Selects: Waterbeds: The Sexiest Bed?

Waterbeds came and went pretty quickly in the United States, but despite their marketing as sex beds, they were actually invented to deliver a great night's sleep. Learn all about these super 70's beds in this classic episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone. It's Chuck here on a Saturday, and today's
select episode is called water Beds Colan the Sexiest bed
Oh me thinks, yes, indeed, this episode is from October,
also the sexiest month. Check it out now. Water Beds.

(00:26):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
and we're just here jiggling away slash slash on our
pleasure pit. God oh man, it's so funny. When I

(00:50):
started researching and so I was like, water beds, that's
very stuff you should know. So sort of fits right
in with our historical pop culture phenomena series. Phenomenal uh
and big shout out to The Atlantic, one of our
favorite rags. A lot of this was taken from article

(01:13):
by Rebecca Greenfield. Uh, and then a bunch of other
cool uh supplementary stuff. New York Times, who else? Uh?
Washington Post, Washington Yeah, wap open all those fake news outlets, right,
although I really love the New York Times and the
Washington Post ones because they were like contemporary articles. Yeah,
like the New York Times one was six and Wapo

(01:36):
was from and they're writing about the phenomena of of
um water beds at the time. I love that, man.
I love being able to go back read an article
and then go back and see how it actually unraveled,
like in real time. Basically, yes, see, like sure, it's
a little time capsule if you will, and you can

(01:58):
look back now and say, they get it right. What's
the big news? I don't even like saying this two
words together. I know neither so played out, so played
All right, let's talk about the water bed. Have you
ever had one? No, I kind of wanted one. I
didn't have one. I kind of wanted one to. I

(02:21):
think we're just of that age and they came about,
as you'll see, we're gonna talking about the seventies and eighties.
That in the eighties is when they peaked sales wise.
I think even like young uns like us, we're very intrigued.
Oh yeah, my friend had one. Yeah, did you sleep
on it? No, never slept on that one. I laid
down on it once, I think because I was I

(02:42):
was like, I gotta know what this feels like at
least uh, And I think it was. They may have
called it waveless, but I don't even know what the
difference was because it was pretty wavy. What decade was this,
This would have been mid to late eighties. Yeah, I
don't even they had waveless ones back then. I think
so they were called waveless, but I don't know how

(03:03):
it's still slashed you around. Yeah, I remember very distinctively
laying on it, and I remember thinking, I don't know
if I could sleep on this. It didn't seem like
I mean, it wasn't uncomfortable like it caused me pain,
but I move around a lot in my sleep, so
it's not It's not a good or at least the

(03:25):
old school water beds are not a good match for me.
Memory phone is a little better. Actually, supposedly they've come
a long way, and then the new water beds are
the bomb. I would be curious to lay on one. Well,
go to a dealer in South Florida. I think City
Furniture in South Florida is bringing back the water bed.
Oh there's other places too, because the design now, well

(03:46):
we'll get to it, but it's much different. It's not
it's not the good old days where you just fill
up a big vinyl rubber bladder and tripping on some
grass and listening to Dark Side of the Moon. You know.
The funny thing about my friend Chris's water bed, though,
in his whole house was a time capsule of the
nineteen seventies. He had a water bed in front of

(04:09):
a wall that the wall was a photograph of a
like a Hawaiian beach sunset. Oh man, we had two
of those in my house. Really. We had one was
a straight up forest. So I was like, oh, I'm
in the family room. I'll walk into the kitchen. Oh
my god, I'm in the forest basically. And then if
you went upstairs, and this is my childhood home in Toledo, Ohio, Um,

(04:33):
when you went upstairs to my sister's rooms, you when
you got right up to the top landing, there was
like an outdoor like Coors beer scene, like in the
woods with like a stream coming through the mountains. Giant murals.
In my house. Yeah, we never It's weird. Like when
I look back at the house I grew up in,
it didn't have any of those cool seventies things. But

(04:56):
now that I look back, I think it's probably you know,
I was not cool then because we lived in this
huge house in the woods. But now I look back,
I'm like, that was where I would like to live now,
So what was the aesthetic of your house? Sort of
contempo country Okay, like that hip like Jerry Read or
something lived there. Yeah, I mean we had looking back,

(05:19):
we had shag carpet, range, shag carpet. There were some
markings of the day. Um. But then that was replaced
with hardwoods at some point in the in the eighties. Um.
But then when I had, you know, not too long ago,
went back to my childhood home and broke in. It
was for sale really and empty, and uh you broke in? Well,

(05:39):
not for sale, it was just sort of derelict and empty.
Did you break a window to break in? Now? I
just got in like I used to get in. It
was family was like it's locked, and I was like
watch this. I used to sneak out and read Bible passages,
so I snuck in through the garage window. And looking back,
there was a lot of a lot of the same
stuff was there, and it was very kind of seventies

(06:00):
tile and linoleum and stuff like that, but it just
wasn't full on like Brady Bunch stuff. That's so cool
more or wall murals, and I'm glad I went because
sadly it is no longer there. I'm glad you went to.
Then a couple of months later just torn down, and
I went back and saw a big emptiness, and I cried,

(06:22):
did you the end? I could see that, you mean?
And I went to Toledo and then I since went once.
When we went to Cleveland for our show, I went
by myself and walked around, kind of hoping that the
people who live in the house would be like, what's
that weird of doing and stick their head out and
be like can I help you? And I'd be like, yeah, actually,
can I come in your house? Um? But no one did.

(06:43):
But I did get to walk around the neighborhood. Did
you cry a little nice? But I I saw. I
wanted to go back to my elementary school, and it's
just like a grass field now. Man, It's like, how
do you tear down an elementary school? You know? Yeah,
maybe it got like black mold or something, well tube,
but it's it's sweet. It's better sweet to go back. Yeah,

(07:04):
go back to your childhood places. Everyone. I highly highly
recommended so water bed Yeah, water beds Um, we'll go
back to the earliest history, I guess. But um, the
man that we really need to talk about is a
man named Charles Hall, the inventor of the modern water
bed as we know it. He's a student at San

(07:27):
Francisco State. He's taking a design class. Oh he was
like a design major. Well, yeah, because he submitted this
as his master's thesis, was the waterbed. How awesome is that?
So I saw competing stuff of what he actually created
like built, yeah. Yeah. And the thing that I saw,
I think it was in that WAPO It said what

(07:50):
he created was called the pleasure pit, and it was
an eight foot by eight foot basically water bed tub
of pudding, but it was meant to be a conversation
pit from mold pull people that kind of hang around
in and there was like a bar and there was
lighting and like shelves and stuff like that, and that
that was the original his design. Yeah. But was there

(08:12):
a water mattress function or was it just a sunken
going room. No, that was the thing that was where
everybody sat was on a water mattress in the middle.
It sounds awful, it's just weird, but it really caught
everybody's imagination. Supposedly, within six months it was on the
front page of papers across the country. This is in
San Francisco. The Miami Herald had something on the front

(08:35):
page about this waterbed exhibit in San Francisco that this
four year old design student created capital p capital p
uh yeah, pleasure pit. Everything I've seen is it's capitalized.
But that's what I'm saying. I think that's what he
called the first thing. But it very quickly got turned
into a bed. The water bed I used to like. Actually,

(08:57):
my same friend Chris had one of those sunken living
rooms very seventies. Remember in um, oh, what's the big
Lebowski when you go see to see Jackie Child or
Jackie whatever. Jackie Treehorn. Yeah, Jackie Treehorn. His whole house
is just amazing. Yeah. He had a conversation pit. Uh right,

(09:19):
conversation pit, that's what it was called. So here's the
deal from Time magazine. In Manhattan, the waterbed display at
Bloomingdale's Department store for a while was a popular singles
meeting place. Sire's Roebuck and Holiday Inns are eyeing the
beds and Lake Tahoe's King Castle Hotel has already installed

(09:40):
them in luxury sweets and this is uh. I think
it continues. Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner has one king's size,
of course and covered with Tasmanian bossom. I thought, how
gross is that? Because what I know is a possum
is different different. I looked up the TASMANI impossible, super soft,
I would imagine. And so it's not like American road

(10:02):
kill on your water bed. Right, It wasn't even made
from it. It It just had a bunch of live American
possums on his bed and his water bed you have
was really weird. But here's the deal. The water bed
that Charles hall Cree eventually would go on to create,
and we'll talk about some of his earlier designs aside
from the pleasure bit, he wanted to revolutionize sleeping. Yeah,

(10:25):
he meant it very seriously. He wanted to have a
pressure point free mattress that would envelope your body and
give you the best night sleep of your life. He
had no intention of it becoming this, which it very
much did. A metaphor for the sexy sixties and seventies, right,

(10:45):
but it definitely did like you say it was. It's
a really good example of an idea just basically getting
hijacked big time. And at first he was kind of like,
I'm just a twenty four year old design suit. Now,
I don't care. Sure, make your own waterbed knockoff. But
then over time he definitely came to care and spent

(11:07):
a couple of decades pursuing um infringement suits here and there,
patent infringement suits um, which we'll talk about later. But
at first it was basically like, here's the waterbed world,
and the world went nuts. Uh. And again, yeah, he
meant a revolutionized sleep, but the hippies and the people
who owned head shops, which is where you bought your

(11:29):
water beds early on was at the head shop, said no,
this is all about sex. And that's how that's how
it was first sold in the late sixties and early seventies.
I have never had sexual intercourse on a waterbed, but
it doesn't it doesn't sound appealing to me, right because
so one of the in this, I think the Washington
Post article quote a Washington Post article from the seventies

(11:52):
saying like a waterbed salesman said, it's very like, very
much like three people are having sex because the bed
itself is like a third warm body participating in the
motion or something like in the worst possible way. And
I looked up Yeah, I was like, it's just weird.
And I looked up um like sex on a water
bed on um on a work computer? Right, uh oh yeah,

(12:18):
the word computer is supertained now um. And the I
found like this one. I can't remember the website, but
it's basically like pros and cons. And it sounds like
it comes down to your preferences, you know, like what
what like are you into your motions being exaggerated? You know?
And I guess, yeah, Chuck's laughing because I'm like kind

(12:41):
of making right, Um, if you're into that, great, if
you're not, or you're um, apparently it's really like you.
It really is pronounced. It's not something going on in
the background. It's like, you know and right, So it
just depends on your prefer says I think. But I

(13:01):
think a lot of the earliest water beds were we're
bought by guys who were pretty confident. They could be like,
I've got a water bed, you want to try it out,
and that that would happen. It became a punch line,
like I remember, I feel like every other sitcom or
a movie at some point there was a scene where
they were like, oh, he's got a water bed, or

(13:22):
he would just slowly open the door to reveal the
water bed, and that meant only one thing. It did
master lover right, So the the and then the waterbed
invariably like they couldn't make it work because one of
them would get flopped off or somebody would make it
spring a leak, and then the leak would just go everywhere.
Whenever water beds appeared in TV and movies like it

(13:44):
went badly. All right, let's take a break. I'm all
hot and bothered. We'll come back and we'll talk about
some of Charles Hall's early designs right after this. Okay,

(14:18):
So again, that was like the first reception to water beds.
Hefner had one, he had to actually had one on
his jet to um he uh, like one of the
Smothers brothers bought one. I guess help his sex life out,
guy from Jefferson Airplane. And you bought them at head
shops and they were sold by waterbed manufacturers again, none

(14:38):
of whom bothered to get a license from the Charles
Hall of the inventor and patent holder. But they had
names like wet Dream. Somebody named their company wet Dream
and that was okay in the seventies. Let me see here,
what else Aquarius, Joyapeutic, aqua beds, Joyapeutic, Um, Aquarius products.

(14:59):
Like you said, water work, what else? That's all I have?
I think wet Dream. We should have stopped there. Um,
it's definitely the worst of all of them. So before
this came about, Charles Hall a couple of his prototype
early prototypes. Um. One, it sounds sort of like a
bean bag chair almost, but it was a big bag

(15:21):
chair full of three hundred pounds of liquid corn starch
that the idea was you would sit in it and
it would envelop you. It sounds like a nightmare. Yeah,
Like he didn't mean for it to envelop you. It
was like he hadn't hit upon the water bed yet.
He was trying out different substances. But yeah, you just sink.
Can't gross, all right? So he moved on to jello

(15:44):
for real, and that didn't work either. That's not a joke, people.
He put jello in this thing did not have the
right temperature or consistency. So eventually he would thanks to
um thanks to vinyl really but coming a very popular thing.
Uh and and being used for things other than like

(16:06):
car parts and tires and things and oh rings, Vinyl
became a hot item. So he filled up this vinyl
bladder with water, had a temperature control device on it. Uh.
And the the idea there was not to have some
hot bed, but to sink up to your body temperature, right,
so your muscles would relax. Yeah, he had the purest

(16:27):
of intentions, I really did, and he he hit upon
it finally and again in the Masters thesis. Well, was
part of the problem. Summer of love. People are having
sex all over the place. And uh, there's a story
named Andrew Kirk who said the basically design and then

(16:47):
late sixties was a free form atmosphere people were really getting.
And if you've ever, like I love design museums, if
you ever go to some of these, it's kind of
cool to see what they were doing in the sixties. Um,
because it was kind of a crazy time for design. Yeah,
because a lot of people were open to trying new things.
Up to this point, you had a mattress and you
were just thankful that I wasn't filled with Hey, you know,

(17:09):
it had springs and you liked it. That's the way
it was, and you liked it. Um. So the idea
of this something totally new, like it was two things. One,
this guy was trying to revolutionized sleep, and it came
at a time when people were willing to like, oh, yeah,
it's the beds boring, let's try something different. And it
just kind of came together really well. But again it

(17:30):
got hijacked by people who owned Headshot well, and he
was in San Francisco. It all kind of converged um
to work against him, ironically, but he he applied for
a pet and I think in nineteen sixty eight, but
it wasn't until nineteen seventy one that it was granted
because prior to his design being UM debuted, like thirty

(17:52):
or so years prior, Robert Heinlein, the very famous in
prolific science fiction writer, he had basically described water beds
so frequently and in such detail that he was considered
the intellectual property holder of waterbed design. Yeah, the reason
Heinlin even went to the trouble of he liked to

(18:12):
describe stuff in his books apparently haven't read any of
them yet, but very detailed descriptions. Yeah, and one of
the things that he kept he that always popped up
was these water beds. And apparently in the thirties he
spent a lot of time in hospital beds, so he
was just imagining how they could be improved. And he
described water beds almost exactly like Charles Hall had described them. Yeah,

(18:35):
he said, UM, A pump to control water level, side
supports to permit one to float rather than simply lying
on a not very soft water filled mattress. Thermostatic control
of temperature, safety interfaces to avoid all possibility of electric shock,
which was a big sort of urban legend at the time.
You can be electrocuted if you have vigorous sex. Waterproof

(18:57):
box to make it leakproof um, which was another probably
legitimate um Cohn for a water bed. Sometimes they would
leak back then uh, and then some other things. But
basically it all came together to form such a robust
all even though it was in a science fiction novel
that he was he had to like go to court

(19:19):
and say, I don't know if he was looking for
money or who. I'm not sure how it came out
that Highland owned the intellectual property of it. If he
came out and said that's mine or what. But by
within three years of Chris or Charles Hall coming out
with this he um, he had the patent for it.
And even way back in the eighteen hundreds there were

(19:41):
doctors who created One guy named Dr Neil or No
or are Not created a hydrostatic bed. He covered a
warm bath with a rubber cloth and sealed it with varnish.
And another doctor in Portsmouth, and these were based to
prevent bed sores, to relieve bed sores, and even highlands

(20:04):
he said, like you said, he cooked it up because
he had been in hospitals a lot. Yeah, he's like
he's getting killed in these hard beds. Yeah. And the
reason you would want some sort of um water filled
bed for a hospital is because people are laying around
in bed all the time and when you have skin
covering like a bony layer, you get bed ulcers and

(20:27):
you don't want those now. So this was to prevent
bed sores. Um that's why the earliest physicians were coming
up with them. But so finally by one Charles Hall
holds the patent and again he was he wanted to
create a serious sleep product and he founded a company
called Inner space environments, and they were selling like the

(20:50):
real deal, legit high end water beds. He even named
it seriously right. He opened like thirty two stores in
California in the early seventies, and and UM had a
factory like he was doing it right. His did not leak.
One of the things that water beds were very much
known for is that the sheets would pop off. Yeah,
very well, because sheets fit on his UM. The temperature

(21:14):
control was great. They were like really high end water
beds made and designed by the guy who actually designed them.
The problem is he didn't really pursue any patent stuff,
and so there were knockoffs out of the gate, and
it was the knockoffs that leaked. It was the knockoffs
that had terrible temperature control UM and it was the

(21:34):
knockoffs that gave water beds a bad name because they
were fully embracing the sexy advertising. That was part of
it too, all the knockoffs manufacturers and apparently he pursued
some of these, but it's he would have spent all
his time and money pursuing a patent infringement if he

(21:54):
really tried to go after everyone. And some of these
didn't make a lot of money, and it was just
sort of use list to even try, so it wasn't
worth his time and money. A lot of times he
said to a lot of people who sold water beds early,
like early waterbed dealers. Basically they were just trying to
make some fast money so they could go start a
pot farm in Oregon. That was like, that's who was

(22:16):
selling water beds in the early seventies. It also has
one of the creepiest lines ever in the Atlantic article
that said something about when Charles Hall initially was selling
water beds out of the back of his van, right like, man,
that's the creepiest thing ever. Yeah here, let me let
me open up my van. You can lay on my
water bed in the back of my van with with

(22:36):
the stallion painted on the side. Oh man, speaking of seventies,
I forgot about the murals on the vands. Remember we
used to do blog posts and stuff I made like
a slide show. I remember that vans with art on
the side, see those every now and then? Gets up. Still,
it's good stuff. You want to take a break before
we get into the the this straightening of water beds. Yes, sorry,

(23:25):
I couldn't come up with a better word than straightening.
I apologize for that. Let me think, I guess legitimizing,
but I'm thinking like more like a boring, suburbanite zing
of water beds. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. We
say that Hall very much wanted to revolution I sleep
and he didn't embrace the sexual component of it. But

(23:46):
he sold a lot of water beds, and he kind
of knew why a lot of these people were buying him,
and he wasn't like, I don't think he was so
pious that he was like, no, I don't want to
sell them for that reason. I think he eventually was
kind of like, you know that that's why people bought him,
and that was okay. But I don't think he just
I don't think he cheapened his own advertising that way. No,

(24:07):
he didn't, and he actually he his company went under
by the mid seventies and he he likens it to
UM basically advertising to the wrong market, Like he he
made quality, high end water beds UM and it was
advertising to people who could afford a more expensive quality,

(24:28):
actual legitimate water bed wearing. At the time, it was like,
you know, Randall Pink Floyd and his friends were the
actual customers of water beds. That's who was buying water beds,
and they weren't seeing the ads that Charles Hall was
putting out there, you know what I'm saying, in like
the New York or whatever. Yeah, and so he missed
the heyday. He was sort of in the early heyday.
But I think in the eighties is when it became

(24:49):
like a two billion dollar of the market share industry. Right, Yeah,
like the late seventies, I think it was about a
thirteen million dollar a year industry, and by seven I
believe at its peak it was like a two point
three billion dollar industry a year, and then a pretty
steep once again grunge killed water beds. Yeah, pretty steep

(25:11):
fall in the nineties, right in the early nineties. But
the way that it built up before it fell was
more companies got into it, kind of legitimized it. I
believe that there was a trade association that developed UM
and the I think it was like it's called the
floatation sleep industry is really the technical term for it. UM.

(25:33):
They really wanted to get away from the sex appeal
and like this stores like you would you wouldn't buy
a water bed in a head shop anymore. To imagine
walking to a hedgehop and being like, what do you
have a water bed here? For? Um? You buy water
beds out in the suburbs at a place called waterbed
Plaza or something like that. Or did you see that
ad I sent to the YouTube adom. Yeah, country Boy

(25:57):
water beds. Everybody, go go under you YouTube and look
for country Boy water bed at Max Headroom and it's beautiful. Yeah,
it's Max Headroom rip off selling water beds country Boy
water beds by water bed h And I think it
was from Arkansas, like a local waterbed dealer in Arkansas,

(26:17):
tex Arcana. You mean, oh, is there right now? I
don't know, but that's I mean, like you could get
water beds everywhere. Well that's why my friend, I mean
in seven in suburban Atlanta. For my friend to have
one in high school, that kind of says it all.
It's not like his parents were like I mean they were.
They were a good, god fearing family and we're like, yeah,

(26:39):
we need to get Chris a sex pit. It was
more like they were supposedly healthy. Yeah, they were like
a healthy way to sleep. I think that's also how
it kind of transitioned the legitimacy and away from like
just the association with sex. Right, So um, you have
you have like an actual bona fide water bed industry.

(27:03):
Um with actual water beds. One of the one of
the ways that this industry was able to establish itself
was they made vast improvements over the early models of
water beds. It used to be that you had a
just basically like a big bladder, a vinyl bladder that
big water, big wooden box, and when you wanted to
get out, you had to like kind of like work

(27:24):
up to it and roll off the side and knee. Yeah,
you had to bang your knee on the way out.
They leaked. There was a lot of problems with it.
But then they started like improving upon it to where
like the water bed was actually like this one article,
I think it was a mental floss article that I
found said that in the eighties, if you were a kid,

(27:45):
a water bed was as close to a status symbol
as you could possibly get. You know, Oh yeah, I
mean it was aspirational. Yeah, there's no when I say,
no chance my parents would have bought me one, It
wouldn't have even like I wouldn't a new bed are
than to even ask I think the same with me.
I don't remember asking for one, although I really wanted one.
I think it was like a pipe dream. Maybe it's

(28:08):
not like, oh, I really want a water bed. It
was such so shut down in my mind as a possibility,
like this is the time where we inherited mattresses from
our older siblings. It was so gross. It was on
the slide road. But it looks too many stains on
kind of uh wait, kind of Oh did you actually
get a mattress from the side of the road. I'm

(28:29):
making sure you did not know, but just short of that, okay, um,
so mattress. The water beds then, and now one of
the knocks against them is there they are very heavy.
There's no way around it. If you fill up a
mattress with water, even partially, you're gonna have a lot
of weight. Depending on the size, a couple to three

(28:51):
gallons of water can weigh between fifteen hundred and two
thousand pounds. And so they always instilled do need a
lot of structural support underneath them, a large, very heavy
wooden platform. Supposedly that's why New York was known as
the the city where the least number of water beds
were ever so I can't imagine. Part of it is

(29:13):
because like in in major cities there were like waterbed
bands and leases, like if you rented an apartment, you
weren't allowed to have a water It was just too heavy. Yeah. Um,
people would leave them behind. Like here you take this
because even when you drain the water, like the thing
that held the water bed was heavy itself. The frame

(29:35):
was super super heavy. It was like a bookcase that
you didn't really want anymore. You just leave it behind.
That's what happened to water beds. I didn't see, and
I don't How do you fill them up? Is that
you water? That's how people did it. Yes, And then
to get it out you needed like a pump, and
you could buy all the stuff in your local waterbeds store.

(29:56):
But you know, when you buy a better mattress, a
regular mattress, you don't have to go I have pumped
two years later because you're moving, you know, and then
pump the water out of mattress. He just moved the mattress.
That was a big, big mark against it in the
popular understanding of it. I imagine in New York too, well,
the weight is enough probably to disqualify it. But just
getting a water hose up a seventh floor walk up. Uh. Yeah,

(30:19):
I'm surprised. I haven't seen that movie scene where they're
like have a rope tied around a water hose from
the street level that they're bringing up through a window.
It sounds like Bust your Keaton or something like Super
Sexy in the seventies. Who would that be? I don't know. Okay,

(30:41):
we should do a podcast on our crumb Have we
done that? Any day? Any day? Buddy? That was like
a dare. I can't remember if I saw them. Was
it a movie or a documentary on him? It was
a movie that came out in the early two thousands.
Well both they did the great documentary Crumb Um and
then when I saw American Splendor, that's what I saw.

(31:02):
He was a character in it, but it was largely
about Harvey PEAKR. Yes, the Great Harvey Peak. That was
a good movie. Um. All right, so these days, uh,
like you said, they've been brought into the modern era. Um,
there's a foam collar around the bladder, their spandex on top. Um.

(31:26):
I believe they are air pockets and things in between
to sort of stabilize it. Yeah, they don't actually they don't.
You can't get seasick on them like you used to
be able to move like that. I really want to
try one of these out and just see what it
feels like. I don't want one, I don't think, but
I do want to see what the sensation is like.
One of my friends back in high school, their parents

(31:48):
had a what he called a motionless water bed. Um
And now I understand what he's talking about. It's like
waveless or whatever. Um, but it just felt like laying
on a feather bed, just the most comfortable feather bed
you've ever been on. Well, my friends must not have
been waveless, because it was it moved. Yeah, this is none.
And this would have been like the nineties or something
like that. And I'm sure it was like a five

(32:09):
thousand dollar mattress or something back then, but that seems
to be like the kind that they have now. It's
like you just lay on it and you're you're not like, oh,
this is a water bed. You just like, this is
super comfortable. I'm floating and weightless, but your mind's not
thinking you're laying on water. Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't have, like,
aside from moving a lot when I sleep. I'm a
like a I like to flop on the bed, like

(32:29):
when I lay down, I don't lay gently on it.
I will kind of throw myself into bed. And none
of these things are conducive to water beds, especially not
in the seventies. But apparently now it's fine you could
do that. Well. One of the new salesman they interviewed
for this article said that he won't say the name
waterbed um. He says, because it turns people off. He said,
even if they try it and they like it and

(32:51):
then they find out it's a water bed, he said,
sometimes they won't buy it because of that weird seventies association,
like yeah, or they're worried it's gonna leak, or they're
you know, they're gonna have to fill it with water.
There Apparently I couldn't find any any verification of this,
but there was an urban legend at least that you

(33:13):
could find aquatic worms floating in your water bed, and
they started doing like, oh, well we need to add
chemicals to the water. Well, then that makes it even grosser, right,
So there's like just over time, people associated a lot
of negative things with water beds, and then the thing
that really killed the water bed was that in the nineties.
By the by the nineties, it was clear that America

(33:37):
was like, sure, we'll try other things besides an inter
spring mattress, what you got And so like temper pedic
came around, or sleep number, all these guys who made
technically alternative mattresses. Um, the same thing that it follows
in that tradition that the waterbed established. They that Charles

(33:58):
Hall he aided that market and showed that it was
a real thing. And so by the time the nineties
rolled around, and like I think tempera pedick was the
first one. Um, it was like all the benefits of
a water bed without the hassle of the water, why
would you want a water bed? And that was it
for water beds. Yeah, and minus the creeps. Yeah. Whereas

(34:21):
just a few a few years before, almost one in four,
between one and four and one in five between a
quarter and of all water or of all mattresses were
water beds sold in America. It's crazy. It's a lot
down to nothing, down to just gone. Man. Imagine the
landfills of America are filled with vinyl bladders just rotting

(34:46):
well broughting a thousand years from now probably yeah, that's true.
They're probably some pretty good shape. So one more thing
about Charles Hall, well, two more things. One he went
on to invent the solar shower, you know, the campus
was a and then um too. He has a kind
of a bad name, or he did, at least back
in one I think um in that WAPO article where

(35:10):
the waterbed industry, the industry association that formed they they
didn't like him very much because a couple of years
before his patent ran out. He'd been gone and then
came back and said, all y'all owe me money for
patent infringement. And they were like, what dude, We like,
we've built this industry. You know, thought you were cool

(35:34):
kind of he was like, no, I'm not give me
some money and he started like they apparently wanted to
settle and it wasn't enough. But one really noteworthy thing
about one of their one of his lawsuits against I
think a Taiwanese um manufacturer that um he sold shares
in the outcome, so like you could buy shares of

(35:57):
a lawsuit. Crazy, And there's a there's a common law
law against it. It's called champ terree, which I had
never heard of before many total sense. It's where somebody
like basically pays for legal fees in order to get
a piece of the action to cut Um. Yeah, chapter
E and in California at the time, chapter was not illegal.

(36:21):
I don't know if it is, but um it was not.
And he sold shares for ten thousand a pop. Uh
for this for this Wow, this lawsuit. That's amazing. Water beds,
They're amazing. Chuck cheez. That's what the episode should be titled.
It's up to you. Do you got anything else? You

(36:44):
got nothing else? If you want to know more about
water beds, well, get in a time machine, get in
the way back machine and go try and one out yourself. Well,
we have one in the way back machine. You're lucky
day covered in American possum. Oh boy. Uh. Since I
said that it's time for listening there, I'm gonna call
this one of the many replies for color blindness too.

(37:06):
We've got a lot of responses for color blindness. What
do you mean too well? I called the jerk all right, Hey, guys,
I was listening to the show about color blindness with
an oh you are so I assume this? Uh oh,
he's Canadian's gonna say British. It's like British light. Yeah,
he's still under the thumb though. I worked in the

(37:27):
electrical field for ten years, and in that time I've
worked with two red green color blind electricians. Remember we
talked about that. The first one I worked with for
a few years. Uh, And he said, it wasn't that
difficult to tell the difference between red and green conductors.
They just looked like every Uh. They look like very
obvious different shades of the same color, and only took

(37:50):
a couple of mistakes before he was able to tell
the difference. An electrical red is a current carrying conductor,
while green is used for grounding and bonding, like a
rat and a science experiment. He explained, it only took
a couple of shocks of what he thought it was
a bonding wire to really notice the difference. So dangerous,
I know, man. Uh. The other I worked with for

(38:11):
only a short while because he died, but he had
been an electrician for twenty plus years. Wasn't until he
asked a co worker why they thought the ground wire
and a current carring conductor were the same color that
he even realized he was color blind. How about that?
A little slow on the uptake, perhaps so, even though
it costs some issues early on their careers, they're both

(38:32):
great electricians. I guess the human brain always finds a way,
and that is James from Cape Breton, Nova, Scotia, Canada.
That's cool Man, Great Area Eastern Canada, Great Area, Western Canada,
fantastic Central Canada. We love it all. Yes, what we do.

(38:54):
If you're Canadian, you want to say hi, We'll get
in touch of this. Go to Stuff you Should Know
and uh click on our social media links or send
us an email. This stuff podcast at how stuffworks dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
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(39:14):
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