Could the Waterbed Make a Comeback?

Waterbeds were a mainstay of opulent '80s culture, but why did they fall out of fashion? How have they evolved since then? Could they climb back from the pits of public disfavor? Explore in this episode of BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren focal bomb here. The water bed was born around
half a century ago as the counterculture solution to something
pretty basic. We're talking a lack of sleep, of course.
Although the promise of sloshy love making was definitely a
selling point back in the day too, it was an

(00:23):
almost immediate, groovy, delicious success. By the late nineteen eighties,
waterbeds accounted for somewhere around fifteen percent of the bedding market,
or a tidy two billion dollars a year, according to
a contemporary New York Times article, if you were cool
back then, or thought you were or wanted to be,
or if you valued a good night's sleep on gently

(00:44):
rolling waves, or dreamed of nights filled with wild surfing passion,
you owned a water bed or you wanted one. Almost
as quickly as the waterbed revolution began, though it crashed,
the novelty wore off, the revolution died, the era faded away.
These days, statistics for waterbed sales are hard to come by,

(01:05):
but it's clear that things aren't like they were back
in the swinging seventies and eighties, and even into the nineties.
The competition mainly things like air mattresses and memory foam
has grown. The number of waterbed manufacturers and sellers has shrunk.
Do you even know anyone who still owns a water bed?
Lynn Hardman does. He still sleeps on one every night.

(01:26):
He's also sold thousands of them over the past few decades.
Hardman owns Southern water Beds and Phutons in Athens, Georgia,
and admits that business isn't like it was in the
nineteen seventies, a time when mattress stores didn't dot every
strip mall in every suburb and mom and pop shops
didn't have to compete with the Internet. But there's still
business out there. Hardman has operated his store for forty

(01:48):
three years, almost as long as water beds have been around,
and the water bed is still hanging on. He said,
it's like night and day. The waterbed has really followed
that Baby Boom generation from the counterculture of the late
seen fifties to where we are today. The early customers
back then were younger, and today it's almost entirely the opposite.
The baby boomers are older, much wiser, and in some

(02:10):
cases buying that final bed. Waterbed manufacturers and showrooms like
Hardman's are easy enough to find if you're looking. Most
brands offer hard sided beds that, like the first ones,
rely on a major piece of wood furniture to hold
the mattress in place. Newer soft sided water mattresses can
stand on their own, though they all need some kind
of a solid base because of the weight of the mattress.

(02:33):
Depending on size, a water mattress can hold up to
two hundred gallons that's about seven hundred and sixty liters
of water, which is more than one thousand, six hundred
pounds or about seven hundred and twenty fives and the
lure of water beds has of course always been that
water aficionados swear by its all around supportive properties. Hardman

(02:54):
talks about being enveloped in a water mattress rather than
lying on top of a standard one. Most water matt
says now come with baffles too that control how waveless
they are for those turned off by that too slashy feeling.
Most have heaters that can regulate the temperature of the
water anywhere from seventy to a hundred degrees fahrenheit about
thirty eight degrees celsius. The newest mattresses are split into

(03:16):
dual zones too, so one person can enjoy a different firmness, temperature,
and wave control than his or her sleeping partner. The
waterbed of the twenty one century clearly is not the
fur covered playground that Hugh Hefner put on his private
jet and flew around on in the nineteen seventies. It
was round and had a Tasmanian possum bedspread. The man

(03:37):
credited with inventing and patenting the water bed is septagenarian
Charlie Hall. He's come up with a new one that
he's marketing through a string of furniture stores in Florida.
Here's a quote from the kitsap Son in Bainbridge, Washington.
Gone is the wooden frame that made the older beds
so hard to get out of, exchanged for a foam
caller that surrounds the water bladder expandex covers the top

(03:59):
of the mattress to give a floating said sation. Fiber
insert quells waves and keeps the water bladder still. An
updated temperature system keeps the water feeling just right. The
innovations Hall is hoping will spur nostalgia in some and
interest a new generation of buyers in a piece of
bedroom furniture that they may know little about. Hooking that
new generation of kids maybe the biggest challenge in the

(04:22):
waterbeds potential comeback. Hardman occasionally sees some young people in
his store now, but they're accompanied by parents or grandparents
who dragged the kids along to show them a relic
from the past, a novelty item. This would all seem
rather quaint if sleep wasn't such a deadly serious topic.
Research over the past few years has shown just how
critical a good night's sleep is. A continued lack of

(04:45):
sufficient sleep has been strongly associated with, among other health problems, obesity, diabetes,
heart disease, hypertension, and a decreased life expectancy, and the
National Sleep Foundation's annual poll shows that only ten percent
of Americans prior ties sleep over other things in their lives,
like work, working out, hobbies, or their social life. Most people,

(05:07):
six the poll found say they don't even consider ahead
of time how much sleep they may need in planning
out their days. Hardman has a potential answer to that problem.
Sitting in his store, just as it has been for
the past forty three years. He said, There's just something
about that semi waitless state that you can only get
laying on a waterbed. There's something about it that's so

(05:28):
soothing and relaxing. We'd pause it that some rigorous scientific
research is in order, though it sounds like plenty of
people are still running their own small time experiments. Today's
episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang.
For more on this and lots of other soothing topics,

(05:48):
visit our home planet, how Stuff works dot com.