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Waterbeds: The Sexiest Bed? · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
0:04
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
0:14
Speaker 1: and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there,
0:17
Speaker 1: and we're just here. Jiggle AOI slash slash on our
0:21
Speaker 1: pleasure pit. God oh man, it's so funny. When I
0:26
Speaker 1: started researching this, so I was like, water beds, that's
0:29
Speaker 1: very stuff you should know. So sort of fits right
0:32
Speaker 1: in with our historical pop culture phenomena series Phenomenal Do
0:39
Speaker 1: do uh and big shout out to The Atlantic, one
0:44
Speaker 1: of our favorite rags. A lot of this was taken
0:47
Speaker 1: from article by Rebecca Greenfield uh, and then a bunch
0:51
Speaker 1: of other cool uh supplementary stuff. New York Times, who else? Uh,
0:56
Speaker 1: Washington Post, Washington Yeah, wapop men, all those fake news outlets, right,
1:01
Speaker 1: Although I really love the New York Times and the
1:04
Speaker 1: Washington Post ones because they were like contemporary articles, like
1:07
Speaker 1: the New York Times one was and Wapop was from
1:13
Speaker 1: and they're writing about the phenomena of of um water
1:16
Speaker 1: beds at the time. I love that, man. I love
1:19
Speaker 1: being able to go back read an article and then
1:22
Speaker 1: go back and see how it actually unraveled like in
1:25
Speaker 1: real time. Basically, yes, see, like sure, it's a little
1:31
Speaker 1: time capsule if you will, and you can look back
1:34
Speaker 1: now and say, did they get it right? News? I
1:39
Speaker 1: don't even like saying the two words together. Neither so
1:42
Speaker 1: played out, so played All right, let's talk about the
1:46
Speaker 1: water bed. Have you ever had one? No? I kind
1:51
Speaker 1: of wanted one. I didn't have one. I kind of
1:55
Speaker 1: wanted one to. I think we're just of that age
1:58
Speaker 1: and they came about as you'll see, we're going to
2:00
Speaker 1: talking about the seventies and eighties. That in the eighties
2:03
Speaker 1: is when they peaked sales wise. I think even like
2:06
Speaker 1: young uns like us, we're very intrigued. Oh yeah, my
2:10
Speaker 1: friend had one. Yeah, did you sleep on it? No,
2:13
Speaker 1: never slept on that one. I laid down on it once,
2:16
Speaker 1: I think because I was I was like, I gotta
2:18
Speaker 1: know what this feels like at least uh, And I
2:20
Speaker 1: think it was. They may have called it waveless, but
2:26
Speaker 1: I don't even know what the difference was because it
2:28
Speaker 1: was pretty wavy. What decade was this, This would have
2:31
Speaker 1: been mid to late eighties. Yeah, I don't even they
2:34
Speaker 1: had waveless ones back then. I think so they were
2:37
Speaker 1: called waveless, but I don't know how it's still slashed
2:39
Speaker 1: you around. Yeah, I remember very distinctly laying on it,
2:44
Speaker 1: and I remember thinking, I don't know if I could
2:46
Speaker 1: sleep on this. It didn't seem like I mean, it
2:49
Speaker 1: wasn't uncomfortable like it calls me pain. But I move
2:53
Speaker 1: around a lot in my sleep, so it's not it's
2:59
Speaker 1: not a good least. The old school water beds are
3:01
Speaker 1: not a good match for me. Memory Fund was a
3:04
Speaker 1: little better. Actually, supposedly they've come a long way, and
3:08
Speaker 1: the new water beds are the bomb. I would be
3:11
Speaker 1: curious to lay on one. Well, go to a dealer
3:14
Speaker 1: in South Florida. I think City Furniture in South Florida
3:17
Speaker 1: is bringing back the water bed. Oh there's other places too,
3:20
Speaker 1: because the design now, well, we'll get to it, but
3:22
Speaker 1: it's much different. It's not. It's not the good old
3:24
Speaker 1: days where you just fill up a big vinyl rubber
3:26
Speaker 1: bladder and we were like tripping on some grass and
3:31
Speaker 1: listening to Dark Side of the Moon. You know. The
3:34
Speaker 1: funny thing about my friend Chris's water bed though, and
3:37
Speaker 1: his whole house was a time capsule of the nineteen seventies.
3:41
Speaker 1: He had a water bed in front of a wall
3:45
Speaker 1: that the wall was a photograph of a like a
3:49
Speaker 1: Hawaiian beach sunset. Oh man, we had two of those
3:52
Speaker 1: in my house. Really. We had one was a straight
3:56
Speaker 1: up forest. So it's like, oh, I'm in the family room,
3:59
Speaker 1: I'll walk into the kitchen. Oh my god, I'm in
4:01
Speaker 1: the forest basically. And then if you went upstairs, and
4:04
Speaker 1: this is my childhood home in Toledo, Ohio, Um, when
4:08
Speaker 1: you went upstairs to my sister's rooms, you when you
4:12
Speaker 1: got right up to the top landing, there was like
4:14
Speaker 1: an outdoor like Coors beer scene, like in the woods
4:18
Speaker 1: with like a stream coming through the mountains. Giant murals
4:22
Speaker 1: in my house, Yeah, we never It's weird. Like when
4:26
Speaker 1: I look back at the house I grew up in,
4:28
Speaker 1: it didn't have any of those cool seventies things. But
4:31
Speaker 1: now that I look back, I think it's probably you know,
4:34
Speaker 1: I was not cool then because we lived in this
4:38
Speaker 1: huge house in the woods. But now I look back,
4:40
Speaker 1: I'm like, that was where I would like to live now.
4:42
Speaker 1: So what was the aesthetic of your house? Sort of
4:46
Speaker 1: contempo country Okay, that hip like Jerry Read or something
4:51
Speaker 1: lived there. Yeah, I mean we had looking back, we
4:54
Speaker 1: had shag carpet, or in shag carpet, there were some
4:57
Speaker 1: markings of the day. Um. But then that was replaced
5:00
Speaker 1: with hardwoods at some point in the in the eighties. Um.
5:04
Speaker 1: But then when I had, you know, not too long ago,
5:07
Speaker 1: went back to my childhood home and broke in. It
5:09
Speaker 1: was for sale really and empty, and uh you broke in? Well,
5:14
Speaker 1: not for sale, it was just sort of derelict and empty.
5:17
Speaker 1: Did you break a window to break in? Now? I
5:19
Speaker 1: just got in like I used to get in. It
5:21
Speaker 1: was family was like it's locked, and I was like,
5:24
Speaker 1: watch this. I used to sneak out and read Bible passages.
5:28
Speaker 1: So I snuck in through the garage window. And looking back,
5:32
Speaker 1: there was a lot of a lot of the same
5:33
Speaker 1: stuff was there, and it was very kind of seventies
5:36
Speaker 1: tile and linoleum and stuff like that, but it just
5:39
Speaker 1: wasn't full on like Brady Bunch stuff more or wall murals.
5:45
Speaker 1: And I'm glad I went because sadly it is no
5:48
Speaker 1: longer there. I'm glad you went to. Then a couple
5:50
Speaker 1: of months later just torn down, and I went back
5:54
Speaker 1: and saw a big emptiness and I cried, did you
5:57
Speaker 1: the end, I could see that I you me and
6:00
Speaker 1: I went to Toledo and then I since went once
6:03
Speaker 1: when we went to Cleveland for our show, I went
6:06
Speaker 1: by myself and walked around, kind of hoping that the
6:09
Speaker 1: people who live in the house would be like, what's
6:11
Speaker 1: that weird doing and stick their head out and be
6:13
Speaker 1: like can I help you? And I'd be like, yeah, actually,
6:15
Speaker 1: can I come in your house? Um? No one did,
6:18
Speaker 1: but I did get to walk around the neighborhood. Did
6:20
Speaker 1: you cry a little? Nice? But I I saw. I
6:24
Speaker 1: want to go back to my elementary school and it's
6:26
Speaker 1: just like a grass field. Now, It's like, how do
6:29
Speaker 1: you tear down an elementary school? You know? Maybe it
6:32
Speaker 1: got like black mold or something. Well, let's hope. Yeah,
6:37
Speaker 1: but it's it's sweet. It's better sweet to go back. Yeah,
6:39
Speaker 1: go back to your childhood places. Everyone. I highly highly recommended.
6:43
Speaker 1: So water beds, Yeah, water beds. Um, we'll go back
6:48
Speaker 1: to the earliest history, I guess. But um. The man
6:51
Speaker 1: that we really need to talk about is a man
6:53
Speaker 1: named Charles Hall, the inventor of the modern water bed
6:58
Speaker 1: as we know it ninety sixty eight. He's a student
7:02
Speaker 1: at San Francisco state he's taking a design class. Oh
7:05
Speaker 1: he was like a design major. Well, yeah, because he
7:08
Speaker 1: submitted this as his master's thesis, was the waterbed. How
7:11
Speaker 1: awesome is that? So I saw competing stuff of what
7:15
Speaker 1: he actually created like built. Yeah, and the thing that
7:19
Speaker 1: I saw, I think it was in that WAPO It
7:24
Speaker 1: said what he created was called the pleasure pit, and
7:28
Speaker 1: it was an eight foot by eight foot basically waterbed,
7:32
Speaker 1: but it was meant to be a conversation pit for
7:34
Speaker 1: multiple people that kind of hang around in and there
7:37
Speaker 1: was like a bar and there was lighting and like
7:40
Speaker 1: shelves and stuff like that, and that that was the
7:43
Speaker 1: original his design. Yeah, But was there a water mattress
7:49
Speaker 1: function or was it just a sunken going room. No,
7:52
Speaker 1: that was the thing that was where everybody sat was
7:54
Speaker 1: on a water mattress in the middle. It sounds awful,
7:57
Speaker 1: it's just weird, but it really caught everybody's an imagination.
8:01
Speaker 1: Supposedly within six months it was on the front page
8:04
Speaker 1: of papers across the country. This is in San Francisco.
8:06
Speaker 1: The Miami Herald had something on the front page about
8:11
Speaker 1: this waterbed exhibit in San Francisco that this twenty four
8:15
Speaker 1: year old design student created capital p capital p uh yeah,
8:21
Speaker 1: pleasure pit. Everything I've seen is it's capitalized. But that's
8:24
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. I think that's what he called the
8:25
Speaker 1: first thing. Yeah, but it very quickly got turned into
8:29
Speaker 1: a bed. The water bed I used to like. Actually,
8:32
Speaker 1: my same friend Chris had at one of those sunken
8:35
Speaker 1: living rooms those very seventies. Remember in um, oh, what's
8:42
Speaker 1: the big Lebowski when he goes see to see Jackie
8:45
Speaker 1: Child or Jackie whatever, Jackie Treehorn. Yeah, Jackie Treehorn and
8:48
Speaker 1: his whole house is just amazing. Yeah, he had a
8:52
Speaker 1: conversation pit. Uh right, conversation pit, That's what it was called.
8:57
Speaker 1: So here's the deal from Time magazine. In Manhattan, the
9:03
Speaker 1: waterbed display at Bloomingdale's Department Store, for a while was
9:06
Speaker 1: a popular singles meeting place. Sire's, Roebuck and Holiday Inns
9:10
Speaker 1: are eyeing the beds, and Lake Tahoe's Kingcastle Hotel has
9:14
Speaker 1: already installed them in luxury suites. And this is uh
9:18
Speaker 1: I think it continues. Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner has one
9:22
Speaker 1: king size, of course and covered with Tasmanian bossom. I thought,
9:28
Speaker 1: how gross is that? Because what I know is a
9:30
Speaker 1: possum is different, different. I looked up the Tasmanian possibles
9:33
Speaker 1: super soft I would imagine. So it's not like American
9:36
Speaker 1: road kill on your water bed. Right. It wasn't even
9:41
Speaker 1: made from it. It just had a bunch of live
9:42
Speaker 1: American possums on his bed, and his water bed was
9:46
Speaker 1: really weird. But here's the deal. The water bed that
9:51
Speaker 1: Charles hall Cree eventually would go on to create, and
9:53
Speaker 1: we'll talk about some of his earlier designs aside from
9:55
Speaker 1: the pleasure pit, he wanted to revolutionize sleeping. Yeah, he
10:00
Speaker 1: meant it very seriously. He wanted to have a pressure
10:04
Speaker 1: point free mattress that would envelope your body and give
10:10
Speaker 1: you the best night sleep of your life. He had
10:12
Speaker 1: no intention of it becoming this, which it very much did.
10:16
Speaker 1: A metaphor for the sexy sixties and seventies, right, but
10:21
Speaker 1: it definitely did like you say it was. It's a
10:24
Speaker 1: really good example of an idea just basically getting hijacked
10:28
Speaker 1: big time. And at first he was kind of like, yeah,
10:31
Speaker 1: I'm just a twenty four year old design suit. I
10:34
Speaker 1: don't care. I'm sure make your own waterbed knockoff. But
10:38
Speaker 1: then over time he definitely came to care and spent
10:42
Speaker 1: a couple of decades pursuing um uh infringement suits here
10:48
Speaker 1: and there, patent infringement suits um which we'll talk about later.
10:51
Speaker 1: But at first it was basically like here's the waterbed world,
10:55
Speaker 1: and the world went nuts. Uh And again, yeah, he
10:58
Speaker 1: meant a revolution. I sleep the hippies and the people
11:02
Speaker 1: who owned head shops, which is where you bought your
11:04
Speaker 1: water beds early on was at the head shop said no,
11:07
Speaker 1: this is all about sex, and that's how that's how
11:09
Speaker 1: it was first sold in the late sixties and early seventies.
11:13
Speaker 1: I have never had sexual intercourse on a waterbed, but
11:18
Speaker 1: it doesn't it doesn't sound appealing to me, right because
11:20
Speaker 1: so one of the in this, I think the Washington
11:23
Speaker 1: Post article quote a Washington Post article from the seventies saying,
11:27
Speaker 1: like a waterbed salesman said, it's very like, very much
11:31
Speaker 1: like three people are having sex, because the bed itself
11:34
Speaker 1: is like a third warm body participating in the motion
11:39
Speaker 1: or something like in the worst possible way. And I
11:41
Speaker 1: looked up, Yeah, I was like, it's just weird. And
11:43
Speaker 1: I looked up um like sex on a water bed
11:48
Speaker 1: on um on a work computer right. Uh oh yeah,
11:53
Speaker 1: the work computer supertained now um, and the I found
11:58
Speaker 1: like this one. Can't remember the website, but it's basically
12:01
Speaker 1: like pros and cons. And it sounds like it comes
12:05
Speaker 1: down to your preferences, you know, like what what like
12:09
Speaker 1: are you into your motions being exaggerated? You know? And
12:13
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, Chuck's laughing because I'm like kind of
12:16
Speaker 1: making toward right. Um, if you're into that, great, if
12:21
Speaker 1: you're not, or you um, apparently it's really like you.
12:26
Speaker 1: It really is pronounced. It's not something going on in
12:29
Speaker 1: the background. It's like you know and right. So it
12:33
Speaker 1: just depends on your preferences, I think. But I think
12:36
Speaker 1: a lot of the earliest water beds were we're bought
12:40
Speaker 1: by guys who were pretty confident. They could be like,
12:42
Speaker 1: I've got a water bed, you want to try it out,
12:45
Speaker 1: and that that would happen. It became a punch line,
12:48
Speaker 1: Like I remember, I feel like every other sitcom or
12:52
Speaker 1: a movie at some point there was a scene where
12:55
Speaker 1: they were like, oh, he's got a water bed, or
12:57
Speaker 1: he would just slowly open the door to reveal the
12:59
Speaker 1: water bed, and that meant only one thing. It did
13:02
Speaker 1: master lover right, so the the and then the waterbed
13:06
Speaker 1: invariably like they couldn't make it work because one of
13:09
Speaker 1: them would get flopped off or somebody would make it
13:13
Speaker 1: spring a leak, and then the leak would just go everywhere.
13:16
Speaker 1: Whenever water beds appeared in TV and movies like it,
13:19
Speaker 1: it went badly. All right, let's take a break. I'm
13:23
Speaker 1: all hot and bothered. We'll come back and we'll talk
13:26
Speaker 1: about some of Charles Hall's early designs right after this. Okay,
13:53
Speaker 1: so again, that was like the first reception to water beds.
13:56
Speaker 1: Heffner had one, he had to actually had one on
13:59
Speaker 1: his jet to um he uh, like one of the
14:03
Speaker 1: smothers brothers bought one, I guess help his sex life out,
14:06
Speaker 1: guys from Jefferson Airplane. And you bought them at head
14:09
Speaker 1: shops and they were sold by waterbed manufacturers again, none
14:13
Speaker 1: of whom bothered to get a license from the Charles
14:16
Speaker 1: Hall of the inventor and patent holder. But they had
14:18
Speaker 1: names like wet Dream. Somebody named their company wet Dream
14:23
Speaker 1: and that was okay in the seventies. Uh, let me
14:26
Speaker 1: see here what else Aquarius Joyapeutic, Aqua Beds, Joyapeutic Um
14:33
Speaker 1: Aquarius products like you said, water works, what else that's
14:37
Speaker 1: all I have? I think wet dream. We should have
14:40
Speaker 1: stopped there. Um, it's definitely the worst of all of them.
14:45
Speaker 1: So before this came about, Charles Hall a couple of
14:48
Speaker 1: his prototype early prototypes. UM one, it sounds sort of
14:51
Speaker 1: like a bean bag chair almost, but it was a
14:55
Speaker 1: big bag chair full of three hundred pounds of liquid
15:00
Speaker 1: corn starch. That the idea was you would sit in
15:03
Speaker 1: it and it would envelop you. It sounds like a nightmare. Yeah,
15:07
Speaker 1: Like he didn't mean for it to envelop you. It
15:10
Speaker 1: was like he hadn't hit upon the water bed yet.
15:12
Speaker 1: He was trying out different substances, but yeah, you just
15:15
Speaker 1: sink in gross, right. So he moved on to jello
15:19
Speaker 1: four real and that didn't work either. That's not a joke, people,
15:22
Speaker 1: He'd be put jello in. This thing did not have
15:26
Speaker 1: the right temperature or consistency. So eventually he would thanks
15:31
Speaker 1: to um, thanks to vinyl really becoming a very popular thing,
15:37
Speaker 1: uh and and being used for things other than like
15:41
Speaker 1: car parts and tires and things and oh rings, vinyl
15:45
Speaker 1: became a hot item. So he filled up this vinyl
15:49
Speaker 1: bladder with water. Had a temperature control device on it. Uh.
15:54
Speaker 1: And the the idea there was not to have some
15:56
Speaker 1: hot bed, but to sink up to your body temperature, right,
15:59
Speaker 1: so your muscles were relaxed. Yeah, he had the purest
16:02
Speaker 1: of intentions, I really did, and he he hit upon
16:05
Speaker 1: it finally and again in that Masters thesis. Well was
16:11
Speaker 1: part of the problem. Summer of love. People were having
16:15
Speaker 1: sex all over the place. And Uh, there's a story
16:18
Speaker 1: named Andrew Kirk who said the basically design and then
16:22
Speaker 1: late sixties was a free form atmosphere people were really getting.
16:26
Speaker 1: And if you've ever, like I love design museums, if
16:29
Speaker 1: you ever go to some of these, it's kind of
16:31
Speaker 1: cool to see what they were doing in the sixties. Um,
16:34
Speaker 1: because it was kind of a crazy time for design. Yeah,
16:36
Speaker 1: because a lot of people were open to trying new things.
16:39
Speaker 1: Up to this point. You had a mattress and you
16:41
Speaker 1: were just thankful that it wasn't filled with Hey you know,
16:44
Speaker 1: it had springs, and you liked it. That's the way
16:46
Speaker 1: it was, and you liked it. That's right. Um. So
16:49
Speaker 1: the idea of this something totally new, like it was
16:54
Speaker 1: two things. One, this guy was trying to revolutionized sleep
16:57
Speaker 1: and it came at a time when people were willing
16:59
Speaker 1: to like, oh, yeah, it's the beds boring, let's try
17:02
Speaker 1: something different, and it just kind of came together really well.
17:05
Speaker 1: But again it got hijacked by people who owned Headshot well,
17:08
Speaker 1: and he was in San Francisco. It all kind of
17:10
Speaker 1: converged um work against him, ironically, but he he applied
17:15
Speaker 1: for a pet and I think in nineteen sixty eight,
17:17
Speaker 1: but it wasn't until nineteen seventy one that it was
17:20
Speaker 1: granted because prior to his design being um debuted, like
17:26
Speaker 1: thirty or so years prior. Robert Heinlein, the very famous
17:31
Speaker 1: in prolific science fiction writer, he had basically described water
17:35
Speaker 1: beds so frequently and in such detail that he was
17:39
Speaker 1: considered the intellectual property holder of waterbed design. The reason
17:44
Speaker 1: Heinlan even went to the trouble of he liked to
17:47
Speaker 1: describe stuff in his books apparently haven't read any of
17:49
Speaker 1: them yet, but very detailed description. And one of the
17:52
Speaker 1: things that he kept he that always popped up was
17:55
Speaker 1: these water beds. And apparently in the thirties he spent
17:58
Speaker 1: a lot of time in hospital beds, so he was
18:00
Speaker 1: just imagining how they could be improved, and he described
18:05
Speaker 1: waterbeds almost exactly like Charles Hall had described them. Yeah,
18:10
Speaker 1: he said, UM A pump to control water level, side
18:13
Speaker 1: supports to permit one to float rather than simply lying
18:16
Speaker 1: on a not very soft water filled mattress, thermostatic control
18:20
Speaker 1: of temperature, safety interfaces to avoid all possibility of electric shock,
18:25
Speaker 1: which was a big sort of urban legend at the time.
18:28
Speaker 1: You'd be electrocuted if you have vigorous sex waterproof box
18:32
Speaker 1: to make it leakproof um which was another probably legitimate
18:39
Speaker 1: um Cohn for a water bed. Sometimes they would leak
18:42
Speaker 1: back then uh, and then some other things. But basically
18:45
Speaker 1: it all came together to form such a robust all
18:49
Speaker 1: even though it was in a science fiction novel that
18:51
Speaker 1: he was he had to like go to court and say,
18:55
Speaker 1: I don't know if he was looking for money or who.
18:58
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how it came out. Highland owned the
19:01
Speaker 1: intellectual property of it. If he came out and said
19:03
Speaker 1: that's mine or what. But by within three years of
19:09
Speaker 1: Chris or Charles Hall coming out with this he UM
19:12
Speaker 1: he had the patent for it. And even way back
19:14
Speaker 1: in the eighteen hundreds there were doctors who created One
19:18
Speaker 1: guy named Dr Neil Are no, or are not created
19:21
Speaker 1: a hydrostatic bed. He covered a warm bath with a
19:26
Speaker 1: rubber cloth and sealed it with varnish. And another doctor
19:31
Speaker 1: in Portsmouth and these were basically to prevent bed sores,
19:36
Speaker 1: to relieve bed sores, and even highlands he said, like
19:40
Speaker 1: you said, he cooked it up because he had been
19:42
Speaker 1: in hospitals a lot. Yeah, He's like, he's getting killed
19:46
Speaker 1: in these hard beds. Yeah. And the reason you would
19:48
Speaker 1: want some sort of um water filled bed for a
19:53
Speaker 1: hospital is because people are laying around in bed all
19:56
Speaker 1: the time and when you have skin covering like a
19:59
Speaker 1: bony are, you get bed ulcers and you don't want those.
20:04
Speaker 1: So this was to prevent bed sores. UM. That's why
20:07
Speaker 1: the earliest physicians were coming up with them. But so
20:10
Speaker 1: finally by one Charles Hall holds the patent and again
20:15
Speaker 1: he was he wanted to create a serious sleep product,
20:20
Speaker 1: and he founded a company called Inner Space Environments and
20:24
Speaker 1: they were selling like the real deal, legit high end
20:28
Speaker 1: water beds. He even named it seriously right. He opened
20:31
Speaker 1: like thirty two stores in California in the early seventies,
20:34
Speaker 1: and UM had a factory like he was doing it right.
20:39
Speaker 1: His did not leak. One of the things that water
20:41
Speaker 1: beds were very much known for is that the sheets
20:43
Speaker 1: would pop off. Yeah, very well. The sheets fit on
20:47
Speaker 1: his um. The temperature control was great. They were like
20:50
Speaker 1: really high end water beds made and designed by the
20:55
Speaker 1: guy who actually designed them. The problem is he didn't
20:58
Speaker 1: really pursue any patents off, and so there were knockoffs
21:02
Speaker 1: out of the gate, and it was the knockoffs that leaked.
21:05
Speaker 1: It was the knockoffs that had terrible temperature control um
21:08
Speaker 1: and it was the knockoffs that gave waterbeds a bad
21:12
Speaker 1: name because they were fully embracing the sexy advertising. That
21:17
Speaker 1: was part of it too, all the knockoffs manufacturers, and
21:21
Speaker 1: apparently he pursued some of these, but it's he would
21:26
Speaker 1: have spent all his time and money pursuing a patent
21:28
Speaker 1: infringement if he really tried to go after everyone, and
21:32
Speaker 1: some of these didn't make a lot of money, and
21:33
Speaker 1: it was just sort of useless to even try, so
21:37
Speaker 1: it wasn't worth his time and money. A lot of
21:39
Speaker 1: times he said to a lot of people who sold
21:42
Speaker 1: water beds early, like early waterbed dealers, basically they were
21:45
Speaker 1: just trying to make some fast money. So they could
21:47
Speaker 1: go start a pot farm in Oregon. That was like,
21:51
Speaker 1: that's who was selling water beds in the early seventies.
21:54
Speaker 1: It also has one of the creepiest lines ever in
21:56
Speaker 1: the Atlantic article that said something about when Charles Hall
21:59
Speaker 1: initially selling water beds out of the back of his van, right, like, man,
22:03
Speaker 1: that's the creepiest thing every year. Here, let me let
22:05
Speaker 1: me open up my van. You can lay on my
22:07
Speaker 1: water bed in the back of my van, you with
22:11
Speaker 1: with the stallion painted on the side. Oh man, speaking
22:15
Speaker 1: of seventies, So I forgot about the murals on the vands.
22:18
Speaker 1: Remember we used to do blog posts and stuff I
22:21
Speaker 1: made like a slide show. I remember that vans with
22:24
Speaker 1: art on the side. We see those every now and
22:26
Speaker 1: then gets up. Still, it's good stuff. You want to
22:29
Speaker 1: take a break before we get into the the this
22:33
Speaker 1: straightening of water beds. Yes, I couldn't come up with
23:00
Speaker 1: a better word than straightening. I apologize for that. Let
23:03
Speaker 1: me think the I guess legitimizing, but I'm thinking like
23:08
Speaker 1: more like boring, suburbanite zing of water beds. Yeah, I mean,
23:13
Speaker 1: here's the thing. We say that Hall very much wanted
23:16
Speaker 1: to revolution. I sleep and he didn't embrace the sexual
23:19
Speaker 1: component of it. But he sold a lot of water beds,
23:23
Speaker 1: and he kind of knew why a lot of these
23:25
Speaker 1: people were buying him, and he wasn't like I don't
23:28
Speaker 1: think he was so pious that he was like, no,
23:31
Speaker 1: I don't want to sell them for that reason. I
23:33
Speaker 1: think he eventually was kind of like, yeah, you know
23:35
Speaker 1: that that's why people bought him, and that was okay.
23:38
Speaker 1: But I don't think he just I don't think he
23:40
Speaker 1: cheapened his own advertising that way. No, he didn't. And
23:42
Speaker 1: he actually he his company went under by the mid seventies,
23:47
Speaker 1: and he he likens it to UM basically advertising to
23:51
Speaker 1: the wrong market. Like he he made quality, high end
23:55
Speaker 1: water beds UM, and it was advertising to people who
24:00
Speaker 1: could afford a more expensive quality, actual legitimate water bed went.
24:05
Speaker 1: At the time, it was like, you know, Randall pink
24:08
Speaker 1: Floyd and his friends were the actual customers of water beds.
24:12
Speaker 1: That's who was buying water beds, and they weren't seeing
24:14
Speaker 1: the ads that Charles Hall was putting out there, you
24:16
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, in like the New York or whatever. Yeah,
24:19
Speaker 1: And so he missed the heyday. He was sort of
24:22
Speaker 1: in the early heyday, but I think in the eighties
24:24
Speaker 1: is when it became like a two billion dollar of
24:26
Speaker 1: the market share industry, right, Yeah, Like the late seventies,
24:29
Speaker 1: I think it was about a thirteen million dollar a
24:32
Speaker 1: year industry, and by seven I believe that its peak
24:35
Speaker 1: it was like a two point three billion dollar industry
24:39
Speaker 1: a year, and then a pretty steep once again grunge
24:43
Speaker 1: killed water beds. Yeah, pretty steep fall in the nineties,
24:47
Speaker 1: right in the early nineties. Yeah, But the way that
24:50
Speaker 1: it built up before it fell was more companies got
24:54
Speaker 1: into it, kind of legitimized it. I believe that there
24:57
Speaker 1: was a trade association that developed UM and the I
25:02
Speaker 1: think it was like it's called the floatation sleep industry
25:06
Speaker 1: is really the technical term for it. UM. They really
25:09
Speaker 1: wanted to get away from the sex appeal and like
25:12
Speaker 1: this stores like you would you wouldn't buy water bed
25:15
Speaker 1: in a head shop anymore. To imagine walking to a
25:18
Speaker 1: hedgehop and being like, what do you have a water
25:20
Speaker 1: bed here? For? Um? You buy water beds out in
25:23
Speaker 1: the suburbs at a place called waterbed Plaza or something
25:26
Speaker 1: like that. Or did you see that ad I sent
25:28
Speaker 1: to the YouTube adroom. Yeah, country Boy water beds. Everybody
25:33
Speaker 1: go go onto YouTube and look for country Boy water
25:38
Speaker 1: bed at Max Headroom and it's beautiful. Yeah, it's a
25:42
Speaker 1: Max Headroom rip off selling water beds, country Boy water beds,
25:48
Speaker 1: water bed h And I think it was from Arkansas,
25:51
Speaker 1: like a local waterbed dealer in Arkansas, Texarcana. You mean
25:54
Speaker 1: is that right now? I don't know, but that's I mean,
25:57
Speaker 1: like you could get water beds everywhere. Well, that's why
26:00
Speaker 1: my friend, I mean in seven in suburban Atlanta. For
26:04
Speaker 1: my friend to have one in high school, that kind
26:06
Speaker 1: of says it all. It's not like his parents were
26:09
Speaker 1: like I mean they were. They were a good, god
26:12
Speaker 1: fearing family and we're like, yeah, we need to get
26:15
Speaker 1: Chris a sex pit. It was more like they were
26:19
Speaker 1: supposedly healthy. Yeah, they were like a healthy way to sleep.
26:23
Speaker 1: I think that's also how it kind of transitioned the
26:26
Speaker 1: legitimacy and away from like just the association with sex. Right, So, um,
26:32
Speaker 1: you have you have like an actual bona fide water
26:36
Speaker 1: bed industry. Um with actual water beds. One of the
26:40
Speaker 1: one of the ways that this industry was able to
26:42
Speaker 1: establish itself was they made vast improvements over the early
26:46
Speaker 1: models of water beds. It used to be that you
26:49
Speaker 1: had a just basically like a big bladder, a vinyl bladder,
26:52
Speaker 1: that big water, big wooden box, and when you wanted
26:57
Speaker 1: to get out, you had to like kind of like
26:59
Speaker 1: work up to it, roll off the side, and yeah,
27:03
Speaker 1: you had to bang your knee on the way out.
27:05
Speaker 1: They leaked. There was a lot of problems with it.
27:08
Speaker 1: But then they started like improving upon it to where
27:11
Speaker 1: like the water bed was actually like this one article,
27:14
Speaker 1: I think it was a mental fass article that I
27:16
Speaker 1: found said that in the eighties, if you were a kid,
27:20
Speaker 1: a water bed was as close to a status symbol
27:22
Speaker 1: as you could possibly get, you know, Oh yeah, I
27:25
Speaker 1: mean it was aspirational. Yeah, there's no when I say,
27:29
Speaker 1: no chance my parents would have bought me one, it
27:32
Speaker 1: wouldn't have even like I wouldn't. I knew better than
27:35
Speaker 1: to even ask. I think the same with me. I
27:37
Speaker 1: don't remember ever asking for one, although I really wanted one.
27:40
Speaker 1: I think it was like a pipe dream. Maybe it's
27:43
Speaker 1: not like, oh I really want a water bed. It
27:45
Speaker 1: was such so shut down in my mind as a possibility,
27:48
Speaker 1: like this is a time where we inherited mattresses from
27:51
Speaker 1: our older siblings. It was so gross. It was on
27:54
Speaker 1: the slide road. But it looks not even too many
27:56
Speaker 1: stains on it. Kind of uh wait, kind of Oh
28:02
Speaker 1: did you actually get a mattress from the side of
28:03
Speaker 1: the room. I'm making sure you did not know, but
28:07
Speaker 1: just short of that, okay. Um, So mattress water beds then,
28:11
Speaker 1: and now one of the knocks against them is there
28:14
Speaker 1: they are very heavy. There's no way around it. If
28:17
Speaker 1: you fill up a mattress with water, even partially, you're
28:21
Speaker 1: gonna have a lot of weight. Depending on the size,
28:24
Speaker 1: a couple to three gallons of water can weigh between
28:28
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred and two thousand pounds. And so they always
28:34
Speaker 1: instill do need a lot of structural support underneath them,
28:37
Speaker 1: a large, very heavy wooden platform. Supposedly that's why New
28:41
Speaker 1: York was known as the um, the city where the
28:44
Speaker 1: least number of water beds are ever. So yeah, I
28:46
Speaker 1: can't imagine. Part of it is because like in in
28:49
Speaker 1: major cities, there were like waterbed bands and leases, like
28:53
Speaker 1: if you rented an apartment, you weren't allowed to have
28:55
Speaker 1: a water it was just too heavy. Yeah. Um, people
29:00
Speaker 1: would leave them behind like here, you take this because
29:04
Speaker 1: even when you drain the water, like the thing that
29:07
Speaker 1: held the water bed was heavy itself. The frame was
29:10
Speaker 1: super super heavy. It was like a bookcase that you
29:13
Speaker 1: didn't really want anymore. You just leave it behind. That's
29:16
Speaker 1: what happened to water beds. I didn't see and I
29:19
Speaker 1: don't How do you fill them up? Is that you water?
29:23
Speaker 1: Really that's how people did it, Yes, And then to
29:27
Speaker 1: get it out you needed like a pump, and you
29:29
Speaker 1: could buy all this stuff in your local waterbeds store.
29:31
Speaker 1: But you know, when you buy a better mattress, a
29:33
Speaker 1: regular mattress, you don't have to go buy a pump
29:35
Speaker 1: two years later because you're moving, you know, and then
29:38
Speaker 1: pump the water out of mattress. You just moved the mattress.
29:41
Speaker 1: That was a big, big mark against it in the
29:44
Speaker 1: popular understanding of it. I imagine in New York too, well,
29:47
Speaker 1: the weight is enough probably to disqualify it. But just
29:50
Speaker 1: getting a water hose up a seventh floor walk up, yeah,
29:54
Speaker 1: I'm surprised. I haven't seen that movie scene where they're
29:57
Speaker 1: like have a rope tied around a water hose from
30:00
Speaker 1: the street level that they're bringing up through a window.
30:02
Speaker 1: It sounds like Buster Keaton or something like super Sexy
30:07
Speaker 1: in the seventies. Who would that be? I don't know. Okay,
30:16
Speaker 1: we should do a podcast on our crumb Have we
30:19
Speaker 1: done that any day? Any day? Buddy? That was like
30:23
Speaker 1: a dare. I can't remember if I saw them. Was
30:25
Speaker 1: it a movie or a documentary on him? It was
30:28
Speaker 1: a movie that came out in the early two thousands.
30:30
Speaker 1: Well both they did, the Great documentary Crumb Um and
30:34
Speaker 1: then American Splendor that he was a character in it,
30:38
Speaker 1: but it was largely about Harvey peakr. Yes, the Great
30:43
Speaker 1: Harvey Peak. That was a good movie. Um. All right,
30:46
Speaker 1: so these days, uh, like you said, they've been brought
30:51
Speaker 1: into the modern era. Um, there's a foam collar around
30:57
Speaker 1: the bladder. There's spandex on top up. Um. I believe
31:01
Speaker 1: they are air pockets and things in between to sort
31:04
Speaker 1: of stabilize it. Yeah, they don't, Actually they don't. You
31:08
Speaker 1: can't get seasick on them like you used to be
31:11
Speaker 1: able to move like that. I really want to try
31:14
Speaker 1: one of these out and just see what it feels like.
31:15
Speaker 1: I don't want one, I don't think, but I do
31:17
Speaker 1: want to see what the sensation is like. One of
31:19
Speaker 1: my friends back in high school. Their parents had a
31:24
Speaker 1: what he called a motionless water bed. Um. And now
31:27
Speaker 1: I understand what he's talking about. It's like waveless or whatever. Um,
31:30
Speaker 1: But it just felt like laying on a feather bed,
31:33
Speaker 1: just the most comfortable feather bed you've ever been on. Well,
31:36
Speaker 1: my friends must not have been waveless, because it was
31:38
Speaker 1: it moved. Yeah, this is non and this would have
31:40
Speaker 1: been like the nineties or something like that. And I'm
31:43
Speaker 1: sure it was like a five thousand dollar mattress or
31:45
Speaker 1: something back then, but that seems to be like the
31:47
Speaker 1: kind that they have now. It's like you just lay
31:49
Speaker 1: on it and you're You're not like, oh, this is
31:50
Speaker 1: a water bed. You just like, this is super comfortable.
31:53
Speaker 1: I'm floating and weightless, but your mind's not thinking you're
31:56
Speaker 1: laying on water. Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't have, like, aside
32:00
Speaker 1: from moving a lot. When I sleep, I'm like a
32:02
Speaker 1: I like to flop on the bed, like when I
32:05
Speaker 1: lay down, I don't lay gently on it. I will
32:07
Speaker 1: kind of throw myself into bed. And none of these
32:09
Speaker 1: things are conduci of the water beds, especially not in
32:12
Speaker 1: the seventies. But apparently now it's fine. You could do
32:14
Speaker 1: that well. One of the new salesman they interviewed for
32:17
Speaker 1: this article said that he won't say the name water
32:21
Speaker 1: bed um. He says, because it turns people off. He said.
32:24
Speaker 1: Even if they try it and they like it and
32:26
Speaker 1: then they find out it's a water bed, he said,
32:29
Speaker 1: sometimes they won't buy it because of that weird seventies
32:33
Speaker 1: association like with yeah, or they're worried it's gonna leak,
32:38
Speaker 1: or they're you know, they're gonna have to fill it
32:40
Speaker 1: with water. There Apparently I couldn't find any any verification
32:45
Speaker 1: of this, but there was an urban legend at least
32:48
Speaker 1: that you could find aquatic worms floating in your water
32:51
Speaker 1: bed and they started down like, oh, well we need
32:54
Speaker 1: to add chemicals to the water. Well, then that makes
32:57
Speaker 1: it even grosser. Right, So there's like just over time
33:00
Speaker 1: people associated a lot of negative things with water beds,
33:03
Speaker 1: and then the thing that really killed the water bed
33:06
Speaker 1: was that in the nineties. By the by the nineties,
33:10
Speaker 1: it was clear that America was like, sure, we'll try
33:13
Speaker 1: other things besides an inter spring, mattress, what you got,
33:16
Speaker 1: and so like temper pedic came around, or sleep number.
33:20
Speaker 1: All these guys who made technically alternative mattresses. Um, the
33:28
Speaker 1: same thing that it follows in that tradition that the
33:31
Speaker 1: waterbed established. They Charles Hall created that market and showed
33:37
Speaker 1: that it was a real thing. And so by the
33:40
Speaker 1: time the nineties rolled around, and like I think temper
33:43
Speaker 1: Peedick was the first one. Um, it was like all
33:47
Speaker 1: the benefits of a waterbed without the hassle of the water,
33:50
Speaker 1: why would you want a water bed? And that was
33:52
Speaker 1: it for water beds. Yeah, and minus the creeps. Yeah.
33:56
Speaker 1: Whereas just a few a few years before, almost one
33:59
Speaker 1: in war between one and four and one and five,
34:02
Speaker 1: between a quarter and of all water or of all
34:07
Speaker 1: mattresses were waterbeds sold in America. It's crazy. It's a
34:10
Speaker 1: lot down to nothing, down to just gone. Man. Imagine
34:14
Speaker 1: the landfills of America are filled with vinyl bladders just rotting,
34:21
Speaker 1: well broughting a thousand years from now probably, yeah, that's true.
34:25
Speaker 1: They're probably some pretty good shape. So one more thing
34:27
Speaker 1: about Charles Hall, well, two more things. One he went
34:30
Speaker 1: on to invent the solar shower, you know, the campus
34:34
Speaker 1: are great. And then um too, he has a kind
34:38
Speaker 1: of a bad name, or he did, at least back
34:39
Speaker 1: in one I think um in that WAPO article where
34:45
Speaker 1: the waterbed industry, the industry association that formed they they
34:53
Speaker 1: didn't like him very much because a couple of years
34:55
Speaker 1: before his patent ran out, he'd been gone and then
34:58
Speaker 1: came back and said, all y'all owe me money for
35:00
Speaker 1: patent infringement. And they were like, what, dude, We like,
35:05
Speaker 1: we've built this industry. You know, we thought you were
35:07
Speaker 1: cool kind of and he was like, no, I'm not
35:11
Speaker 1: give me some money and he started like they apparently
35:13
Speaker 1: wanted to settle and it wasn't enough. But one really
35:16
Speaker 1: noteworthy thing about one of their one of his lawsuits
35:19
Speaker 1: against I think a Taiwanese um manufacturer that Um he
35:27
Speaker 1: sold shares in the outcome, so like you could buy
35:31
Speaker 1: shares of a lawsuit. Crazy, and there's a there's a
35:36
Speaker 1: common law law against it. It's called champ terree, which
35:41
Speaker 1: I had never heard of before. Makes total sense. It's
35:43
Speaker 1: where somebody like basically pays for legal fees in order
35:48
Speaker 1: to get a piece of the action to cut yeah,
35:51
Speaker 1: champtere And in California at the time, champtery was not illegal.
35:56
Speaker 1: I don't know if it is, but it was not.
36:01
Speaker 1: And uh, he sold shares for ten thousand a pop.
36:05
Speaker 1: Uh for this, for this, wow, this lawsuit. That's amazing.
36:11
Speaker 1: Water beds, they're amazing. Chuck cheez. That's what the episode
36:14
Speaker 1: should be titled. It's up to you. Do you got
36:18
Speaker 1: anything else? You got nothing else? If you want to
36:21
Speaker 1: know more about water beds, well, get in a time machine,
36:24
Speaker 1: get in the way back machine and go try and
36:26
Speaker 1: one out yourself. Well, we have one in the way
36:28
Speaker 1: back machine, so you're lucky. Day it covered in American possum.
36:32
Speaker 1: Oh boy. Uh. Since I said that it's time for listening,
36:38
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this one of the many replies for
36:40
Speaker 1: color blindness too. We've got a lot of responses for
36:42
Speaker 1: color blindness. What do you mean too well? I called
36:46
Speaker 1: the sure all right, Hey guys, I was listening to
36:50
Speaker 1: the show about color blindness with an oh you are
36:53
Speaker 1: so I assume this? Uh oh, he's Canadian. I'm gonna
36:56
Speaker 1: say British. It's like British, like he's still under the
37:00
Speaker 1: thumb though. Uh. I worked in the electrical field for
37:03
Speaker 1: ten years, and in that time I've worked with two
37:07
Speaker 1: red green color blind electricians. Remember we talked about that.
37:11
Speaker 1: The first one I worked with for a few years. Uh,
37:14
Speaker 1: and he said, it wasn't that difficult to tell the
37:16
Speaker 1: difference between red and green conductors. They just looked like
37:19
Speaker 1: every Uh, they looked like very obvious different shades of
37:23
Speaker 1: the same color. It only took a couple of mistakes
37:26
Speaker 1: before he was able to tell the difference. An electrical
37:29
Speaker 1: red is a current carrying conductor, while green is used
37:33
Speaker 1: for grounding and bonding like a rat and a science experiment.
37:36
Speaker 1: He explained, it only took a couple of shocks of
37:39
Speaker 1: what he thought it was a bonding wire to really
37:41
Speaker 1: notice the difference. So dangerous, I know. Man. Uh. The
37:45
Speaker 1: other I worked with for only a short while because
37:47
Speaker 1: he died, but he had been an electrician for twenty
37:50
Speaker 1: plus years. Wasn't until he asked a co worker why
37:54
Speaker 1: they thought the ground wire and a current carrying conductor
37:57
Speaker 1: were the same color that he even realized he was
37:59
Speaker 1: color on. Wow, how about that? A little slow on
38:03
Speaker 1: the uptake, perhaps, so, even though it costs some issues
38:06
Speaker 1: early on their careers, they're both great electricians. I guess
38:09
Speaker 1: the human brain always finds a way. And that is
38:12
Speaker 1: James from Cape Breton, Nova, Scotia, Canada. That's cool, man,
38:19
Speaker 1: great Area, Eastern Canada, Great Area, Western Canada, Fantastic Central Canada.
38:27
Speaker 1: We love it all. Yes what we do. If you're
38:29
Speaker 1: Canadian you want to say hi, We'll get in touch
38:31
Speaker 1: of this go to stuff you should know and uh
38:34
Speaker 1: click on our social media links or send us an email.
38:38
Speaker 1: This stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
38:45
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
38:47
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com