text: Bainbridge Island resident and waterbed inventor Charles Hall talks about the redesigned waterbed concept that has no waves and gives better support, at his home on Thursday, Jan. 25, 2018. (Photo: Meegan M. Reid / Kitsap Sun) 
   
   BAINBRIDGE ISLAND – The waterbed was just a concept in a San Francisco art gallery, and Charles Hall was just a young graduate student floating an idea back in 1968. 
   
   Half a century, a popular subculture icon and a successful design career later, Hall wakes up on his most famous design each morning with a million-dollar view of Puget Sound and downtown Seattle. 
   
   Today he's taking another go at the waterbed, hoping it's on the verge of a comeback. 
   
   Hall, now a resident of Bainbridge Island, plans to launch a redesigned waterbed later this year. It’s a rethink of his original design from 50 years ago that removes all its negative aspects and keeps its positives, he said. 
   
   Gone is the wooden frame that made the older beds so hard to get out of, exchanged for a foam collar that surrounds the water bladder. Spandex covers the top of the mattress to give a floating sensation. A fiber insert quells waves and keeps the water bladder still. An updated temperature system keeps the water feeling just right. 
   
   “It’s a better experience all around,” Hall said. 
   
   His famous bed first launched on the West Coast all those years ago, but his new bed will launch across the country on its eastern shore. The bed will first go to a test market in a chain of Florida furniture stores later this spring or summer, before it hopefully rolls out more broadly, he said. A bed-in-a-box version you can set up yourself might also go up for sale online, Hall said. 
   
   Queen- and king-sized mattresses will be available, and a complete bed system will sell for about $2,000, he said. 
   
   Fifty years ago, Hall’s original concept began as a chair filled with a viscous cooking starch. The chair weighed about 300 pounds, the starch didn’t flow well and it was difficult to get out of, Hall said, so he abandoned the idea in favor of the bed that would launch his design career. 
   
   The idea was that it would offer better support and a temperature system that would approximate the body’s skin temperature to help a person relax and get better sleep, he said. 
   
   “A waterbed is about as pure a concept as you can get,” Hall said. “Your body is 90-some-percent water anyway, what you’re doing in an environment before you’re born is water.” 
   
   
   
   While he was touting its practical benefits, the undulating bed took off for other reasons amid the counterculture movement and sexual revolution of the 1970s. Sellers and buyers saw a sensuous appeal: Phrases like “Pleasure is a waterbed” and “Two things are better on a waterbed – one of them is sleep” began to show up on advertisements. 
   
   “The sexy part drove it for quite awhile,” Hall said. “People would look at it and they’d see this wiggle and they’d say, ‘Ooh, that’s going to be great for sex.’ That sold an awful lot of waterbeds. Then when people slept on them, they said, ‘Hey, that’s actually comfortable.’” 
   
   He laments how his product has been portrayed in movies and TV shows, where they’d always seem to be a joke, exploding or springing a leak. The sloshing got people’s attention, but it was just a sideshow, Hall said. 
   
   Waterbeds reached their heyday in the 1980s before sales tapered off. Hall moved on to other design projects, like inflatable kayaks and a solar-heated shower for campers, he said, but returned to the concept in recent years with a few tweaks. 
   
   His friend, who runs the City Furniture chain in Florida that will initially carry the new beds, feels like it’s an idea whose time has come again, Hall said. 
   
   “I think that some people will have a memory of it and want to revisit it just because they remember waterbeds and want to see how different they are,” Hall said. “And then there’ll be a generation, it’ll be a total novelty for them.” 
   
   © 2018 KING-TV ||||| Ready for the return of waterbeds? Charlie Hall, the Bainbridge Island inventor of them, has a comeback planned 50 years after their debut. And he’s looking at you, millennials, to get groovy. 
   
   Millennials, the inventor of the waterbed has a message for you. Especially those of you living right here in the Pacific Northwest, like he does. 
   
   You need a waterbed. 
   
   Charlie Hall is 71 and a millionaire because of waterbeds and some of the other 40 patents he holds. (You know the Sun Shower, with the solar-heated bags that let you bathe when camping? That’s his.) 
   
   He’s planning on the waterbed making a comeback this spring. 
   
   “I don’t think a millennial has ever seen one,” says Charlie, as everyone calls him, about the invention he debuted 50 years ago at a “Happy Happening” art show in San Francisco. 
   
   “But I have this theory that it’s a Northwest kind of thing. I feel like a lot of us spawned in a waterbed.” 
   
   And so those younger types, “Maybe they want to visit the spawning ground.” 
   
   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 City Furniture, with 16 stores 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 that some customers didn’t like. Dual bladders allow each side of the bed to have its own temperature control. 
   
   It’s not like Charlie needs the money from the Return of the Waterbed. 
   
   He has a ranch home in California wine country and another place in that state, and about 15 years ago he bought a home right on the Bainbridge Island waterfront. Looking out through the big windows, he has a straight-on, unobstructed view of downtown Seattle. During nice weather, he spends a lot of time on his 55-foot cruiser, going around the San Juans. 
   
   Still, he’s an inveterate tinkerer. He can’t help it. 
   
   That Sun Shower is part of the catalog for Advanced Elements, of which he’s co-founder, although these days not involved in the day-to-day operations. 
   
   “It keeps me young, to be active and engaged in a lot of projects,” says Charlie. 
   
   But are we ready for Waterbeds 2.0? 
   
   If history is to repeat, once again it’ll be that male customer who’ll plunk down the cash. 
   
   The ads back then sometimes featured women in slinky outfits, or no outfits at all. 
   
   By May 1970, Charlie Hall’s waterbed was featured in a Playboy magazine spread, in an issue that included a story on “The Fiery Feminists” and “An exclusive interview with William F. Buckley Jr.” 
   
   “I remember we had to do the bed in velvet, I think maybe green velvet,” remembers Charlie. 
   
   Subtlety was not part of the waterbed ethos back then. 
   
   Some came in gargantuan, four-poster wood frames such as a “Jungle Bed” advertised in June 1976 in The Seattle Times for a special sale price of $450, which is $1,953 in today’s dollars. 
   
   For Charlie Hall, it’s a long way from his days as a 24-year-old industrial design student at San Francisco State University doing his graduate school thesis. 
   
   “I always liked furniture and I wanted to address human comfort. I talked to doctors, physical therapists, even some psychiatrists, trying to put together elements of comfort that work,” he says. 
   
   For example, there are whirlpool baths taken by athletes — “letting your muscles relax, that soothing sensation associated with floating,” says Charlie. 
   
   From that came his first effort, a chair filled with a kind of viscous starch. 
   
   “It was not practical. It weighed 300 pounds, and you couldn’t move it unless you had a forklift. And you kept sinking deeper and deeper into it until it was hard to get out of,” remembers Charlie. “I also decided that a bed was more important. It’s the piece of furniture used most in the house.” 
   
   Then he had the epiphany of using water inside a vinyl bladder, made for him by a company specializing in PVC. 
   
   Charlie got an “A” on his thesis, and the waterbed revolution was on. Although it didn’t magically take off. 
   
   “We had a little shop in Sausalito, and we would deliver them on top of a Rambler station wagon,” says Charlie. 
   
   One of his customers liked the beds so much he helped raise $100,000 in funding. 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,” says Charlie. 
   
   On June 15, 1971, he was granted U.S. Patent No. 3,585,356 A for a “Liquid Support for Human Bodies,” the waterbed. 
   
   That didn’t deter the copycats, who ignored his requests for royalties or licensing fees. 
   
   It wouldn’t be until 1991 that Charlie was vindicated when a jury awarded him $6 million in a patent-infringement lawsuit against Intex Plastics, a company that imported waterbeds from Taiwan. He then began receiving licensing fees. 
   
   The waterbed craze lasted for nearly 20 years. 
   
   A 1986 New York Times story quoted the Waterbed Manufacturers Association as saying they accounted for 12 percent to 15 percent of the American bedding market, and that back then they had $1.9 billion ($4.3 billion in today’s dollars) in annual sales. 
   
   They were so popular that the California Civil Code says landlords can’t discriminate against people with waterbeds, as long as they have waterbed insurance. In Seattle there is no waterbed legislation, although some rental agreements either prohibit waterbeds or require proof of insurance. 
   
   Then waterbeds practically disappeared. 
   
   “Probably bad marketing,” says Charlie. “It got to be price wars. Retailers were presenting $99 specials and selling a very crappy product. It spiraled down from there.” 
   
   Sometimes, he says, what was sold to college kids was just the bladder — no frame. “You can imagine a bag of water on a college dorm floor. Not a good idea,” he says. 
   
   Charlie says that there also were a lot of myths associated with waterbeds. 
   
   Like they were so heavy that they crashed through the floor. No, he explains, “Forty pounds per square foot is a normal building load on a residential floor. Waterbeds don’t even come close. It’d be a third or less.” 
   
   Or, they’d leak all over the place. No, says Charlie, “They have safety liners that take care of any leak issues.” 
   
   He does say that it was because of waterbeds that the mattress industry changed. It showed you didn’t have to settle for some rigid spring coil bed. 
   
   “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.” 
   
   Now it’s a new day. 
   
   Fifty years later, don’t you think this could fit you, too? 
   
   Seattle Times, June 8, 1978, in a feature about waterbeds: 
   
   “ … the avant-garde youth took to them like protest marches.”
target: – Waterbeds were all the rage back in the 1970s before all but disappearing the following decade. Now the original inventor plans a big comeback in the new millennium. Fittingly, he sees millennials as the key to that revival, reports the Seattle Times. “I don’t think a millennial has ever seen one,” 71-year-old Charlie Hall tells the newspaper. Hall is betting that a slew of improvements—temperature control, calmer waves, etc.—will once again make the beds a must-have for the younger generation when they hit the market later this year, initally at the City Furniture chain in Florida. King- and queen-sized mattresses will be available, and those looking to indulge can expect to pay about $2,000, reports KREM2. “I think that some people will have a memory of it and want to revisit it just because they remember waterbeds and want to see how different they are,” says Hall. “And then there’ll be a generation, it’ll be a total novelty for them.” Both stories recount the colorful history and risque marketing that helped make the original waterbeds popular 50 years ago. Consider that the first one was called "The Pleasure Pit," and came with a not-too-subtle slogan: “Two things are better on a waterbed, and one of them is sleeping.” Hall does indeed own the patent for the waterbed, and he's had other successful inventions over the years, including a solar-heated shower for campers.