BrainStuff Classics: 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 classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://home.howstuffworks.com/home-decor/bedroom/could-waterbeds-ever-make-comeback.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff. I'm Lauren vocal Bomb, and today's episode is
a classic from our archives. This one is about the
strange cultural phenomenon that is the water bed. My parents
had one, our Labrador retriever, figured out how to pop
holes in it and liked watching the water scored out,
which was pretty much the end of that. But outside

(00:25):
of my childhood home, water beds evolved, so could they
ever make a large scale comeback? Hey brain Stuff, Lauren
vocal 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

(00:45):
promise of sloshy love making was definitely a selling point
back in the day too, it was an almost immediate
groovylicious success. By the late nineteen eighties, water beds accounted
for somewhere around fift of the bedding market, or a
d two billion dollars a year, according to a contemporary
New York Times article, if you were cool back then,

(01:06):
or thought you were or wanted to be, or if
you valued a good night's sleep on gently rolling waves,
or dreamed of nights filled with wild surfing passion, You
owned a waterbed 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,

(01:29):
statistics for waterbed sales are hard to come by, 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?

(01:50):
Lynn Hardman does. He still sleeps on one every night.
He's also sold thousands of them over the past few decades.
Hardman owns Southern Waterbeds and Phutons in at in 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

(02:11):
business out there. Hardman has operated his store for forty
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 water bed has really
followed that Baby Boom generation from the counterculture of the
late nineteen fifties to where we are today. The early
customers back then were younger, and today it's almost entirely

(02:33):
the opposite. The baby boomers are older, much wiser, and
in some 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

(02:55):
stand on their own, though they all need some kind
of a solid base because of the weight of the
match riss. 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 five ms.
And the lure of water beds has of course always

(03:15):
been that water aficionados swear by it's all around supportive properties.
Hardman talks about being enveloped in a water mattress, rather
than lying on top of a standard one. Most water
mattresses now come with baffles too that control how waveless
they are for those turned off by that too sloshy feeling.
Most have heaters that can regulate the temperature of the

(03:36):
water anywhere from seventy to a hundred degrees fahrenheit about
one to thirty eight degrees celsius. The newest mattresses are
split into 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 you have

(03:56):
never put on his private jet and flew around on
in the nine It was round and had a Tasmanian
possum bedspread. The man 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 kitsapp
Son in Bainbridge, Washington. Gone is the wooden frame that

(04:20):
made the older beds so hard to get out of,
exchanged for a foam caller that surrounds the water bladder
expandex covers the top of the mattress to give a
floating said station. A 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

(04:42):
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 water beds 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 path, a
novelty item. This would all seem rather quaint if sleep

(05:04):
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 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 prioritize

(05:27):
sleep over other things in their lives, like work, working out, hobbies,
or their social life. Most people sixty, 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,

(05:48):
he said, there's just something about that semi witless state
that you can only get laying on a waterbed. There's
something about it that's so soothing and relaxing. We had
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 is based on

(06:11):
the article could waterbeds ever make a comeback? On how
Stuff Works dot Com? Written by John Donovan. Bring Stuff
is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how
stuff Work dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler Clay.
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