Groovy then, very cool now and
By Burl Burlingame
still touted as a great tool for two things
—'one of them is sleep'
Star-BulletinRIP Van Winkle only slept 20 years. If he'd passed out on a waterbed, maybe Rip's nap would have lasted 30 years. For it was three decades ago this summer that San Francisco State grad student Charles Hall designed a revolutionary piece of furniture that combined both firmness and flexibility.
At first, Hall tried liquid starch, then tinted jelly inside plastic bags. The results were just this side of haunted-house-creepy. But then, like any conscientious design student, he simplified, and then simplified his simplifications, opting for tap water inside a mattress-shaped vinyl bladder.
It worked. It rocked and rolled like something alive, bringing the sense of tidal forces to the realm of sleep, and proved to be surprisingly comfortable, nearly therapeutic. Hall tweaked the design, making it a "combination of bed, lounging area and conversation piece, equipped with lighting, stereo and temperature control," he recalled in a recent interview. He called it the "Pleasure Pit" and unveiled it at The Cannery, a San Francisco gallery.
By Ken Ige, Star-Bulletin
Waveless lumbar tubes are a feature in the
high-end waterbed models.
"It was a slow August news day," he says. "It made front pages all across the country."Backers materialized, and Hall created Innerspace Environments to crank out the first "waterbeds." Lining up were the Jefferson Airplane, a Smothers brother, the Grateful Dead. Publicists got them featured on television comedies ("I Love Lucy") and in movies ("Cactus Flower.")
Waterbeds became an emblem of the "oh-wow" era, along with bead curtains, lava lamps and black-light posters. They promised new-age restful snooze to a gen-eration interested in personal comfort.
"I wanted to invent a bed that would replace the innerspring mattress," Hall said, who still has three waterbeds in his California home. "When a waterbed is adjusted right, the comfort is unsurpassed."
But that's not what sold waterbeds.
As one manufacturer's ad promised at the time, "Two things are better on a waterbed. One of them is sleep."
Get it? We're talking about sex. Simple old-fashioned shagging was supposedly elevated by the rhythmic backwash of surging liquid.
Hotels rushed them into bridal suites. Hugh Hefner installed a king-size waterbed covered with Tasmanian opossum fur at his Playboy mansion.
"People would just look at them and get erotic thoughts," said Hall. He became a rich man off the basic patent. Waterbeds were the stuff dreams were made of.
And nightmares. Waterbeds were the stuff of early urban legends, with scary stories of floods, collapsing bedroom floors, chilly vinyl, seasickness, algae farms and electrocution passed along.
And, inevitably, whenever a waterbed was featured on a TV comedy, floods followed.
"These shows didn't promote the product very well," said Hall. "There was always water squirting everywhere. In fact, the beds wouldn't squirt. There was no pressure."
A fully loaded "bladder" water mattress can easily weigh a ton and many rental agreements in Hawaii prohibit them to this day. But there's waterbed insurance available for roughly $15 a year to cover any potential dampening.
Jill Pike-Madsen of New Wave Waterbeds at Hickam Air Force Base Exchange, who's been selling waterbeds in Hawaii for 16 years, said she's never heard of a waterbed accident.
Waterbeds became accepted by the mainstream and are rippling away in an estimated 35 million U.S. homes. Sales have steadied, after a high in the mid-'80s, at something like 2 million a year. They're standard equipment in rehabilitation centers and burn units, and also in the rear cabs of long-haul trucks, because, no matter what angle the truck is parked, the bed is self-leveling, thanks to gravity."
The new waterbeds have headboards and adjustable surface tension, water temperature and wave action. They're also likely to come in a modular design called "tubes," in which long narrow mini-waterbeds are laid side by side like squeezes of toothpaste. Add a few more tubes, and your single bed becomes a queen or a king-size.
"A lot of waterbeds these days are combinations of regular mattress styles and waterbed cells," said Pike-Madsen. With a hard-foam liner and an insulating pad, they don't even need a heater.
Heaters are good if you suffer from arthritis, and can crank it up to sooth muscles and joints. Otherwise, heaters are used to hold the water at a steady 83 degrees, enough to take the chill off, unless you prefer a cool bed.
Waterbeds are also good for children with allergies. "Traditional mattresses with ticking attract dust mites, but water beds can just be wiped down," said Pike-Madsen.
Another newer feature is a "waveless" baffle added to the cell interior, actually, threads of a dense fiber that absorb the roiling water. A waveless waterbed rocks just once when you lie on it.
Another advantage of the tube cells is that, while the fore-and-aft motion of the waterbed is intact (or dampened if the cells contain the waveless fiber), the side-to-side yawing motion vanishes. Each side of a double bed can be made stiffer or softer by varying the pressure inside the cells.
"And a little person like me can easily pick up one cell and empty or fill it, and I wouldn't be able to budge a bladder-style waterbed," said Pike-Madsen. The tubes are a standard size, and can be mixed and matched no matter where they're manufactured.
If a tube is punctured, only a couple of gallons of water would escape, not a tsunami.
The water is treated with a $5 compound that both kills algae and keeps the vinyl supple. Chlorine, like for swimming pools, is too harsh.
Waterbed prices are roughly the same as conventional mattresses, running from several hundred dollars to a couple of thousand for a swank set-up that includes a wooden canopy with ceiling mirrors.
New Wave has a small showroom at the base exchange. Surprisingly, they are the only Oahu source for waterbeds at the moment. (Another outlet listed in the phone book has closed its retail outlet.) New Wave will dispatch a sales rep to your business or home, however, if you don't have military-access privileges.
But the military market has proved to be solid customer base for New Wave. Pike-Madsen speculated that it might have to do with the military's insular culture, plus the requirement of regular moving. Once the water is drained out, waterbeds are much lighter, smaller and easier to move than traditional box-frames. The "big box" that holds the waterbed also doubles as storage space in cramped military housing.
With little urging, Army Lt. Pete Eilskov flopped down on a bladder-style bed and rode the waves with a big smile on his face. He probably wasn't even born yet when Hall invented the waterbed. "I always wanted a water bed," he said. "All through college I slept on second-hand mattresses that were hard as a board. So I got a waterbed a few weeks ago.
"I didn't want one that would make me seasick, and it doesn't. It's just like a nice soft mattress that supports me all over, even in the small of my back. It's great."
Will it be easy to move around when you transfer out?
Eilskov's eyes were closed as the water rocked him like a baby. "Dunno," he said. "Check back in a couple of years when I have to drain it."
With reports from Scripps Howard
