Regular
readers of this little blog know that we like to highlight
the innovations and inventions that have improved the world and made America great. Take, for instance, the example of the late 20th Century waterbed which was introduced as a class project by design
student Charles Prior Hall at San
Francisco State University in March of 1968. At the height of its popularity 19 years later in 1987 nearly one quarter of all mattresses sold in the U.S. were waterbeds.
In the late spring of 1971, I took
off on one of the great adventures of
my young life—hitch hiking from Chicago to
the Bay Area of California. From there, I
was to work my way up the Pacific Coast
hopping freight trains on an old fashion soap box speaking tour for the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW). I was lucky. I got most of the way to the coast in three long rides.
I picked up the last one as I was
leaving Salt Lake from a young dude in a 1950’s sedan who
had spent the winter in a high country
cabin tending sheep all alone
and dropping acid. He was more than slightly crazed, but he got me across the dreaded salt flats. Just
as we crossed into Nevada he stopped
to pick up two more long haired kids
who were headed west looking for work in the fruit harvests. The car
broke down outside of Elko, but I
got a short lift to a junk yard and
took a fan belt off a junker. By the time we got to his hometown just
east of the Bay area, the driver was in full hallucination mode. The
kids took him into his parents’ home and I continued on my way.
My next ride from a Middle age guy in a late model Oldsmobile turned out badly. The guy seemed friendly enough at first and told me that he had hitch hiked as a
young man. Then he started questioning
me about my trip. I told him about my
plans for the speaking tour and explained the IWW. He asked me if I was a demonstrator and I told him that I had been in the streets during
the ’68 Democratic Convention in Chicago. We were on an Interstate overpass in the late
afternoon nearing Palo Alto where
I was planning to crash with an old friend when the driver suddenly pulled over and told me to “get
the fuck out of my car.” It was a very dangerous spot and told his I was afraid I would be hit by traffic and asked if he could at least take me to the next exit.
He told me “That’s too damn bad.”
The Freeway was so busy, that I was surprised he hadn’t been hit letting me off. Standing in a strip less than two feet wide
while cars zipped by at 70 mph, I stood there with my bedroll and the gasmask bag stuffed
with a change of clothes and had to
make a quick choice. I looked over the railing and saw that a busy surface street ran under the overpass. Some sort of vines covered a steep embankment
to the road. I had to jump for it dropping maybe ten feet and
hoping I didn’t break anything tumbling down the rest of the way. I tossed the bindle and the bag over and followed. I landed in one piece and slid to the sidewalk by the road—right in front of
a local cop. Naturally, he was curious about why I had
just leapt from the freeway. But despite
my scruffy appearance in my beat up old Stetson and jean jacket with
Wobbly colors sewed on back, he
accepted my story. He patted me down and checked my bag and
bedroll for drugs and weapons. I had neither
except for an old Boy Scout pocketknife,
but lots of people carried that kind of thing and it wasn’t considered a real
weapon. He let me off with a warning to be more careful and even gave me vague
directions to my friend’s place two or three miles away.
After my heart stopped pounding,
I noticed what a pleasant, warm, and sunny afternoon it was. I
was surprised that the air seemed perfumed. Bougainvillea and other flowers grew in perfusion in yards along fences. Evidently spring came earlier and more
seriously to California than still frosty
Chicago. I ambled my way through the streets getting lost once or twice. Finally, I found a pay phone and got directions.
Soon I was at the small cottage my
friend shared with a male roommate
who was apparently off doing something else.
My friend was, in fact, an old girl friend from Shimer College and the great unrequited
love of my life. I had wasted years mooning over her with suitable romantic angst and in the process missed most of the sexual revolution everyone else seemed
to be enjoying. We will call her Sarah E. She was a pretty ash blonde, keenly intelligent, with her
own streak of restless melancholy. We were still close, but I was definitely on the best friend desert island like the wisecracking third wheel of a romantic comedy.
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Sara greeted me warmly,
poured a generous glass of wine and fed me a dinner with tofu and veggies, a sure sign I
was on the left coast. After dinner we sat on her porch in the gloaming smoking excellent dope out of a carved stone pipe. We talked
long into the seemingly tropical night recalling old times and catching up with
each other’s lives. I harbored dim hopes that we would fall
into each other’s arms and weep over time lost.
We did not. Instead of leading me
to her alluring bed with the Indian print spread, she took me to her
roommate’s room. And that is where for
the first time in my life, I beheld a waterbed—something
I had only heard rumors about and read jokes
about in Playboy.
I bet you never thought we would get
back to the blog topic at hand, but here we are.
The bed was little more than a giant flat plastic bag lying on the floor, filled, naturally, with
water. I don’t think it even had a frame.
Several light blankets were
thrown on it. I was advised to use most of them under
me. The heater did not work very well if at all. The water in the bag was, at best, room temperature. When I lay down—alas, alone—I could feel the
cool through the layers. The bed never warmed up like I was used to from the
heat of my own body. I was surprised and
a little alarmed by the rolling motion of the bed every time I
moved. In point of fact, after the tofu,
wine, and dope, it made me a little queasy. But I was exhausted and slept the sleep of
the dead waking up refreshed.
Sarah made strong coffee in a French press and made paper thin crepes for breakfast. She had a day off and the use of her
roommate’s VW Bus. She drove me around the Bay, up the East side giving me a short tour of Oakland and Berkley where I had stops in a couple of days, then over the wide bridge to San Francisco itself. We cruised the Haight and the Castro
district and had dinner in Chinatown
before she deposited me at the apartment
of Phil Mellman, an 80-something
Wobbly and former seaman who was my host for my Frisco appearance
at Golden Gate Park the next day.
There I was given a seaman’s
bunk and it was up at six bells to
swab the bare wooden floors
as if they were the decks of a tramp steamer, where the Joe was boiled mud and breakfast a
glop of oatmeal.
We will leave the story of the tour
for another day and return now, at
long last, to the saga of the waterbed.
What was notable is that in just
three years the waterbed had gone from college project to a consumer product that could be found in
some homes and that could be the butt of
jokes in a men’s
magazine. And
bigger things yet were ahead.
Now for a quick look back to the origins of the idea.
The use of some sort of water
mattress for therapeutic purposes
dates back to the 19th Century and
perhaps even earlier. In 1832 noted Scottish physician Dr. Neil Arnott invented and put into use
what he called the Hydrostatic Bed to prevent bedsores in invalids.
It was also later used for burn
victims and others for whom pressure
from lying on relatively unyielding mattresses
produced excruciating pain. The bed enclosed
what he called a “bath of water” in a
casing of rubberized canvas. Arnott
declined to patent his invention
hoping that other physicians would copy and use it. By the mid-century his bed or similar ones
developed by others were in use in the most progressive clinics and hospitals
on both sides of the Atlantic but
were still generally considered novelties.
North and
South, an important novel by English author
and social reformer Elizabeth Gaskell in 1855 described a
waterbed used by an invalid character.
In America, Mark Twain described
and praised their use at an infirmary for invalids in his hometown of Elmira,
New York in an article for the New York Times in 1871.
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While bedridden for an extended time with chronic tuberculosis which he contracted as a young Navy officer, pioneering science
fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein designed a waterbed to ease
his discomfort from bed sores. While he
never constructed it, similar water beds were described in his classics Beyond This Horizon (1942), Double Star (1956), and Stranger
in a Strange Land (1961). Years
later in 1980 in his anthology of short stories and non-fiction Expanded Universe, Heinlein
described in detail his never-built water bed.
I designed the waterbed during years as a bed patient in the
middle thirties; 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, waterproof box to make a leak no more important than a leaky
hot water bottle rather than a domestic disaster, calculation of floor loads
(important!), internal rubber mattress and lighting, reading, and eating
arrangements—an attempt to design the perfect hospital bed by one who had spent
too damn much time in hospital beds.
In fact, it sounded a lot like the
water beds found in stores across the county.
How much, if anything of all this
that design student Charles Hall knew is open to conjecture. Like Dr. Arnott
and Heinlein, Hall’s initial design was therapeutic. He wanted to build a chair for those in chronic
pain. Working with the assistance of
fellow students Paul Heckel and Evan Fawkes he first experimented with
filling a vinyl bag filled with 300 pounds
of cornstarch. He hoped that the fine powder would
provide just enough “give” and softness. Unfortunately,
it was uncomfortable. He next turned
to gelatin, but it had a tendency to
decompose even in the sealed bag.
He abandoned the idea of a chair,
and turned to making a bed, which was structurally
simpler. He soon turned to water to
fill the bag. The resulting simple waterbed
was much like Arnott’s more than a hundred years earlier. His main innovation was replacing the
rubberized canvas with modern, flexible
vinyl. He also discovered in
addition to any health benefits and patient comfort, the motion of his beds enhanced sexual
calisthenics.
Hall obtained a patent and founded Innerspace
Environments which became a pioneering waterbed manufacturer, distributor,
and retailer. He marketed his products as pleasure pits. Sales took off. But Hall, like many inventors, never really
got rich from his innovation. His basic
original idea—a single chamber bag
with a rudimentary heating system was
so simple that it was easy for
competitors to make improvements and get their own patents. Hall spent so much money on fruitless patent infringement lawsuits that
his business was barely profitable. And many of those innovations, especially
multiple sections and baffling to reduce motion, as well as
more sophisticated heaters and thermostats, made his simple original model
rapidly obsolete.
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If Hall did not become rich selling
water beds, plenty of others did.
Several regional and national retail chains made the waterbed store a ubiquitous urban feature. Until
they became sold with elaborate frames and platforms and later models incorporated padding, water beds were significantly cheaper than brand name box
spring and mattress sets. And they had the caché of hot sex.
They were naturally popular among young people.
But they had their drawbacks—most notably the “domestic
disasters” Heinlein tried to avoid. They
could, and did, spring leaks. I
had a friend whose cat tried sharpening her claws on a mattress
and flooded her apartment and drenched the one below. There were many cases reported of the heavy
beds crashing through floors that could not support them. The beds were also a hassle to drain and move.
Heaters often failed and
were expensive to continuously operate.
Like all fads interest eventually waned. Some blamed landlords who increasingly banned
them, and insurance companies that
either canceled policies of water
bed owners or charged exorbitant
premiums. Meanwhile there was a
revolution in conventional mattresses including layers of padding, improvement
in innerspring coil technology, and especially the introduction of memory foam.
Today waterbed stores have virtually
disappeared. Only about 2% of
American mattress sales are waterbeds and they are made, just as old Dr. Arnott
had hoped, mostly for therapeutic purposes.
