Stuff You Should KnowWaterbeds came and went pretty quickly in the United States, but despite their marketing as sex beds, they were actually invented to deliver a great night's sleep. Learn all about these super 70's beds in this classic episode.
Hello everyone. It's Chuck here on a Saturday, and today's select episode is called water Beds Colan the Sexiest bed Oh me thinks, yes, indeed, this episode is from October, also the sexiest month. Check it out now. Water Beds. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there, and we're just here jiggling away slash slash on our pleasure pit. God oh man, it's so funny. When I started researching and so I was like, water beds, that's very stuff you should know. So sort of fits right in with our historical pop culture phenomena series. Phenomenal uh and big shout out to The Atlantic, one of our favorite rags. A lot of this was taken from article by Rebecca Greenfield. Uh, and then a bunch of other cool uh supplementary stuff. New York Times, who else? Uh? Washington Post, Washington Yeah, wap open all those fake news outlets, right, although I really love the New York Times and the Washington Post ones because they were like contemporary articles. Yeah, like the New York Times one was six and Wapo was from and they're writing about the phenomena of of um water beds at the time. I love that, man. I love being able to go back read an article and then go back and see how it actually unraveled, like in real time. Basically, yes, see, like sure, it's a little time capsule if you will, and you can look back now and say, they get it right. What's the big news? I don't even like saying this two words together. I know neither so played out, so played All right, let's talk about the water bed. Have you ever had one? No, I kind of wanted one. I didn't have one. I kind of wanted one to. I think we're just of that age and they came about, as you'll see, we're gonna talking about the seventies and eighties. That in the eighties is when they peaked sales wise. I think even like young uns like us, we're very intrigued. Oh yeah, my friend had one. Yeah, did you sleep on it? No, never slept on that one. I laid down on it once, I think because I was I was like, I gotta know what this feels like at least uh, And I think it was. They may have called it waveless, but I don't even know what the difference was because it was pretty wavy. What decade was this, This would have been mid to late eighties. Yeah, I don't even they had waveless ones back then. I think so they were called waveless, but I don't know how it's still slashed you around. Yeah, I remember very distinctively laying on it, and I remember thinking, I don't know if I could sleep on this. It didn't seem like I mean, it wasn't uncomfortable like it caused me pain, but I move around a lot in my sleep, so it's not It's not a good or at least the old school water beds are not a good match for me. Memory phone is a little better. Actually, supposedly they've come a long way, and then the new water beds are the bomb. I would be curious to lay on one. Well, go to a dealer in South Florida. I think City Furniture in South Florida is bringing back the water bed. Oh there's other places too, because the design now, well we'll get to it, but it's much different. It's not it's not the good old days where you just fill up a big vinyl rubber bladder and tripping on some grass and listening to Dark Side of the Moon. You know. The funny thing about my friend Chris's water bed, though, in his whole house was a time capsule of the nineteen seventies. He had a water bed in front of a wall that the wall was a photograph of a like a Hawaiian beach sunset. Oh man, we had two of those in my house. Really. We had one was a straight up forest. So I was like, oh, I'm in the family room. I'll walk into the kitchen. Oh my god, I'm in the forest basically. And then if you went upstairs, and this is my childhood home in Toledo, Ohio, Um, when you went upstairs to my sister's rooms, you when you got right up to the top landing, there was like an outdoor like Coors beer scene, like in the woods with like a stream coming through the mountains. Giant murals. In my house. Yeah, we never It's weird. Like when I look back at the house I grew up in, it didn't have any of those cool seventies things. But now that I look back, I think it's probably you know, I was not cool then because we lived in this huge house in the woods. But now I look back, I'm like, that was where I would like to live now, So what was the aesthetic of your house? Sort of contempo country Okay, like that hip like Jerry Read or something lived there. Yeah, I mean we had looking back, we had shag carpet, range, shag carpet. There were some markings of the day. Um. But then that was replaced with hardwoods at some point in the in the eighties. Um. But then when I had, you know, not too long ago, went back to my childhood home and broke in. It was for sale really and empty, and uh you broke in? Well, not for sale, it was just sort of derelict and empty. Did you break a window to break in? Now? I just got in like I used to get in. It was family was like it's locked, and I was like watch this. I used to sneak out and read Bible passages, so I snuck in through the garage window. And looking back, there was a lot of a lot of the same stuff was there, and it was very kind of seventies tile and linoleum and stuff like that, but it just wasn't full on like Brady Bunch stuff. That's so cool more or wall murals, and I'm glad I went because sadly it is no longer there. I'm glad you went to. Then a couple of months later just torn down, and I went back and saw a big emptiness, and I cried, did you the end? I could see that, you mean? And I went to Toledo and then I since went once. When we went to Cleveland for our show, I went by myself and walked around, kind of hoping that the people who live in the house would be like, what's that weird of doing and stick their head out and be like can I help you? And I'd be like, yeah, actually, can I come in your house? Um? But no one did. But I did get to walk around the neighborhood. Did you cry a little nice? But I I saw. I wanted to go back to my elementary school, and it's just like a grass field now. Man, It's like, how do you tear down an elementary school? You know? Yeah, maybe it got like black mold or something, well tube, but it's it's sweet. It's better sweet to go back. Yeah, go back to your childhood places. Everyone. I highly highly recommended so water bed Yeah, water beds Um, we'll go back to the earliest history, I guess. But um, the man that we really need to talk about is a man named Charles Hall, the inventor of the modern water bed as we know it. He's a student at San Francisco State. He's taking a design class. Oh he was like a design major. Well, yeah, because he submitted this as his master's thesis, was the waterbed. How awesome is that? So I saw competing stuff of what he actually created like built, yeah. Yeah. And the thing that I saw, I think it was in that WAPO It said what he created was called the pleasure pit, and it was an eight foot by eight foot basically water bed tub of pudding, but it was meant to be a conversation pit from mold pull people that kind of hang around in and there was like a bar and there was lighting and like shelves and stuff like that, and that that was the original his design. Yeah. But was there a water mattress function or was it just a sunken going room. No, that was the thing that was where everybody sat was on a water mattress in the middle. It sounds awful, it's just weird, but it really caught everybody's imagination. Supposedly, within six months it was on the front page of papers across the country. This is in San Francisco. The Miami Herald had something on the front page about this waterbed exhibit in San Francisco that this four year old design student created capital p capital p uh yeah, pleasure pit. Everything I've seen is it's capitalized. But that's what I'm saying. I think that's what he called the first thing. But it very quickly got turned into a bed. The water bed I used to like. Actually, my same friend Chris had one of those sunken living rooms very seventies. Remember in um, oh, what's the big Lebowski when you go see to see Jackie Child or Jackie whatever. Jackie Treehorn. Yeah, Jackie Treehorn. His whole house is just amazing. Yeah. He had a conversation pit. Uh right, conversation pit, that's what it was called. So here's the deal from Time magazine. In Manhattan, the waterbed display at Bloomingdale's Department store for a while was a popular singles meeting place. Sire's Roebuck and Holiday Inns are eyeing the beds and Lake Tahoe's King Castle Hotel has already installed them in luxury sweets and this is uh. I think it continues. Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner has one king's size, of course and covered with Tasmanian bossom. I thought, how gross is that? Because what I know is a possum is different different. I looked up the TASMANI impossible, super soft, I would imagine. And so it's not like American road kill on your water bed. Right, It wasn't even made from it. It It just had a bunch of live American possums on his bed and his water bed you have was really weird. But here's the deal. The water bed that Charles hall Cree eventually would go on to create, and we'll talk about some of his earlier designs aside from the pleasure bit, he wanted to revolutionize sleeping. Yeah, he meant it very seriously. He wanted to have a pressure point free mattress that would envelope your body and give you the best night sleep of your life. He had no intention of it becoming this, which it very much did. A metaphor for the sexy sixties and seventies, right, but it definitely did like you say it was. It's a really good example of an idea just basically getting hijacked big time. And at first he was kind of like, I'm just a twenty four year old design suit. Now, I don't care. Sure, make your own waterbed knockoff. But then over time he definitely came to care and spent a couple of decades pursuing um infringement suits here and there, patent infringement suits um, which we'll talk about later. But at first it was basically like, here's the waterbed world, and the world went nuts. Uh. And again, yeah, he meant a revolutionized sleep, but the hippies and the people who owned head shops, which is where you bought your water beds early on was at the head shop, said no, this is all about sex. And that's how that's how it was first sold in the late sixties and early seventies. I have never had sexual intercourse on a waterbed, but it doesn't it doesn't sound appealing to me, right because so one of the in this, I think the Washington Post article quote a Washington Post article from the seventies saying like a waterbed salesman said, it's very like, very much like three people are having sex because the bed itself is like a third warm body participating in the motion or something like in the worst possible way. And I looked up Yeah, I was like, it's just weird. And I looked up um like sex on a water bed on um on a work computer? Right, uh oh yeah, the word computer is supertained now um. And the I found like this one. I can't remember the website, but it's basically like pros and cons. And it sounds like it comes down to your preferences, you know, like what what like are you into your motions being exaggerated? You know? And I guess, yeah, Chuck's laughing because I'm like kind of making right, Um, if you're into that, great, if you're not, or you're um, apparently it's really like you. It really is pronounced. It's not something going on in the background. It's like, you know and right, So it just depends on your prefer says I think. But I think a lot of the earliest water beds were we're bought by guys who were pretty confident. They could be like, I've got a water bed, you want to try it out, and that that would happen. It became a punch line, like I remember, I feel like every other sitcom or a movie at some point there was a scene where they were like, oh, he's got a water bed, or he would just slowly open the door to reveal the water bed, and that meant only one thing. It did master lover right, So the the and then the waterbed invariably like they couldn't make it work because one of them would get flopped off or somebody would make it spring a leak, and then the leak would just go everywhere. Whenever water beds appeared in TV and movies like it went badly. All right, let's take a break. I'm all hot and bothered. We'll come back and we'll talk about some of Charles Hall's early designs right after this. Okay, So again, that was like the first reception to water beds. Hefner had one, he had to actually had one on his jet to um he uh, like one of the Smothers brothers bought one. I guess help his sex life out, guy from Jefferson Airplane. And you bought them at head shops and they were sold by waterbed manufacturers again, none of whom bothered to get a license from the Charles Hall of the inventor and patent holder. But they had names like wet Dream. Somebody named their company wet Dream and that was okay in the seventies. Let me see here, what else Aquarius, Joyapeutic, aqua beds, Joyapeutic, Um, Aquarius products. Like you said, water work, what else? That's all I have? I think wet Dream. We should have stopped there. Um, it's definitely the worst of all of them. So before this came about, Charles Hall a couple of his prototype early prototypes. Um. One, it sounds sort of like a bean bag chair almost, but it was a big bag chair full of three hundred pounds of liquid corn starch that the idea was you would sit in it and it would envelop you. It sounds like a nightmare. Yeah, Like he didn't mean for it to envelop you. It was like he hadn't hit upon the water bed yet. He was trying out different substances. But yeah, you just sink. Can't gross, all right? So he moved on to jello for real, and that didn't work either. That's not a joke, people. He put jello in this thing did not have the right temperature or consistency. So eventually he would thanks to um thanks to vinyl really but coming a very popular thing. Uh and and being used for things other than like car parts and tires and things and oh rings, Vinyl became a hot item. So he filled up this vinyl bladder with water, had a temperature control device on it. Uh. And the the idea there was not to have some hot bed, but to sink up to your body temperature, right, so your muscles would relax. Yeah, he had the purest of intentions, I really did, and he he hit upon it finally and again in the Masters thesis. Well, was part of the problem. Summer of love. People are having sex all over the place. And uh, there's a story named Andrew Kirk who said the basically design and then late sixties was a free form atmosphere people were really getting. And if you've ever, like I love design museums, if you ever go to some of these, it's kind of cool to see what they were doing in the sixties. Um, because it was kind of a crazy time for design. Yeah, because a lot of people were open to trying new things. Up to this point, you had a mattress and you were just thankful that I wasn't filled with Hey, you know, it had springs and you liked it. That's the way it was, and you liked it. Um. So the idea of this something totally new, like it was two things. One, this guy was trying to revolutionized sleep, and it came at a time when people were willing to like, oh, yeah, it's the beds boring, let's try something different. And it just kind of came together really well. But again it got hijacked by people who owned Headshot well, and he was in San Francisco. It all kind of converged um to work against him, ironically, but he he applied for a pet and I think in nineteen sixty eight, but it wasn't until nineteen seventy one that it was granted because prior to his design being UM debuted, like thirty or so years prior, Robert Heinlein, the very famous in prolific science fiction writer, he had basically described water beds so frequently and in such detail that he was considered the intellectual property holder of waterbed design. Yeah, the reason Heinlin even went to the trouble of he liked to describe stuff in his books apparently haven't read any of them yet, but very detailed descriptions. Yeah, and one of the things that he kept he that always popped up was these water beds. And apparently in the thirties he spent a lot of time in hospital beds, so he was just imagining how they could be improved. And he described water beds almost exactly like Charles Hall had described them. Yeah, he said, UM, A pump to control water level, side supports to permit one to float rather than simply lying on a not very soft water filled mattress. Thermostatic control of temperature, safety interfaces to avoid all possibility of electric shock, which was a big sort of urban legend at the time. You can be electrocuted if you have vigorous sex. Waterproof box to make it leakproof um, which was another probably legitimate um Cohn for a water bed. Sometimes they would leak back then uh, and then some other things. But basically it all came together to form such a robust all even though it was in a science fiction novel that he was he had to like go to court and say, I don't know if he was looking for money or who. I'm not sure how it came out that Highland owned the intellectual property of it. If he came out and said that's mine or what. But by within three years of Chris or Charles Hall coming out with this he um, he had the patent for it. And even way back in the eighteen hundreds there were doctors who created One guy named Dr Neil or No or are Not created a hydrostatic bed. He covered a warm bath with a rubber cloth and sealed it with varnish. And another doctor in Portsmouth, and these were based to prevent bed sores, to relieve bed sores, and even highlands he said, like you said, he cooked it up because he had been in hospitals a lot. Yeah, he's like he's getting killed in these hard beds. Yeah. And the reason you would want some sort of um water filled bed for a hospital is because people are laying around in bed all the time and when you have skin covering like a bony layer, you get bed ulcers and you don't want those now. So this was to prevent bed sores. Um that's why the earliest physicians were coming up with them. But so finally by one Charles Hall holds the patent and again he was he wanted to create a serious sleep product and he founded a company called Inner space environments, and they were selling like the real deal, legit high end water beds. He even named it seriously right. He opened like thirty two stores in California in the early seventies, and and UM had a factory like he was doing it right. His did not leak. One of the things that water beds were very much known for is that the sheets would pop off. Yeah, very well, because sheets fit on his UM. The temperature control was great. They were like really high end water beds made and designed by the guy who actually designed them. The problem is he didn't really pursue any patent stuff, and so there were knockoffs out of the gate, and it was the knockoffs that leaked. It was the knockoffs that had terrible temperature control UM and it was the knockoffs that gave water beds a bad name because they were fully embracing the sexy advertising. That was part of it too, all the knockoffs manufacturers and apparently he pursued some of these, but it's he would have spent all his time and money pursuing a patent infringement if he really tried to go after everyone. And some of these didn't make a lot of money, and it was just sort of use list to even try, so it wasn't worth his time and money. A lot of times he said to a lot of people who sold water beds early, like early waterbed dealers. Basically they were just trying to make some fast money so they could go start a pot farm in Oregon. That was like, that's who was selling water beds in the early seventies. It also has one of the creepiest lines ever in the Atlantic article that said something about when Charles Hall initially was selling water beds out of the back of his van, right like, man, that's the creepiest thing ever. Yeah here, let me let me open up my van. You can lay on my water bed in the back of my van with with the stallion painted on the side. Oh man, speaking of seventies, I forgot about the murals on the vands. Remember we used to do blog posts and stuff I made like a slide show. I remember that vans with art on the side, see those every now and then? Gets up. Still, it's good stuff. You want to take a break before we get into the the this straightening of water beds. Yes, sorry, I couldn't come up with a better word than straightening. I apologize for that. Let me think, I guess legitimizing, but I'm thinking like more like a boring, suburbanite zing of water beds. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. We say that Hall very much wanted to revolution I sleep and he didn't embrace the sexual component of it. But he sold a lot of water beds, and he kind of knew why a lot of these people were buying him, and he wasn't like, I don't think he was so pious that he was like, no, I don't want to sell them for that reason. I think he eventually was kind of like, you know that that's why people bought him, and that was okay. But I don't think he just I don't think he cheapened his own advertising that way. No, he didn't, and he actually he his company went under by the mid seventies and he he likens it to UM basically advertising to the wrong market, Like he he made quality, high end water beds UM and it was advertising to people who could afford a more expensive quality, actual legitimate water bed wearing. At the time, it was like, you know, Randall Pink Floyd and his friends were the actual customers of water beds. That's who was buying water beds, and they weren't seeing the ads that Charles Hall was putting out there, you know what I'm saying, in like the New York or whatever. Yeah, and so he missed the heyday. He was sort of in the early heyday. But I think in the eighties is when it became like a two billion dollar of the market share industry. Right, Yeah, like the late seventies, I think it was about a thirteen million dollar a year industry, and by seven I believe at its peak it was like a two point three billion dollar industry a year, and then a pretty steep once again grunge killed water beds. Yeah, pretty steep fall in the nineties, right in the early nineties. But the way that it built up before it fell was more companies got into it, kind of legitimized it. I believe that there was a trade association that developed UM and the I think it was like it's called the floatation sleep industry is really the technical term for it. UM. They really wanted to get away from the sex appeal and like this stores like you would you wouldn't buy a water bed in a head shop anymore. To imagine walking to a hedgehop and being like, what do you have a water bed here? For? Um? You buy water beds out in the suburbs at a place called waterbed Plaza or something like that. Or did you see that ad I sent to the YouTube adom. Yeah, country Boy water beds. Everybody, go go under you YouTube and look for country Boy water bed at Max Headroom and it's beautiful. Yeah, it's Max Headroom rip off selling water beds country Boy water beds by water bed h And I think it was from Arkansas, like a local waterbed dealer in Arkansas, tex Arcana. You mean, oh, is there right now? I don't know, but that's I mean, like you could get water beds everywhere. Well that's why my friend, I mean in seven in suburban Atlanta. For my friend to have one in high school, that kind of says it all. It's not like his parents were like I mean they were. They were a good, god fearing family and we're like, yeah, we need to get Chris a sex pit. It was more like they were supposedly healthy. Yeah, they were like a healthy way to sleep. I think that's also how it kind of transitioned the legitimacy and away from like just the association with sex. Right, So um, you have you have like an actual bona fide water bed industry. Um with actual water beds. One of the one of the ways that this industry was able to establish itself was they made vast improvements over the early models of water beds. It used to be that you had a just basically like a big bladder, a vinyl bladder that big water, big wooden box, and when you wanted to get out, you had to like kind of like work up to it and roll off the side and knee. Yeah, you had to bang your knee on the way out. They leaked. There was a lot of problems with it. But then they started like improving upon it to where like the water bed was actually like this one article, I think it was a mental floss article that I found said that in the eighties, if you were a kid, a water bed was as close to a status symbol as you could possibly get. You know, Oh yeah, I mean it was aspirational. Yeah, there's no when I say, no chance my parents would have bought me one, It wouldn't have even like I wouldn't a new bed are than to even ask I think the same with me. I don't remember asking for one, although I really wanted one. I think it was like a pipe dream. Maybe it's not like, oh, I really want a water bed. It was such so shut down in my mind as a possibility, like this is the time where we inherited mattresses from our older siblings. It was so gross. It was on the slide road. But it looks too many stains on kind of uh wait, kind of Oh did you actually get a mattress from the side of the road. I'm making sure you did not know, but just short of that, okay, um, so mattress. The water beds then, and now one of the knocks against them is there they are very heavy. There's no way around it. If you fill up a mattress with water, even partially, you're gonna have a lot of weight. Depending on the size, a couple to three gallons of water can weigh between fifteen hundred and two thousand pounds. And so they always instilled do need a lot of structural support underneath them, a large, very heavy wooden platform. Supposedly that's why New York was known as the the city where the least number of water beds were ever so I can't imagine. Part of it is because like in in major cities there were like waterbed bands and leases, like if you rented an apartment, you weren't allowed to have a water It was just too heavy. Yeah. Um, people would leave them behind. Like here you take this because even when you drain the water, like the thing that held the water bed was heavy itself. The frame was super super heavy. It was like a bookcase that you didn't really want anymore. You just leave it behind. That's what happened to water beds. I didn't see, and I don't How do you fill them up? Is that you water? That's how people did it. Yes, And then to get it out you needed like a pump, and you could buy all the stuff in your local waterbeds store. But you know, when you buy a better mattress, a regular mattress, you don't have to go I have pumped two years later because you're moving, you know, and then pump the water out of mattress. He just moved the mattress. That was a big, big mark against it in the popular understanding of it. I imagine in New York too, well, the weight is enough probably to disqualify it. But just getting a water hose up a seventh floor walk up. Uh. Yeah, I'm surprised. I haven't seen that movie scene where they're like have a rope tied around a water hose from the street level that they're bringing up through a window. It sounds like Bust your Keaton or something like Super Sexy in the seventies. Who would that be? I don't know. Okay, we should do a podcast on our crumb Have we done that? Any day? Any day? Buddy? That was like a dare. I can't remember if I saw them. Was it a movie or a documentary on him? It was a movie that came out in the early two thousands. Well both they did the great documentary Crumb Um and then when I saw American Splendor, that's what I saw. He was a character in it, but it was largely about Harvey PEAKR. Yes, the Great Harvey Peak. That was a good movie. Um. All right, so these days, uh, like you said, they've been brought into the modern era. Um, there's a foam collar around the bladder, their spandex on top. Um. I believe they are air pockets and things in between to sort of stabilize it. Yeah, they don't actually they don't. You can't get seasick on them like you used to be able to move like that. I really want to try one of these out and just see what it feels like. I don't want one, I don't think, but I do want to see what the sensation is like. One of my friends back in high school, their parents had a what he called a motionless water bed. Um And now I understand what he's talking about. It's like waveless or whatever. Um, but it just felt like laying on a feather bed, just the most comfortable feather bed you've ever been on. Well, my friends must not have been waveless, because it was it moved. Yeah, this is none. And this would have been like the nineties or something like that. And I'm sure it was like a five thousand dollar mattress or something back then, but that seems to be like the kind that they have now. It's like you just lay on it and you're you're not like, oh, this is a water bed. You just like, this is super comfortable. I'm floating and weightless, but your mind's not thinking you're laying on water. Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't have, like, aside from moving a lot when I sleep. I'm a like a I like to flop on the bed, like when I lay down, I don't lay gently on it. I will kind of throw myself into bed. And none of these things are conducive to water beds, especially not in the seventies. But apparently now it's fine you could do that. Well. One of the new salesman they interviewed for this article said that he won't say the name waterbed um. He says, because it turns people off. He said, even if they try it and they like it and then they find out it's a water bed, he said, sometimes they won't buy it because of that weird seventies association, like yeah, or they're worried it's gonna leak, or they're you know, they're gonna have to fill it with water. There Apparently I couldn't find any any verification of this, but there was an urban legend at least that you could find aquatic worms floating in your water bed, and they started doing like, oh, well we need to add chemicals to the water. Well, then that makes it even grosser, right, So there's like just over time, people associated a lot of negative things with water beds, and then the thing that really killed the water bed was that in the nineties. By the by the nineties, it was clear that America was like, sure, we'll try other things besides an inter spring mattress, what you got And so like temper pedic came around, or sleep number, all these guys who made technically alternative mattresses. Um, the same thing that it follows in that tradition that the waterbed established. They that Charles Hall he aided that market and showed that it was a real thing. And so by the time the nineties rolled around, and like I think tempera pedick was the first one. Um, it was like all the benefits of a water bed without the hassle of the water, why would you want a water bed? And that was it for water beds. Yeah, and minus the creeps. Yeah. Whereas just a few a few years before, almost one in four, between one and four and one in five between a quarter and of all water or of all mattresses were water beds sold in America. It's crazy. It's a lot down to nothing, down to just gone. Man. Imagine the landfills of America are filled with vinyl bladders just rotting well broughting a thousand years from now probably yeah, that's true. They're probably some pretty good shape. So one more thing about Charles Hall, well, two more things. One he went on to invent the solar shower, you know, the campus was a and then um too. He has a kind of a bad name, or he did, at least back in one I think um in that WAPO article where the waterbed industry, the industry association that formed they they didn't like him very much because a couple of years before his patent ran out. He'd been gone and then came back and said, all y'all owe me money for patent infringement. And they were like, what dude, We like, we've built this industry. You know, thought you were cool kind of he was like, no, I'm not give me some money and he started like they apparently wanted to settle and it wasn't enough. But one really noteworthy thing about one of their one of his lawsuits against I think a Taiwanese um manufacturer that um he sold shares in the outcome, so like you could buy shares of a lawsuit. Crazy, And there's a there's a common law law against it. It's called champ terree, which I had never heard of before many total sense. It's where somebody like basically pays for legal fees in order to get a piece of the action to cut Um. Yeah, chapter E and in California at the time, chapter was not illegal. I don't know if it is, but um it was not. And he sold shares for ten thousand a pop. Uh for this for this Wow, this lawsuit. That's amazing. Water beds, They're amazing. Chuck cheez. That's what the episode should be titled. It's up to you. Do you got anything else? You got nothing else? If you want to know more about water beds, well, get in a time machine, get in the way back machine and go try and one out yourself. Well, we have one in the way back machine. You're lucky day covered in American possum. Oh boy. Uh. Since I said that it's time for listening there, I'm gonna call this one of the many replies for color blindness too. We've got a lot of responses for color blindness. What do you mean too well? I called the jerk all right, Hey, guys, I was listening to the show about color blindness with an oh you are so I assume this? Uh oh, he's Canadian's gonna say British. It's like British light. Yeah, he's still under the thumb though. I worked in the electrical field for ten years, and in that time I've worked with two red green color blind electricians. Remember we talked about that. The first one I worked with for a few years. Uh, And he said, it wasn't that difficult to tell the difference between red and green conductors. They just looked like every Uh. They look like very obvious different shades of the same color, and only took a couple of mistakes before he was able to tell the difference. An electrical red is a current carrying conductor, while green is used for grounding and bonding, like a rat and a science experiment. He explained, it only took a couple of shocks of what he thought it was a bonding wire to really notice the difference. So dangerous, I know, man. Uh. The other I worked with for only a short while because he died, but he had been an electrician for twenty plus years. Wasn't until he asked a co worker why they thought the ground wire and a current carring conductor were the same color that he even realized he was color blind. How about that? A little slow on the uptake, perhaps so, even though it costs some issues early on their careers, they're both great electricians. I guess the human brain always finds a way, and that is James from Cape Breton, Nova, Scotia, Canada. That's cool Man, Great Area Eastern Canada, Great Area, Western Canada, fantastic Central Canada. We love it all. Yes, what we do. If you're Canadian, you want to say hi, We'll get in touch of this. Go to Stuff you Should Know and uh click on our social media links or send us an email. This stuff podcast at how stuffworks dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
