An Overview of Foam Bedding – Where Do Beds Come From?
An Overview of Foam Bedding – Where Do Beds Come From?
Is it about time you got a good night’s sleep. Foam mattresses can give you that quality of sleep that you have been looking for. Let’s take a look at an overview of foam bedding and see where these miracle beds came from.
I know that I am extremely grateful that I live in this day and age. I can’t imagine what my ancestors went through, especially knowing that they slept on feather mattresses, straw mattresses, and mattresses made from leaves, horsehair, etc. My parents even slept on poor quality innerspring mattresses. Thank goodness that we have latex foam and memory foam mattresses now.
NASA researches began working on polyurethane foam in the 1970s. These researchers at the Ames Research Center in California were looking to create a material that would cushion astronauts during lift-off. The material that they were hoping to invent would protect the astronauts from the massive amounts of gravitational forces. In the process, they created memory foam. Although it wasn’t useful to NASA, it became extremely useful to the general public years later.
An affiliate company of NASA’s took the memory foam material and kept working on it during the 1980s. The Swedish company, Fagerdala World Foams, thought that the open-celled and temperature-sensitive material might prove useful. They were right.
The company continued to develop memory foam for several years. When memory foam mattresses were first made available, they were extremely expensive. Initially, the mattresses were only sold to hospitals and other health care facilities. Eventually, a reasonably priced memory foam mattress was made available to the general public by Tempur-Pedic in the 1990s.
