The Impact of the Tempur-Pedic and other Mattress Advancements
The first company to create a NASA memory foam mattress was a Swedish company called Tempur-Pedic™. Their Company began selling the Space Age foam mattress in the early 90’s. The mattress was based on the technology that took the astronauts to the moon.
The original memory foam mattress helped to take the points of pressure off of the body by using a visco-elastic material that conformed around the body, but would come slowly back to shape once you rolled away. Their memory foam mattress was originally 2 layers that had a top layer of memory foam and a denser polyurethane base foam on the bottom.
The Swedish Tempur-Pedic™ memory foam mattress accomplished several things was never achieved by a spring mattress. Most importantly, the mattress had no hard springs or coils. Second, the mattress takes the shape of a person lying on it. Third, the Tempur-Pedic™ does not transfer motion like a standard spring mattress.
Since the early 90’s the science of memory foam has continued to take steps forward. In today’s world, we have many different densities and grades of the Space age memory foam. The science of building a memory foam mattress is expanding by leaps and bounds. For example, it was the standard of thought that the more firm a mattress was, the better it supported your spine.
This is because a mattress that is too soft will cause a person to hammock in the mattress because it does not have enough stability to support the body. However, it has also been known that a mattress that is too firm will not be as comfortable on your joints and can actually prevent a person from reaching the deepest phase of sleep, the delta phase.
With the invention of visco-elastic memory foam, a body could be supportive with a firm enough substance, but still be comfortably contoured to produce a more even distribution of pressure across the joints of the body. Since the development of the Tempur-Pedic mattresses in the 1980’s, some companies have brought further innovation to the science of sleep.
One such product is called the Temperflow™, a visco-elastic memory foam mattress that may solve the heat retention problem that can happen with dense memory foam by using a patent pending design that allows air to flow through the mattress.
It accomplishes this by using a total airflow circulation through many small holes that go through the surface of the memory foam and out through the convoluted channels on the firmer base foam. The Temperflow™ even has been evaluated and compared in depth to the Tempur-Pedic DeluxeBed in comfort and support, and heat retention by an online space news site called Space Daily (see the link below for the full article).
While some consumers may be reluctant to throw out their old spring mattress in favor of this new and evolving technology, one thing is clear...Astronauts have had much more than the lack of gravity to make their journey’s more relaxing and comfortable along the way.