Bob Barry’s Unearthed Interviews Podcast: Charlie Hall (Inventor of the Waterbed)
One of the funniest episodes on the “Love Boat” TV sitcom was when the captain’s wife had a waterbed brought into their cabin on the ship. If you’ve been on a cruise, you know how the bed rocks and rolls during a storm at sea. Can you imagine what it would be like in a waterbed? How many of you have owned waterbeds? How many still have a waterbed? Remember when we had the groundwater waterbed commercials on the radio? Today we meet the man who looked at an ordinary mattress and thought, “You know what this needs? A few hundred gallons of water.” Before memory foam, and before sleep numbers promised to change your life, there was Charlie Hall, the revolutionary who invented the modern waterbed, one of the wildest consumer crazes ever. The waterbed had become a status symbol, a punchline, a romance prop and occasionally – a homeowner’s insurance nightmare. Let’s float through the strange history of the bed that sloshed its way into American culture with the inventive mind behind it all.
