Aug 26
A Little About the History of Mattresses
Modern mattresses and beds, as we think of them today, bear no resemblance to the type of sleeping arrangements ancient man was used to. In fact, ancient man had nothing similar to a mattress at all, but he did use a primitive form of bed. The beds he used would have been formed using rocks and stones to create a small sleeping area in a separate part of his dwelling, and while we can’t say for certain, it is assumed he used animal skins to keep warm and for comfort while he slept.
Not much changed in the sleeping department for at least a few thousand years after this, and we have to come right up to the middle ages to discover the next big step forward in terms of improving how we slept. When European Knights went on Crusades to the Holy Lands they became aware that the Arabs didn’t sleep directly on the floor as they did. The Arabs used something called a materas, basically a large cushion, to make sleeping more comfortable. This was obviously a revelation to the European Knights, because when they returned back to their own countries after the fighting had finished, they took the materas back with them, and it is from there that the modern day mattress owes its existence.
The mattress didn’t catch on quickly though, as it would only have been the gentry and other very rich people who would have had the resources to have them made. Average people lived a peasant lifestyle back then and would have had enough trouble surviving on a daily basis without trying to fund something as decadent as a mattress.
It’s only in the twentieth century that we see mattresses for the masses – newly acquired manufacturing techniques allowed companies like the Kingsdown Mattress Company produce hundreds of thousands of mattresses each year at prices the average Joe could afford. We take for granted something as basic as a mattress nowadays and the fact that we can just go online and read cheap mattress reviews about the type of mattress we would like to buy.
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