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 I have pumped
Speaker 1: two years later because you're moving, you know, and then
Speaker 1: pump the water out of mattress. He 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. Uh. 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 Bust your Keaton or something like Super
Speaker 1: Sexy 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 when I saw American Splendor, that's what I saw.
Speaker 1: He was a character in it, but it was largely
Speaker 1: about Harvey PEAKR. Yes, the Great Harvey Peak. That was
Speaker 1: a good movie. Um. All right, so these days, uh,
Speaker 1: like you said, they've been brought into the modern era. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a foam collar around the bladder, their spandex on top. Um.
Speaker 1: I believe they are air pockets and things in between
Speaker 1: to sort of stabilize it. Yeah, they don't actually they don't.
Speaker 1: You can't get seasick on them like you used to
Speaker 1: be able to move like that. I really want to
Speaker 1: try one of these out and just see what it
Speaker 1: feels like. I don't want one, I don't think, but
Speaker 1: I do want to see what the sensation is like.
Speaker 1: One of my friends back in high school, their parents
Speaker 1: had a what he called a motionless water bed. Um
Speaker 1: And now I understand what he's talking about. It's like
Speaker 1: waveless or whatever. Um, but it just felt like laying
Speaker 1: on a feather bed, just the most comfortable feather bed
Speaker 1: you've ever been on. Well, my friends must not have
Speaker 1: been waveless, because it was it moved. Yeah, this is none.
Speaker 1: And this would have been like the nineties or something
Speaker 1: like that. And I'm sure it was like a five
Speaker 1: thousand dollar mattress or something back then, but that seems
Speaker 1: to be like the kind that they have now. It's
Speaker 1: like you just lay on it and you're you're not like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is a water bed. You just like, this is
Speaker 1: super comfortable. I'm floating and weightless, but your mind's not
Speaker 1: thinking you're laying on water. Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't have, like,
Speaker 1: aside from moving a lot when I sleep. I'm a
Speaker 1: like a I like to flop on the bed, like
Speaker 1: when I lay down, I don't lay gently on it.
Speaker 1: I will kind of throw myself into bed. And none
Speaker 1: of these things are conducive to water beds, especially not
Speaker 1: in the seventies. But apparently now it's fine you could
Speaker 1: do that. Well. One of the new salesman they interviewed
Speaker 1: for this article said that he won't say the name
Speaker 1: waterbed 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 association,
Speaker 1: like yeah, or they're worried it's gonna leak, or they're
Speaker 1: you know, they're gonna have to fill it with water.
Speaker 1: There Apparently I couldn't find any any verification of this,
Speaker 1: but there was an urban legend at least that you
Speaker 1: could find aquatic worms floating in your water bed, and
Speaker 1: they started doing like, oh, well we need to add
Speaker 1: chemicals to the water. Well, then that makes it even grosser, right,
Speaker 1: So there's like just over time, people associated a lot
Speaker 1: of negative things with water beds, and then the thing
Speaker 1: that really killed the water bed was that in the nineties.
Speaker 1: By the by the nineties, it was clear that America
Speaker 1: was like, sure, we'll try other things besides an inter
Speaker 1: spring mattress, what you got And so like temper pedic
Speaker 1: came around, or sleep number, all these guys who made
Speaker 1: technically alternative mattresses. Um, the same thing that it follows
Speaker 1: in that tradition that the waterbed established. They that Charles
Speaker 1: Hall he aided that market and showed that it was
Speaker 1: a real thing. And so by the time the nineties
Speaker 1: rolled around, and like I think tempera pedick was the
Speaker 1: first one. Um, it was like all the benefits of
Speaker 1: a water bed without the hassle of the water, why
Speaker 1: would you want a water bed? And that was it
Speaker 1: for water beds. Yeah, and minus the creeps. Yeah. Whereas
Speaker 1: just a few a few years before, almost one in four,
Speaker 1: between one and four and one in five between a
Speaker 1: quarter and of all water or of all mattresses were
Speaker 1: water beds sold in America. It's crazy. It's a lot
Speaker 1: down to nothing, down to just gone. Man. Imagine the
Speaker 1: 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: was a 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, thought you were cool
Speaker 1: kind of he was like, no, I'm not give me
Speaker 1: some money and he started like they apparently wanted to
Speaker 1: settle and it wasn't enough. But one really noteworthy thing
Speaker 1: about one of their one of his lawsuits against I
Speaker 1: think a Taiwanese um manufacturer that um he sold shares
Speaker 1: in the outcome, so like you could buy shares of
Speaker 1: a lawsuit. Crazy, And there's a there's a common law
Speaker 1: law against it. It's called champ terree, which I had
Speaker 1: never heard of before many total sense. It's where somebody
Speaker 1: like basically pays for legal fees in order to get
Speaker 1: a piece of the action to cut Um. Yeah, chapter
Speaker 1: E and in California at the time, chapter was not illegal.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it is, but um it was not.
Speaker 1: And he sold shares for ten thousand a pop. Uh
Speaker 1: for this for this Wow, this lawsuit. That's amazing. Water beds,
Speaker 1: They're amazing. Chuck cheez. That's what the episode should be titled.
Speaker 1: It's up to you. Do you got anything else? You
Speaker 1: got nothing else? If you want to know more about
Speaker 1: water beds, well, get in a time machine, get in
Speaker 1: the way back machine and go try and one out yourself. Well,
Speaker 1: we have one in the way back machine. You're lucky
Speaker 1: day covered in American possum. Oh boy. Uh. Since I
Speaker 1: said that it's time for listening there, I'm gonna call
Speaker 1: this one of the many replies for color blindness too.
Speaker 1: We've got a lot of responses for color blindness. What
Speaker 1: do you mean too well? I called the jerk all right, Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I was listening to the show about color blindness with
Speaker 1: an oh you are so I assume this? Uh oh,
Speaker 1: he's Canadian's gonna say British. It's like British light. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's still under the thumb though. I worked in the
Speaker 1: electrical field for ten years, and in that time I've
Speaker 1: worked with two red green color blind electricians. Remember we
Speaker 1: talked about that. The first one I worked with for
Speaker 1: a few years. Uh, And he said, it wasn't that
Speaker 1: difficult to tell the difference between red and green conductors.
Speaker 1: They just looked like every Uh. They look like very
Speaker 1: obvious different shades of the same color, and only took
Speaker 1: a couple of mistakes before he was able to tell
Speaker 1: the difference. An electrical red is a current carrying conductor,
Speaker 1: while green is used for grounding and bonding, like a
Speaker 1: rat and a science experiment. He explained, it only took
Speaker 1: a couple of shocks of what he thought it was
Speaker 1: a bonding wire to really notice the difference. So dangerous,
Speaker 1: I know, man. Uh. The other I worked with for
Speaker 1: only a short while because he died, but he had
Speaker 1: been an electrician for twenty plus years. Wasn't until he
Speaker 1: asked a co worker why they thought the ground wire
Speaker 1: and a current carring conductor were the same color that
Speaker 1: he even realized he was color blind. How about that?
Speaker 1: A little slow on the uptake, perhaps so, even though
Speaker 1: it costs some issues early on their careers, they're both
Speaker 1: great electricians. I guess the human brain always finds a way,
Speaker 1: and that is James from Cape Breton, Nova, Scotia, Canada.
Speaker 1: That's cool Man, Great Area Eastern Canada, Great Area, Western Canada,
Speaker 1: fantastic Central Canada. We love it all. Yes, what we do.
Speaker 1: If you're Canadian, you want to say hi, We'll get
Speaker 1: in touch of this. Go to Stuff you Should Know
Speaker 1: and uh click on our social media links or send
Speaker 1: us an email. This stuff podcast at how stuffworks dot com.
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