Buying A Mattress For Chair Beds
Way back in 1971, NASA had a problem they were trying to figure out how to solve. When Astronauts lifted off, they experienced significant G forces. These weren’t that terrible, but NASA was of a mind to reduce them as much as possible. For those who may not know, G Force is what you experience on any sort of roller coaster or carnival ride. It’s the polar opposite of that light, weightless feeling in the pit of your stomach. G Force is that feeling like someone is holding you down or pressing on you. You feel like you’ve suddenly becoming very heavy. This is what the astronauts were experiencing.
The solution to this problem became the first memory foam. This material was extremely useful for NASA but needed to be replaced regularly. NASA published the formula but for many years there was no marketable application for the material. NASA worked on the material some more and eventually a Swedish company called Fagerdala World Foams picked it up and fiddled with the formula even more, perfecting their version of the memory foam over a number of years. Eventually in 1991 they believed it was commercially viable and began offering their first memory foam mattresses. They called their new foam “Tempur” and their mattress line became “Tempur-Pedic”.
The material was, and still is, quite expensive however and was only successful through a well designed marketing campaign. One of the company’s marketing strategies is to associate themselves with NASA and science in general, and if they could scientifically prove people got better sleep on their mattresses than standard inner-spring mattresses that wouldn’t hurt either. This led them to take an active role in sponsoring scientific sleep studies and many of the more recent scientific discoveries surrounding sleep can be attributed to studies sponsored by the company. This is a great service to the scientific community and a boon to sleep research, which has traditionally been under funded.
Currently Tempur-Pedic brand offers a number of different styles of mattress. Their “Original” in double size is just under one thousand US dollars, which is actually comparable to some inner spring mattresses. They do not yet seem to offer chair beds. And I love my foam chair bed. Their “Celebrity” goes for just under four thousand US dollars in King size. Many competitors have popped up over the last two decades with memory foam offerings of their own. There are a number of unique formulas floating around and no one’s is quite the same. Tempur-Pedic’s formula is patented and used only on their licensed products.
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