I was having dinner the other day with my fiance and we started talking about the most random topic: waterbeds. She was telling me how her grandma had one for years growing up. I was in shock. I have never met nor seen someone who actually owned a waterbed.
I can’t even understand why anyone would ever buy one. How is sleeping in that thing comfortable? And if you live in the Midwest, what if the heater goes out when it’s below freezing in winter?
Not to mention that if that damn thing popped or got a hole in it. Bye bye floorboards (Hello Empireeee).
I guess I’m one of the rare ones who doesn’t think that they are practical. Waterbeds were all the rage in the 70s and 80s. This watershed movement (see what I did there?) was at this weird intersection between counterculture and a sexual revolution. Celebrities endorsed it (Hugh Hefner), there were wild marketing stunts and it drove an obsession among Americans who were looking for the next thing that defined them as “cool.”
All thanks to Charles Hall’s masters project at San Francisco State University. That’s not a joke. Hall was the inventor of the waterbed, and he had no idea that his class project would turn into a wonky sexual revolution.
Sleeping on Jell-O
What if I handed you some cornstarch and Jell-O and told you to make a bed out of it? You would think I was nuts. But those were some of the first materials that Charles Hall used in his Industrial Design class in 1968.
The thesis was to improve human comfort, so the first thing that came to Hall’s mind was “Let’s make the world’s most comfortable chair.” Fixing together gelatin and cornstarch, he made himself a chair, but the concept didn’t have any legs…. It started to decompose and emit noxious gas, which freaked him out. At that point it had fused with the ground and he struggled to get it out of his house (only managing to get it to the back porch).
Hall had to go back to the drawing board. He decided it might be best to collaborate with some folks who actually know some things about the human body (smart move, Hall). He did several interviews with medical doctors, trying to understand what materials could make magic happen.
After a bunch of trial and error, he decided to use water instead of goo. He assembled an 8-square foot plastic mattress and filled it with water. And that was the moment. He had a winner.
His class was obsessed with the invention. People stopped working on their own projects and would ride the waves, laying on the new plastic contraption. He called it the “Pleasure Pit” and decided to show it off at the The Cannery art gallery in San Francisco in the summer of 1968. It immediately blew up and was featured in newspapers and magazines across the country. The word was out, waterbeds were the next big thing.
Hall applied for a patent, and to his surprise, was granted it in 1969. Innerspace Environments Inc. was born. They started manufacturing water beds and delivering them in his bulky Rambler station wagon, one by one.
But this is when the story starts to get weird and takes on a mind of its own. Some early adopters really took an interest in what Hall was selling. Bands like Jefferson Airplane and celebrities like Tommy Smothers and Hugh Hefner bought beds from Hall. But you know who else loved them? Nudist colonies. And they bought several from Hall. That was the turning point when waterbeds started to become a cooky cultural phenomenon.
