of bicycles and water-beds and cabbages and kings
Jerome K. Jerome – or his fictional counterpart “J.” – says in chapter 5 of Three Men on the Bummel:
I do not regard the conveyance of useful information as my forte. This belief was not inborn with me; it has been driven home upon me by experience.
. . . [six pages] . . .
Therefore it is that I have come to restrain my passion for the giving of information; therefore it is that nothing in the nature of practical instruction will be found, if I can help it, within these pages.
Chapter 10 touches on the advertising of bicycles:
. . . one feels [looking at such posters] that, for perfect bodily rest combined with entire freedom from mental anxiety, slumber upon a water-bed cannot compare with bicycle-riding upon a hilly road. No fairy travelling on a summer could could take things more easily than does the bicycle girl, according to the poster. . . .
Water-bed? thought I. Everyone knows™ that Robert Heinlein (1907-88) conceived the water-bed as we know it when he spent some time in a hospital bed, and wrote it into Stranger in a Strange Land. So what did the word mean in 1900? I turn to the OED (something I do less often than you might imagine).
3. A water-tight mattress partly filled with water, designed to serve as a bed for an invalid.
. . . with quotations beginning in 1853.
We learn something every day. Not always something useful, but something.
I have an entirely vague memory that I’d noted this information before, but it’s still interesting. So thanks.
Had a bunch of defense of Heinlein stuff to say recently here. Me against the non-fans, but Chopper shows up late to give moral support, and it wasn’t a hostile crowd, to be sure. (More comments than anyone would want to wade through, also, of course.)
Heinlein was certainly familiar with Jerome K. Jerome. The protagonist’s father in “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” was quite taken with “Three Men in a Boat”. A curiously oblique reference like that can sit on the hindbrain for years and suddenly pop out as if it were an original thought of your own with no antecedents that you can remember. (It’s happened to me in less time than that.)
I hadn’t realized that the water bed concept was so old but it doesn’t surprise me either. There are plenty of examples of inventions that were first conceived when the materials/technology wasn’t really there to make them into a mass market commodity…runcible spoons and difference engines had to wait until the infrastructure was in place to suppor them.