Self | Culture
What We Can Learn from the Slow Disappearance of Waterbeds
Why the objects we care about could someday become cultural artifacts
When I was six, I often slept over at my buddy Justin’s house. His older sister was supposed to be our babysitter but was usually on her waterbed with her boyfriend, either making out or watching movies. If the door was cracked, we would peek inside and giggle as they plastered together like two suckerfish.
Just before leaving to run an errand, she warned us, “Don’t use my bed! I’m telling you right now, Justin!” She wasn’t supposed to do it while babysitting, and her boyfriend wasn’t supposed to be there either. Babysitting quality control was apparently absent.
So, of course, being troublemaking little brats, we started playing on the waterbed with our toys immediately after she left. Only a few minutes later, Justin jumped on the bed and accidentally stepped on one of his action figures, which had a pointed toy spear. It punctured through the mattress, and a thin stream of water sprayed vertically. We both looked in horror at it and scrambled to fix it. We managed to stem the damage — but there was no hiding this boo-boo.
Justin’s sister got home, and the screaming began. Then the parents got home, and it got worse. I’ll never forget her screaming, “Mom, he broke my bed!” Justin immediately and understandably threw her under the bus, “She left us alone and went away with her boyfriend.” And then we were all in trouble.
I’d wager most fellow millennials have at least one story involving a waterbed. And for me, that was the last one I ever saw.
The waterbed was an obscure luxury item when it first appeared in the late 1960s. By the late 1980s, nearly one in four beds sold was a waterbed, generating billions in revenue. They were all the hedonistic craze in the 1970s, with Hugh Hefner reportedly having one covered in Tasmanian Possum hair.
I was recently at a local mall and, in the spirit of writing this article, stopped into a mattress store and asked if they had any waterbeds for sale. I wanted to at least remember what they felt like. When I asked, the rep laughed, but not in a condescending way, and said, “We haven’t sold those for 20 years. You’d need to go to a specialty store for a good one.”
What happened to the waterbed? Where did they all go?
The extinction of waterbeds
The modern waterbed had a hippie following after Charles Hall, an industrial design student at San Francisco State University, created the first waterbed in 1968 for a homework assignment. After classmates complimented him on their comfort, he began manufacturing and selling them out of his home. His initial model was called “the pleasure pit” and was designed for people’s living rooms for obvious hedonistic purposes. His first model used Jell-O and then starch, but neither worked right. He went back to the basics with water and was thrilled with the result.
Then, the design evolved for bedrooms and was patented in 1971. Before long, Hall was shipping waterbeds to famous bands like the Smothers Brothers and Jefferson airplanes. He went from $13 million in sales in 1971 to $2.2 billion in 1989.
The bed was prohibitively expensive initially, but as demand rose, generic, cheaper versions were sold. Most people enjoyed the beds, but they weren’t without complications. First, they began to spring leaks, as I saw firsthand.
Weight was the other huge issue. A waterbed can hold between 80 and 235 gallons of water, depending on the type, and water is far heavier than your typical mattress foam. A large waterbed can weigh as much as 2000 pounds. A twin-size waterbed weighs 1350 pounds — while a typical foam mattress weighs between 50–200 lbs (at the very most).
Having this contained ocean of water creates physical risks — especially if there’s significant “activity” on the bed and if the building doesn’t have proper structural integrity. Specifically, if you are in an old or cheaply built house and on the second floor or higher, these beds are heavy enough to bend the joists (the horizontal wood frames under the flooring). This could damage and crack other parts of the structure and leave you with a world of expensive problems — let alone safety hazards.
If you didn’t maintain the mattress, which most people weren’t familiar with doing, you risked waking up in the water — which was uncomfortable and often led to customers blacklisting the product.
Even worse, if there’s a huge release of those 200 gallons of water that is going to seep into your structure. Smaller spills can be absorbed by the intervening woods and materials, but a sudden gush of that much water will have it raining like the Amazon on the floor below.
Why waterbeds were too cold
The chemical properties of water allow it to transfer heat energy with far more efficiency. Consequently, you usually needed a heating system attached— which was nice for people who liked a temperature-controlled mattress. But it was still one more thing that could break, and when it did, you were left shivering — or sleeping on the couch. Additionally, it took significant energy to heat up a large waterbed, which added to people’s electric bills. And if you forgot to turn it on an hour before bed during winter, you were in for a journey.
And it’s unfortunate because waterbeds are actually useful for people with back problems and for those who are paralyzed or disabled. The waterbed perfectly spreads the pressure out because it is liquid, which helps reduce the risk of bed sores.
The stubborn problem that kept coming back was that, like a hot tub, waterbeds could be high maintenance and annoying. The risk of spills, of not being able to bring it into a new place where landlords had forbidden them — all made them inconvenient. They were also quite difficult to move. You needed to drain them prior with a special vacuum — which could be messy.
And, as time passed, more horror stories of spills and mishaps trickled outwards through news networks. As is often the case, the incidents weren’t as common as networks made them seem, but they were common enough to spook buyers.
Concurrently, dry mattress technology improved rapidly —and began outperforming waterbeds, leading to their gradual decline. Today, waterbeds are still out there — in full water and hybrid forms and with sand alternatives. But their heyday is long gone.
Me? I typically buy a memory foam mattress and spend north of $2000 — not because I’m filthy rich (I’m not) but because I realized years ago that I’d be spending 30% or more of my life in bed. It was worth the investment and bypassing the discomfort, bad sleep, and back pain.
The 1980s were a weird but interesting time that I smile back upon. My aforementioned friend’s parents also had carpeting in the bathrooms, surrounding toilets, and the shower. Which sounds like an easy recipe for mold, but to each their own. Waterbeds were a glorious part of American culture and are still enshrined in 1980s horror movies, with Freddie Krueger famously pulling a teenager into one. But for the most part, waterbeds are all dried up.
Conclusions and Takeaways
It is a gentle reminder to those reading this: don’t take your “things” for granted because they may well become cultural artifacts.
I’d have never imagined a day when Toys R Us went away (though they are making a minor comeback) or that music and movies wouldn’t require physical objects because some magical cloud would do all of the work for us.
I assumed landline phones and hearing a ring echo through the house would be a shared household experience in perpetuity, but now that is almost gone, too.
Perhaps the enduring nature of other objects, like schools, cars, and restaurants, lulls us into a sense of permanence. Or perhaps it is the presumptive nature of being human: It is so easy to pine for things you don’t have and then take it for granted when you finally do. Then, when it quietly goes away, you wonder where it went.
A day may come when you explain what TikTok and movie theaters were to your kids and grandkids. So enjoy the things you love now, and remember the stories you form with them. Because someday, those stories may be all you have.
Rest in peace, waterbed.
