"That's when I go back East to Pittsburgh, and I lay in bed with my granddaughters and we talk about the waterbed, and how we wish we were on the waterbed!" laughed Johnson. In the last 30 years, the longest she's been away from her waterbed is two weeks. In fact, by the 1980s more than one in five of all beds sold were waterbeds.Īnd the biggest fan of the water bed? That might be Katherine Johnson, of Mesa, Arizona. "At one time we were the largest seller of beds in South Florida, and we just sold waterbeds," Koenig said. He says when people eventually fell for the beds, they fell hard. "The mattress companies that we competed with, Sealy and Simmons, those folks pretty much disregarded us to start with," said Keith Koenig, who started selling the beds in the 1970s with his brother at their store, Waterbed City, in South Florida. Coil springs were big, until waterbeds came along."ĭespite this, it actually took awhile to convince the wider public to sleep on a bag of water – and it took even longer to convince the mattress industry. Coil springs came around, and that was a big innovation. But that's the way the bedding business was until, like, 1800s. And then in the Middle Ages they moved up into something off the floor, wood rack frame around and ropes underneath tying it together. And if you're a good hunter you put in a skin or a pelt. "You put straw in there, you put leaves in there. "Beds long ago were, like, indentations in the floor of the cave," he said. To hear Hall tell it, it was the first substantial reimagining of a mattress in at least a hundred years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |