"Believe me, you've got to get up pretty early in the morning if you want to get out of bed."
Groucho Marx, American comedian and actor
In early-twentieth-century San Francisco, William Murphy (1876-1959) found that he had a problem. He wanted to court a young opera singer from a good background, but he lived in a small one-room apartment with a bed taking up most of the floor space. Since it would not be proper to bring a young lady back to his bedroom, he began experimenting with pivoting beds to make his room respectable.
He applied for his first patent in 1900 and formed the Murphy Wall Bed Company that year. The company is still in business today, and is the second oldest furniture company in America.
In the earliest and most familiar Murphy beds, the bed flips up at the head to be stored in a closet. In 1918 Murphy invented the pivoting bed that pivoted on a swinging arm around the door jamb of a closet, then lowered into a sleeping position. The beds were at the height of their popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, But declined after World War II as the economy grew and single-family homes became more common. But with the recession of the 1970s, the beds came back into style as a way of making the most of limited space, and the business began to grow once more.
Murphy beds have provided countless opportunities for slapstick comedy throughout the years, regularly featuring in the films of Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and Charlie Chaplin, always ready to spring from the wall to bonk someone on the head or suddenly fold up to leave someone trapped helplessly in the wall.
And Murphy's inventiveness paid off, too—he eventually married his musical sweetheart.
