Innovation: Who Made That Water Bed?

Photograph from Charles Hall

In the late 1960s, a design student named Charlie Hall embarked on an independent project to explore the idea of comfort. He poured a cornstarch-based gel into an enormous vinyl bag, sealed it and climbed on top. He felt as if he were levitating, his body cradled in the gel that molded around him. But there were drawbacks: the chair began to stink after a few days, and it weighed 300 pounds. "Unless you had a forklift in your living room, it was an impossible piece of furniture," he says. Hall switched to water as his filler. And he decided to build a mattress instead of a chair; since people rarely move their beds, the weight wouldn't matter so much. Plus, he says,"It's the piece of furniture you spend the most amount of time in."

Hall built the demo model in his house in Haight-Ashbury and invited his design class from San Francisco State University to stop by and critique his project. "Somebody got a bottle of wine," Hall says. "The party didn't stop until everybody got too tired and went home." It was 1968, just after the Summer of Love, and he had created a heated bed that undulated, seeming to hold you in its embrace.

Soon Hall set up a studio where he handcrafted his water beds; he sold them by word of mouth. "One went to a Smothers Brother, another to a Jefferson Airplane member," Hall says. "We would deliver these things all over Marin County and San Francisco on top of a Rambler station wagon. I did make one for Hugh Hefner, upholstered in green velvet."

Within a few years, competitors offered knockoff water beds for less than $100 — and the mattress became notorious for leaks and deflations. But Hall says that what really sank the water bed was the installation: "Generally, a professional would come in and fill it up, then set up the frame, the heater, this and that. It was a lot of work to put in. So when people made a move, often the water bed got left behind and they opted for a simpler solution."

Still, even if we rarely sleep on them today, the water bed may have transformed our ideas about comfort. "It used to be 'firmer is better,' " Hall says, until "water beds changed what people look for in a mattress. The Tempur-Pedic and the memory-foam things and pillow tops are all about making a bed conform to you."

HE KNOWS WHEN YOU ARE SLEEPING

Robert Oexman, director of Kingsdown's Sleep for Life Institute, helped design Sleep Smart, a mattress that analyzes the sleeper's body. Priced at about $8,500 (for queen size).

How does the mattress monitor your sleep habits? The bed has sensors in it that measure your body. It takes into account your height, your weight, the distribution of your weight, the width of your shoulders, the width of your waist, the width of your hips, the amount of lumbar curve you have and the flexibility of that lumbar curve. After you've been on the bed for about two weeks, the system has learned your sleeping behavior. So the bed decides: "You're 86 percent sleep-efficient. I want to do better than that." And the bed makes adjustments.

Have you slept on this thing? Yes. I could see my sleep patterns change by watching what happens inside my mattress. So if I chose to go out and have two cocktails for dinner, I could see that impacted my sleep.

You mean that you plug your smartphone into the mattress and look at a display? Yes, I get onto my phone and pull up my sleep stats. There's an app that comes with the bed, and the consumer can answer questions in a sleep diary. So the consumer could send this data to the Sleep for Life Institute. We would then help them solve their problems with their environment, their behavior and sleep equipment — like a pillow or a comforter.