KIRO-97.3 FM (SEATTLE) -- It was 1968 in San Francisco. One year after the Grateful Dead joined Jimi Hendrix, the Mamas and the Papas, and Jefferson Airplane at the Monterey Pop Festival. A year after 100,000 hippies descended on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for The Summer of Love. Charlie Hall was a student at San Francisco State University. It was this time when Hall invented the waterbed.
“This was from, actually, my graduate school project in 1968 San Francisco,” Hall said. “My thesis was on human support and comfort and the waterbed evolved out of that.”
Hall now lives on Bainbridge Island. After graduating from college, he had a company manufacture the beds. He believed the beds were the most supportive and comfortable ever invented. And this being a groovy time in American history, they were first sold in pretty groovy places.