The mattress is a cushioned and flexible piece placed on the bed to have comfortable sitting or lying on the bed. The mattress with wool stuffing came to Europe after the Crusades when Europeans adopted the Arabic custom of sleeping on cushions.
Formerly, the mattresses consisted of a bag filled with organic materials such as straw, wool, leaves, etc. which were a nest of small insects such as mites, fleas, bedbugs, so they had to be ventilated and aired periodically. Wool mattresses were popular in Europe until the twentieth century. In some countries, there were workmen of the mattresses who travelled from town to town aerating, filling and hollowing the wool mattresses.
In the sixteenth century, France launched air mattress that enjoyed a limited period of success and in the seventeenth century in London. At the beginning of century XVII appeared in England the first mattresses of piers. They are cylindrical springs and did not compress, but rather they overcame the front and the sides.
In the middle of the 1850s, they began to manufacture, still in a handmade way, conical springs that facilitated their vertical compression. One of the most popular mattresses in the United States was launched in 1925 by the manufacturer Zalmon Simmons namely Beautyrest.
Memory Foam Mattresses
Today, it is the era of memory foam mattresses, though they were not intended for the public use, yet the memory foam mattresses have become highly demanded by the public. If you have interest in buying one, please visit http://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-best-memory-foam-015400316.html.
Wool mattress
They were very popular in Hispanic cultures and Latin American colonies from the time of the Crusades till twentieth century, and was the most common alternative for the popular classes.
The manufacture of this mattress consisted of first forming the covers with a thick textile material and then subdividing it into longitudinal chambers of about 30 cm in diameter. The wool was washed and classified before being introduced to each of the chambers. The wool was put under pressure with force by each chamber until obtaining a mattress with relatively uniform surface, very heavy, of good thermal quality but little resilient. This type of mattress disappeared in the late 1970s.
Featherbed
Still very appreciated, this mattresses is stuffed of bird feathers which are sought for their special qualities of resilience and flexibility, especially the mattress of goose and duck feather. Goose feathers provide unique flexoelasticity qualities due to their arched shape.
Goose feathers are by-products of poultry slaughterhouses, and in some countries they are reared as poultry awaiting the natural molt of plumages when they are harvested, therefore, they are expensive mattresses.
