The Mattress

From straw to feathers, beds have a long, dust mite-filled history. Today’s mattresses promise engineering technology that puts space travel to shame

From leaves to latex, and feathers to foam, comfortable beds through the ages. ZOË MEUNIER

Pret ty much as soon as cavemen evolved enough to start sleeping horizontally, they figured out that a ‘mattress’ of some description was a clever idea. Apparently, trying to sleep with a rock in your back was no less comfortable then than it is now.

The earliest palaeontological evidence of a mattress is from an astounding 77,000 years ago. Found in a rock shelter in South Africa, the ancient bedding was only about two centimetres thick and made with alternating layers of reeds and rushes.

Natural materials – straw, leaves, grasses covered with animal skin – remained the mattresses of choice for many more thousands of years. Hey, you’ve got to work with what’s available. The Ancient Persians were the first to raise things up a notch, with Persian royalty said to have paved the way for the waterbed trend by sleeping on goatskins filled with water some 3600 years ago. We’re guessing they weren’t heated to optimum temperature and available in semi-waveless varieties, but it was a promising start.

As humans evolved, so did their sleeping arrangements – at least, the wealthy ones. Sometime between 3000 and 1000 BCE, many cultures,

starting with those clever Ancient Egyptians, began raising their mattresses off the ground – all the better to avoid sharing the bed with rats and snakes. The mattresses themselves were usually made from wool, while the beds were made from wood – for your average Joe – while your Cleopatra-types preferred a solid gold, jewel-encrusted slumber number.

Throughout the Medieval period, mattresses continued to vary greatly depending on wealth, with the poor still often sleeping on piles of leaves on the ground or on a hay sack, where ‘hitting the hay’ became a nightly necessity to dislodge bugs from one’s bed. While the wealthy opted for mattresses stuffed with down and feathers, the focus was more on the bed frames, which became increasingly ornate and made of carved wood. This era also saw the rise of four poster beds covered with curtains.

Mattresses remained largely unchanged throughout the Renaissance period, although cotton-filled mattresses started to replace down and feathers by the 18th century. It was in 1870 that the next big innovation occurred, with the invention of the first innerspring mattress. The brainchild of German Heinrich Westphal, he adapted metal coils from the seats of horse-drawn carriages to make a mattress with a firm-yet-springy sleep surface. Sadly for Westphal, fame and wealth did not immediately spring forth and he died impoverished, his creation taking a good 60 years to be adopted by mainstream consumers.

By that time, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, meaning that beds and mattresses could be mass produced. But it didn’t take long for people to realise that an open spring coil gone awry in a

mattress could be almost as

uncomfortable as a good old-fashioned rock in the back. This paved the way in the 1920s for English engineer and machinist James Marshall to patent his ‘Marshall Coil’, the first pocket sprung mattress. Consisting of individual springs in connected pockets of fabric, his concept allowed the coils to function independently of each other, tailoring to individuals’ posture and body shape. Thank you James, you saved many a bad back – and probably a marriage or two as well.

Nonetheless, as something we spend a third of our lives resting upon, plenty more attention and innovation has been laid into mattress design over the last century.

The first latex foam mattress was introduced in 1931. Latex comes from the sap of rubber trees. The Dunlop Rubber company spent several years trying to turn it into a foam, until one of their scientists had a lightbulb moment – and borrowed his wife’s cake mixer to whip the liquid latex into a soft foam. The resulting air bubbles gave the foam its unique cushioning qualities. Now, we can’t help but think if only there’d been a female scientist in that lab, perhaps they would have figured out that solution a bit sooner.

Another game changer was memory foam, aka viscoelastic polyurethane foam. First invented by NASA in the 1970s to provide better seat cushioning and crash protection for airlines, the first memory foam mattress entered the marketplace in 1991.

Praised for its ability to ‘hug’ the body, the material offers better spinal alignment and more pressure point relief, becoming an instant hit amongst the bad-back brigade. Its extreme density means it’s also resistant to those ubiquitous dust mites and their havoc-causing droppings, making them popular among allergy sufferers, too.

Better yet, memory foam’s ability to spring back to shape means you can stuff ‘em in a box, which in recent years has transformed the process of buying a mattress. Sales of a ‘mattress in a box’ have doubled in the past five years.

Meanwhile, bubbling away on the sidelines was the modern- day waterbed, developed by university design student Charles Hall in 1968 as his Master’s Thesis (for which we hope he got a High Distinction). Waterbed mattresses, with their sexy, bohemian image and pressure-point free benefits, rode the crest of a (waveless) wave through the 1970s and 1980s, accounting for 20 per cent of mattresses bought by 1986, but their sales sprang a massive leak in the 1990s and are now only five per cent of the market.

Mattresses are still evolving, with new fabrics and technologies still being discovered. Celliant-infused fabric is one of the latest advances in mattresses, with University of California-Irvine research showing people fall asleep faster on them, as it regulates your body temp and transforms body heat into infrared energy.

Other cutting edge materials include sustainable organic latex; latex with graphite, to enhance fire retardation; AntiGravity foam to provide the ultimate top layer comfort; hybrid creations; and even nanotechnology, in which a very thin sheet of carbon tubes are stacked to create a memory foam-like substance even more superior than the original.

And of course, digital technology has also come into play, because who doesn’t want a smart mattress? Eight Sleep’s The Pod can automatically adjust itself to the perfect sleeping temperature of each individual in the bed, courtesy of its Active Grid hub, which will even regulate the temperature to gently wake you up at the right time.

The ReST bed is like an airbed on steroids, with three separate layers containing special cooling and pressure devices that adjust to suit each area of your body, and can be set to automatically adjust to your needs.

And then you’ve got the Sleep Number SleepIQ technology, which not only tracks your sleep patterns throughout the night, but contains PartnerSnore Technology ... so when your bedfellow starts snoring, you can press a button to raise their head and stop the drone in its tracks. Now that’s progress.

MATTRESSES ARE EVOLVING, WITH NEW FABRICS AND TECHNOLOGIES