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Waterbeds!
"The waterbed, as we know it, got its start in California, in the late sixties. After experimenting with chairs filled with cornstarch and even Jell-o, Charlie Hall, a design student at San Francisco State University, hit upon the idea of a mattress full of water. Hall presented the water-filled mattress as his master’s thesis one evening in 1968, and his entire class spent the night frolicking on it. Thus the modern waterbed was born."
-Apartment Therapy, by Nancy Mitchell, (link)
"In Manhattan, the waterbed display at Bloomingdale's department store for a while was a popular singles meeting place. Sears, Roebuck and Holiday Inns are eying the beds, and Lake Tahoe's Kings Castle Hotel has already installed them in its luxury suites. Playboy Tycoon Hugh Hefner has one—king-size, of course, and covered with Tasmanian opossum. The growing number of manufacturers and distributors, with such appropriate names as Aquarius Products, the Water Works, Innerspace Environments, Joyapeutic Aqua Beds and the Wet Dream, can hardly meet the demand. They have sold more than 15,000 since August."
-Time Magazine, 8 Feb 1971.
There was no better place to 'find your groove' or 'do your thing' than in a shag-carpet filled room with the centerpiece being the waterbed.
I had a cousin who had one. My dad put one in (in 1980) to help his bad back. They were extremely comfortable, if not a little weird for the 'sloshing' sounds and your whole body bobbing around like a cork. They were filled with water (naturally) and covered in protective vinyl. Having a heater was a must, unless you wanted to feel a very weird clammy cold squishy vinyl imprint conform to your whole body.
They had their heyday in the hippie era, but were soon pushed out with the strangely firmer stiffer harder Futon from Japan. I guess the futon's mobility and lightweight nature made it superior to waterbeds, with their unwieldily weight and set-up time.
There was a time when you could find whole stores that did nothing but sell and maintain waterbeds. Who knows? In time people may view our dual elevating mattresses with 'sleep numbers' and remote controls just as ridiculous.
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