Stuff You Should Know - Waterbeds: The Sexiest Bed?

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

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 today's episode.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.

And we're just here jiggling away. Slosh, slosh. On our pleasure pit. Oh, God. Oh, man, it's so funny. When I started researching this, I was like, waterbeds, that's very Stuff You Should Know. Yeah. So it sort of fits right in with our

historical pop culture phenomena series. Phenomenal. Do-do-do-do-do-do. Phenomenal. And big shout out to The Atlantic, one of our favorite rags. A lot of this was taken from a 2010 article by Rebecca Greenfield, and then a bunch of other cool

supplementary stuff, New York Times. Who else? Washington Post. Washington, yeah, WAPO. 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.

Like the New York Times one was in 1986, and WAPO was from 1991, and they're writing about the phenomena of waterbeds at the time. 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. Sure. It's a little time capsule, if you will. And you can look back now and say, did they get it right? Or is it fake news? I don't even like saying those two words together.

I don't either. So played out. So played. All right, let's talk about the waterbed. Have you ever had one? No. I kind of wanted one. I didn't have one.

I kind of wanted one too. Sure. I think we're just of that age, and they came about, as you'll see, we're going to talk about the 70s and 80s, that in the 80s is when they peaked sales-wise. I think even, like, youngins like us were 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 like, I gotta know what this feels like, at least. Right. 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 80s. Yeah, I don't even, do they had waveless ones back then? I think so. They were called waveless, but I don't know how. It still sloshed you around?

Yeah, I remember very distinctly laying on it. And I remember thinking, I don't know if I could sleep on this. Yeah. 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. Bees, bees.

Yeah. So it's not a good, or at least the old school water beds are not a good match for me. Right. Memory foam is a little better, actually. Supposedly they've come a long way, and 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, we'll get to it, but it's much different. It's not the good old days where you just fill up a big vinyl rubber bladder.

Right. While you're like, no, it holds. Tripping on some grass and listening to dark side of the moon. You know what the funny thing about my friend Chris's water bed though, and his whole house was a time capsule of the 1970s. He had a water bed in front of a wall

that the wall was a photograph of a Hawaiian beach sunset. Oh, man. We had two of those in my house. Really? We had one. One was a straight up forest. So it was like, oh, I'm in the family room. I'll walk into the kitchen.

Oh my god, I'm in the forest, basically, right? And then if you went upstairs, and this is my childhood home in Toledo, Ohio, 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. Rocky 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 70s things. But 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 that I look back, I'm like, where I would like to live now.

So what was the aesthetic of your house? Sort of Contempo country. Okay, that's hip. Like Jerry Reed or something lived there? Yeah, I mean, we had, looking back, we had Shag carpet, Orange Shag carpet. There were some markings of the day. But then that was replaced with hardwoods

at some point in the 80s. Gotcha. But then when I had, you know, not too long ago, I went back to my childhood home and broke in, so it was for sale. Oh, really? And empty. Wow.

And you broke in. Well, not for sale. It was just sort of derelict and empty. Did you break a window to break in? No, I just got in like I used to get in. No, that's awesome. Emily was like, it's locked. And I was like, watch this.

Watch this. I used to sneak out and read Bible passages. So I snuck in through the garage window. And looking back, that was a lot of, a lot of the same stuff was there. And it was very kind of 70s tile and linoleum and stuff like that. But it just wasn't full on like Brady Bunch stuff.

That's so cool. 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. Did you? The end.

I could see that. You me 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 weirdo 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? But no one did. But I did get to walk around the neighborhood. Did you cry? A little. Nice. But I saw, I went to go back to my elementary school and it's just like a grass field now.

Oh man. It's like, how do you tear down an elementary school? You know? Yeah. Maybe it got like black mold or something. Well, let's hope. Yeah. But it's sweet.

It's better sweet to go back. Yeah. Go back to your childhood places, everyone. I highly recommend it. So water beds. Yeah, water beds. We'll go back to the earliest history, I guess, but 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. 1968. Yeah. He's a student at San 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 water bed. How awesome is that? So I saw competing stuff of what he actually created. Like built? Yeah. And the thing that I saw, I think it was in that WAPO 1991 article. It said what 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 for multiple people to 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 of his design.

Yeah, but was there a water mattress function? Or was it just a sunken living 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 page about this water bed exhibit in San Francisco that this 24 year old design student created. Capital P, capital P. 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 my same friend, Chris, had one of those sunken living rooms. Oh, I love those. Very 70s.

You remember in, oh, what's the big Lebowski? When he goes to see Jackie Child or Jackie, whatever. Jackie Treehorn, yeah. Jackie Treehorn, his whole house is just amazing. Yeah, he had a conversation pit. Right, conversation pit. That's what it was called. Yeah.

So here's the deal from Time Magazine, 1971. In Manhattan, the water bed display at Bloomingdale's department store for a while was a popular singles meeting place. Sears, Roebuck and Holiday Ends are eyeing the beds. And Lake Tahoe's King Castle Hotel has already installed them in luxury suites. And this is, I think it continues.

Playboy Tycoon Hugh Hefner has one. King size, of course, and covered with Tasmanian possum. I thought how gross is that? Cause what I know as a possum is different. I looked up the Tasmanian possum. It's super soft. I would imagine so. It's not like American Roadkill on your water bed.

Right. It wasn't even made from it. It just had a bunch of live American possums on his bed, on his water bed. Hugh Hefner was really weird. But here's the deal. The water bed that Charles Hall 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, he would mend it very seriously. He wanted to have a pressure point free mattress that would envelop your body and give you the best night's sleep of your life. He had no intention of it becoming this,

which he very much did, a metaphor for the sexy 60s and 70s. Right, but it definitely did, like you say. 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 24 year old design student.

I don't care. Sure, make your own water bed knock off. But then over time, he definitely came to care and spent a couple of decades pursuing infringement suits here and there, patent infringement suits, which we'll talk about later. But at first it was basically like,

here's the water bed world and the world went nuts. And again, yeah, he meant to revolutionize sleep, but the hippies and the people who own head shops, which is where you bought your water beds early on, was at the head shop said, no, this is all about sex. And that's how it was first sold in the late 60s and early 70s. I have never had sexual intercourse on a water bed,

but it doesn't sound appealing to me. Right, because so one of the, I think the Washington Post article quotes a Washington Post article from the 70s saying like a water bed salesman said, it's 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 that.

In the worst possible way. And I looked up, yeah, I was like, it's just weird and I looked up like sex on a water bed. Of course you did. On a work computer. Right, oh yeah, the work computer is super tainted now. It's fouled. And the, I found like this one,

I can't remember the website, but it was basically like pros and cons. And it sounds like it comes down to your preferences. You know, like what, like are you into your motions being exaggerated, you know? And I guess, yeah, Chuck's laughing because I'm like kind of making those noises. You're thrusting toward me.

Right, if you're into that, great. If you're not or you, apparently it's really like, it really is pronounced. It's not something going on in the background. It's like, you know, part of it. And part of the ride. Right, so it just depends on your preferences, I think. But I think a lot of the earliest water beds

were bought by guys who were pretty confident that you'd be like, I've got a water bed, you wanna try it out. And that would happen. It became a punchline. Like, I remember, I feel like every other sitcom or movie at some point though, was a scene where they were like, oh, he's got a water bed.

Or 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, and then the water bed invariably, like they couldn't make it work cause one of them would get flopped off. Sure.

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 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.

On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey, Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey, Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay. So again, that was like the first reception to water beds. Hugh Hefner had one. He had two actually. He had one on his jet too. He, like one of the Smothers Brothers bought one, I guess,

helped his sex life out, got some Jefferson Airplane. Sure. And you bought them at head shops. And they were sold by water bed manufacturers. Again, none of whom bothered to get a license from the Charles Hall, the inventor and patent holder. Yeah. They had names like Wet Dream.

Yeah. Somebody named their company Wet Dream. And that was okay in the 70s. Let me see here. What else? Well, it's Aquarius, Joyaputic Aquabeds, Joyaputic Aquarius products, like you said, Water Works. What else?

That's all I have. I got you. I think Wet Dream, we should have stopped there. It's definitely the worst of all of them. So before this came about, Charles Hall, a couple of his early prototypes. One, it sounds sort of like a beanbag chair almost. But it was a big bag chair full of 300 pounds of liquid corn starch. Yeah.

That the idea was you would sit in it and it would develop you. It sounds like a nightmare. Yeah. Like he didn't mean for it to develop you. It was like he hadn't hit upon the water bed yet. He was trying out different substances. But yeah, you just sink in. Gross.

Right. So he moved on to Jello. For real. That didn't work either. That's not a joke, people. Yeah, it's true. He put Jello in this thing. Did not have the right temperature or consistency.

So eventually he would, thanks to vinyl really becoming a very popular thing and being used for things other than like car parts and tires and things. And O-rings. Vinyl became a hot item. So he filled up this vinyl bladder with water. Had a temperature control device on it. And 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 of intentions. I really did. And he hit upon it finally again in that 1968 Masters thesis. Well, 1968 was part of the problem. Summer of love. People were having sex all over the place.

Sure. And there's a story named Andrew Kirk who said the basically design in the late 60s was a freeform atmosphere. People were really getting, and if you've ever like, I love design museums. And if you ever go to some of these, it's kind of cool to see what they were doing in the 60s. Yeah. Because it was kind of a crazy time for design. Yeah, because a lot of people were open to trying new things.

Sure. And up to this point, you had a mattress and you were just thankful that it wasn't filled with hay. Right. You know, it had springs and you liked it. That's the way it was and you liked it. That's right. So the idea of this something totally new, like it was two things. One, this guy was trying to revolutionize sleep and it came at a time when people were

willing to like, oh, yeah, the bed's boring. Let's try something different. Right. And it just kind of came together really well. But again, it got hijacked by people who own headshots. Yeah. Well, and he was in San Francisco. It all kind of converged to work against him ironically.

But he applied for a pet and I think in 1968, but it wasn't until 1971 that it was granted because prior to his design being debuted, like 30 or so years prior, Robert Heinlein, the very famous and 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 water bed design. Yeah. The reason Heinlein even went to the trouble of, he liked to describe stuff in his books, apparently, I haven't read any of them yet.

No, but very detailed descriptions, yeah. And one of the things that he kept, that always popped up was these water beds. And apparently in the 30s, 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, he said 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 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. Yeah. Waterproof box to make it leak proof, which was another probably legitimate con for a water bed. For sure. Sometimes they would leak back then. And then some other things.

But basically it all came together to form such a robust, even though it was in a science fiction novel, that he had to like go to court and say, I don't know if he was looking for money or... Who, Heinlein? I'm not sure how it came out that Heinlein owned the intellectual property of it. If he came out and said, that's mine, or what? But by, within three years of Charles Hall coming out with this, he had the patent for it. And even way back in the 1800s, there were doctors who created one guy named Dr. Neil Arnaud, or Arnaud created a hydrostatic bed.

What's the name of it? He covered a warm bath with a rubber cloth and sealed it with varnish. And another doctor in 1893, Dr. Portsmouth, and these were basically to prevent bed sores, to relieve bed sores. And even Heinleins, he said, like you said, he cooked it up because he had been in hospitals a lot. And he was like, I'm getting killed in these hard beds. Yeah.

And the reason you would want some sort of 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 you don't want those. No. So this was to prevent bed sores. That's why the earliest physicians were coming up with them. But so finally, by 1971, Charles Hall holds the patent. And again, he wanted to create a serious sleep product.

And he founded a company called Innerspace Environments, and they were selling like the real deal, legit high-end water beds. He'd been named it seriously. Right. He opened like 32 stores in California in the early 70s and 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.

He didn't fit very well. The sheets fit on his. The temperature control was great. They were like really high-end water beds made and designed by the guy who actually designed them. The problem is, 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, and it was the knockoffs that gave water beds a bad name. Because they were fully embracing the sexy advertising.

That was part of it too. All the knockoff manufacturers. And apparently he pursued some of these, but he would have spent all his time and money pursuing patent infringement if he really tried to go after everyone. And some of these didn't make a lot of money, and it was just sort of useless to even try, so it wasn't worth his time and money a lot of times. He served a lot of people who sold water beds early, like early water bed 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 selling water beds in the early 70s. 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.

Like, man, that's the creepiest thing ever. Yeah, here, let me open up my van. You can lay on my water bed in the back of my van. You bought a size 8? With the stallion painted on the side. Oh, man, speaking of 70s, I forgot about the murals on the vans. Remember when we used to do blog posts and stuff? I made like a slideshow of vans with art on the side.

I'll see those every now and then. I think it's up still. It's good stuff. You want to take a break before we get into the straightening of water beds? Yes. Thank you. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. I couldn't come up with a better word than straightening. I apologize for that. Let me think. The, uh, I guess legitimizing, but I'm thinking like more like a boring suburbanizing of water beds. Yeah.

I mean, here's the thing. I would say the hall very much wanted to revolutionize sleep and he didn't embrace the sexual component of it, but 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. Right. I think he eventually was kind of like, yeah, 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, he didn't. He, he, his company went under by the mid seventies and he, he likens it to basically advertising to the wrong market.

Like he made quality high end water beds and it was advertising to people who could afford a more expensive quality actual legitimate water bed. When 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. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? And like the New Yorker 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 like a $2 billion, 20% of the market share industry. Right. Yeah. Like the late seventies, I think it was about a $13 million a year industry. And by 1987, I believe at its peak, it was like a $2.3 billion industry a year. And then a pretty steep, once again, grunge killed water beds. Yeah. Pretty steep fall in the nineties.

Right. In the early nineties. Yeah. 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. And the, I think it was like, it's called the flotation sleep industry is really the technical term for it. Yeah. They really wanted to get away from the sex appeal.

They totally did. That's the name. And like the stores, like you wouldn't buy a water bed in a head shop anymore. Imagine walking into a head shop and being like, what do you have a water bed here for? Yeah. You buy water beds out in the suburbs at a place called like Water Bed Plaza or something like that. Right. Or did you see that ad I sent you, the YouTube ad?

You have the Max Headroom. Yeah. Uh-huh. Country boy water beds. Everybody go under YouTube and look for country boy water bed at Max Headroom. And it's beautiful. Yeah. It's a Max Headroom ripoff.

Yeah. Selling water beds. Country boy water beds. Country boy water beds. Yeah. And I think it was from Arkansas, like a local water bed dealer in Arkansas. Texarkana, you mean? Oh, is that right?

No, I don't know. I was just guessing. But that's, I mean, like you could get water beds everywhere. Well, that's why my friend, I mean, in 1987 in suburban Atlanta for my friend to have one in high school, that kind of says it all. Right. It's not like his parents were like, I mean, they were, they were a good God fearing family. Sure.

They weren't like, yeah, we need to get Chris a sex pit. Right. It was more like they were supposedly healthy. Yeah. They were like a healthy way to sleep. Uh-huh. And also how it kind of transitioned legitimacy in a way from like just the association with sex, right?

Yeah, yeah. So, um, you have, you have like an actual bona fide water bed industry, 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's got water bottle. A big wooden box and when you wanted to get out, you had to like kind of like work up

to it and roll off the side and like bang your 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 80s, if you were a kid, a water bed was as close to a status symbol as you could possibly get. For sure.

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. Yeah. It wouldn't have even, like I wouldn't have knew better than to even ask.

I think the same with me. I don't remember ever asking for one, although I really wanted one. I think it was like a pipe dream maybe. It's not like, oh, I really want a water bed. It was such, so shut down in my mind is a possibility. Right. It was the time where we inherited mattresses from our older siblings. Right, exactly.

It was so gross. It was on the side of the road, but it looks not even too many stains on it. Kind of. Wait. Kind of? Oh, did you actually get a mattress from the side of the road? No. I'm making sure you did not.

No. Oh, okay. But just short of that. Okay. So mattress, 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 going to have a lot of weight,

depending on the size, a couple to 300 gallons of water can weigh between 1500 and 2000 pounds. And so they always and still do need a lot of structural support underneath them. Right. A large, very heavy wooden platform. Supposedly that's why New York was known as the city where the least number of water beds were ever sold. Oh, yeah. Right.

Part of it is because in major cities, there were water bed bands and leases. If you rented an apartment, you weren't allowed to have a water bed. Yeah. It was just too heavy. Yeah. I had those in my leases. Yeah. People would leave them behind.

Mm-hmm. It's like, here, you take this. You can't move them. Because even when you drain the water, the thing that held the water bed was heavy itself. The frame was super, super heavy. Yeah. 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 you, and how do you fill them up? Is it a water garden hose? You run a garden hose. Really? Yeah. That's how people did it. Wow.

Yes. And then to get it out, you needed like a pump. And you could buy all this stuff at your local water bed store, but when you buy a bed or a mattress, a regular mattress, you don't have to go buy a pump two years later because you're moving and then pump the water out of the mattress, you just move the mattress. Yeah. It does a big mark against it and the popular understanding of it. I imagine when New York too, well, the weight is enough probably to disqualify it, but just

getting a water hose up a seventh floor walk up, I'm surprised I haven't seen that movie scene where they have a rope tied around a water hose from the street level that they're bringing up through a window. Sounds like Buster Keaton. Or something like Super Sexy in the 70s. Who would that be? I don't know. It's the cat.

It's the cat. We should do a podcast on our crumb. Why haven't 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 2000s. Well, both. They did the great documentary, Crumb. And then... I can't remember which one I saw. American Splendor. That's what I saw. He was a character in it, but it was largely about...

Harvey. Harvey Picar. That's what I saw. The great, great Harvey Picar. That was a good movie. Go watch. All right. So these days, like you said, they've been brought into the modern era.

There's a foam collar around the bladder. There's spandex on top. I believe there are air pockets and things in between to sort of stabilize it. Yeah. They don't actually... You can't get seasick on them like you used to be able to. Yeah. They don't move like that.

I really want to try one of these out and 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 had what he called a motionless water bed. And now I understand what he's talking about. It's like waveless or whatever. 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 moved. Yeah, this is... No. This is something like the 90s or something like that. And I'm sure it was like a $5,000 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 not like, oh, this is a water bed.

You're just like, this is super comfortable. Right. I'm floating and weightless, but your mind's not thinking you're laying on water. Yeah. It's like down. Yeah. I couldn't have... Like aside from moving a lot when I sleep, I like to flop on the bed.

Like when I lay down, I don't lay gently on it. I will kind of throw myself into bed. Yeah. And that's the kind of thing that you can do when you're in the waterbeds or condos of the waterbeds. Especially not in the 70s, but apparently now it's fine. You could do that. Well, one of the new salesmen, they interviewed for this article said that he won't say the

name waterbed. He says, because it turns people off, he said, even if they try it and they like it and then they find out it's a waterbed, he said sometimes they won't buy it because of that weird 70s association, like with porn. Yeah. Or they're worried it's going to leak. Or they're going to have to fill it with water. Apparently I couldn't find any verification of this, but there was an urban legend at

least that you could find aquatic worms floating in your waterbed. And they started being like, oh, well, we need to add chemicals to the water. Well, then that makes it even grosser. Right. So just over time, people associated a lot of negative things with waterbeds. And then the thing that really killed the waterbed was that in the 90s, by the 90s, it was clear that America was like, sure, we'll try other things besides the interspring mattress.

Right. What do you got? And so like Tempurpedic came around. Sure. There's sleep number, all these guys who made technically alternative mattresses. Right. Our beloved Casper. Sure.

Yeah. Same thing. It follows in that tradition that the waterbed established. But Charles Hall created that market and showed that it was a real thing. And so by the time the 90s rolled around and like, I think Tempurpedic was the first one, it was like all the benefits of a waterbed without the hassle of the water, why would you want a waterbed? And that was it for waterbeds.

Yeah. And minus the creeps. Yeah. Whereas just a few years before, almost one in four, between one in four and one in five between a quarter and 20% of all water or of all mattresses were waterbeds sold in America. That's crazy. It's a lot down to nothing, down to just gone. Man, imagine the landfills of America filled with vinyl bladders.

Yeah. Just rotting. Well, rotting a thousand years from now probably. Yeah, that's true. They're probably still in pretty good shape. So one more thing about Charles Hall, well, two more things. When he went on to invent the solar shower, you know, the camping shirt. But no way.

Yeah. Those are great. And then two, he has kind of a bad name or he did at least back in 1991, I think, in that WAPO article where the waterbed industry, the industry association that formed, 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. All y'all. And they were like, what, dude, we've built this industry, you know?

We thought you were cool. What you were talking about. Kind of. And 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 Taiwanese manufacturer, that he sold shares in the outcome.

So like you could buy shares of a lawsuit crazy. And there's a common law law against it. It's called Champterie, which I had never heard of before. I haven't either. It makes total sense. It's where somebody basically pays for legal fees in order to get a piece of the action. Cut. Crazy.

Yeah. Champterie. And in California at the time, Champterie was not illegal. Is it now? I don't know if it is. Wow. But in 1991, it was not. And he sold shares for 10,000 a pop for this, for this, this lawsuit.

That's amazing. Waterbeds. They're amazing, Chuck. Jeez. That's what the episode should be titled. It's up to you. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

If you want to know more about waterbeds, well, get in a time machine, get in the way back machine, and go try one out yourself. Well, we have one in the way back machine, so it's your lucky day. It's covered in American possum. Oh boy. Since I said that, it's time for listening now. I'm going to call this one of the many replies for color blindness, too. We got a lot of responses for color blindness.

What do you mean, too? Well, I called the manager. All right. Hey, guys, I was listening to the show about color blindness with an OUR. So I assume this, oh, he's Canadian. It's going to say British. It's like British-like. Yeah.

He's still under the thumb, though. I worked in the electrical field for 10 years, and in that time, I've worked with two red-green colorblind electricians. Remember we talked about that? The first one I worked with for a few years, and he said it wasn't that difficult to tell the difference between red and green conductors, they just looked like very obvious, different shades of the same color. It only took a couple of mistakes before he was able to tell the difference.

Electrical red is a current-carrying conductor, while green is used for grounding and bonding. Like a rat in a science experiment, he explained, it only took a couple of shocks of what he thought was a bonding wire to really notice the difference. So dangerous. I know, man. The other I worked with for only a short while, because he died, but he had been an electrician for 20-plus years. It wasn't until he asked a co-worker why they thought the ground wire and a current-carrying

conductor were the same color that he even realized he was colorblind. Wow. How about that? A little slow on the uptake. Perhaps. So even though it caused some issues early on in their careers, they were both great electricians. I guess the human brain always finds a way.

That is James from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. That's cool, man. Great area. Eastern Canada. Great area. Western Canada. Fantastic. Central Canada.

Beautiful. We love it all. Yes, we do. If you're a Canadian and you want to say hi, well, get in touch with us. Go to Stuff You Should Know and click on our social media links or send us an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.