True, Weird Story on Rise, Fall of the Waterbed Begins at SF State

APARTMENT THERAPY -- The waterbed, as we know it, got its start in California, in the late ’60s. 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.