Reimagining waterbeds for modern sleepers
Inventor planning revamp of once-popular mattress to attract millennial shoppers
Millennials, the inventor of the waterbed has a message for you: You need a waterbed.
Charlie Hall, 71, is a millionaire because of waterbeds and some of the other 40 patents — including the Sun Shower solar-heated water bags for campers.
He’s planning on the waterbed making a comeback this spring.
“I don’t think a millennial has ever seen one,” Hall says about the invention he debuted 50 years ago at a “Happy Happening” art show in San Francisco.
That first waterbed was called “The Pleasure Pit” because, as the oft-repeated sales pitch went in that groovy era: “Two things are better on a waterbed, and one of them is sleeping.”
Working with a good friend of his from the waterbed days — Keith Koening, president of the City Furniture chain in south Florida — he is about to test-market Waterbed 2018.
No more rigid frame that made them hard to get out of. Now there’s foam around the edges. New materials suppress the wave action. Dual bladders allow each side of the bed to have its own temperature control.
Hall — who has two homes in California, another on the Bainbridge Is- land waterfront in Washington and a 55-foot cruiser where he enjoys the summer weather navigating around Washington’s San Juan Islands — is an inveterate tinkerer.
But are we ready for Waterbeds 2.0?
Back in May 1970, Hall’s waterbed was featured in a Playboy spread. “I remember we had to do the bed in velvet, I think maybe green velvet.”
Subtlety was not part of the original waterbed ethos.
Some came in gargantuan, fourposter wooden frames — such as the 1976 “Jungle Bed.”
It all began with Hall’s graduate school thesis at San Francisco State University. “I talked to doctors, physical therapists, even some psychiatrists, trying to put together elements of comfort that work,” he says.
After an initial (failed) attempt to mimic the effect of a whirlpool bath in a viscous starch-filled chair, Hall turned his attention to beds. He had the epiphany of using water inside a vinyl bladder, made for him by a company specializing in PVC.
Hall got an A on his thesis and the waterbed revolution was on. “We had a little shop in Sausalito and we would deliver them on top of a Rambler station wagon,” he says. Celebrities began to notice the new fad.
“One of the Smothers Brothers bought one, and somebody in Jefferson Airplane bought one. I remember we delivered that one to a big Victorian house that was painted all black. Getting the bed in there was hell,” he recalls.
In 1971 he was granted a U.S. patent for a “Liquid Support for Human Bodies,” the waterbed. But that didn’t deter copycats and it wouldn’t be until 1991 that a jury awarded Hall $6 million in a patent-infringement lawsuit. The waterbed craze lasted for nearly 20 years.
A1986 New York Times story quoted the Waterbed Manufacturers Association as saying they accounted for 12 to 15 per cent of the American bedding market, with $1.9 billion ($4.3 billion in today’s dollars) in annual sales.
Then waterbeds practically disappeared.
“Probably bad marketing,” says Hall. “It got to be price wars. Retailers were presenting $99 specials and selling a very crappy product. It spiralled down from there.”
Hall believes waterbeds changed the mattress industry. “Memory foam, pillowtop mattresses, all that stuff began to appear,” he says.
“Look at the ads for the memory foams — they read like all waterbed ads.”