Traditional mattress companies figured out how to approximate the comforts of a water bed with pillow tops and foam, and most people turned away, though there were stalwarts who clung to their vinyl oddities like gear heads with an eight-track. Yet only a few years later, water beds had lost their luster. “It was about the principle of the thing more than anything else,” he said.
A jury awarded him $4.8 million, plus interest, which he shared with investors who had chipped in for his legal fees. Hall won a lawsuit against a Taiwanese manufacturer for patent infringement. You could buy baby water beds, and suites of water bed furniture, including one wince-making number in dark wood paneling, the “Captain Pedestal,” that looked like a high boy married to a schooner.īy 1991, one of every five mattresses sold was a water bed. Gone were the shin-nicking wooden frames, and the early sloshings, as water beds went waveless and mainstream, encased in soft-edged mattress forms that looked just like their coil-filled cousins. Hall was always touted as the father of the industry, he did not share in those riches, though he continued to advise a number of companies, and to design improvements to the original product, as did others.
By 1984, Waterbed Magazine fretted that its customers were aging, “edging toward the 40-year old category.” In 1986, according to the Waterbed Manufacturers Association, water bed sales reached nearly $2 billion - between 12 and 15 percent of the American mattress market - and retailers like Waterbed City, based in South Florida, were making millions of dollars. The water bed evolved nonetheless, shaking off its sleazy associations as a lame sexual prop and sight gag. (In New York City, they remain leery: Most standard leases still contain a “no-water-bed rider,” said Zach Gutierrez, a consultant at, which collects real estate data.)
There were rumors of electrocutions, and floors collapsing from the weight of all that water pouring out of defective mattresses (a king-size bed might weigh as much as 2,300 pounds, some newspapers reported) landlords got the jimjams. Hall remembered one shady seller whose product line also included “orgy butter” and fake theological doctoral degrees. Hall patented his heated, lined version, which he sold on a sturdy redwood frame, there were many, many imitators, offering cheaply made, leak-prone knockoffs for a fraction of the cost. Hall and a partner found investors, and their company, Innerspace Environments, opened more than 30 stores throughout California. “I was trying to make a better sleep experience,” he said.Įventually Mr. But he himself was no sybarite he was earnest about his invention’s benefits: how weightlessness contributed to health and well-being.