Murphy bed

William Lawrence Murphy (1876-1959) lived in a one-room apartment in San Francisco around 1900. He was courting an opera singer, and the moral conventions of the era made it improper for a woman to enter a room with a visible bed. Murphy's solution was to build a bed that folded into a closet, transforming his bedroom into a parlor. The invention was born from a dating problem.

Murphy filed his first patent in 1900 and founded the Murphy Wall Bed Company in 1916. The pivot mechanism that allowed a full-size mattress to fold vertically into a cabinet was his engineering contribution. The concept was not entirely new — folding beds had existed in various forms — but Murphy's counterbalanced spring mechanism made the fold-up operation smooth enough for daily use. The bed went up with one hand.

The Murphy bed became a staple of American apartments during the housing shortages of the 1920s and 1940s. Studios and one-rooms in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago relied on them. The bed appeared in slapstick films throughout the twentieth century — the gag of someone being folded into a wall became a comedy trope. Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, and Mel Brooks all used Murphy bed gags.

The Murphy Bed Company successfully defended its trademark for decades but lost the fight in 1989 when a court ruled that 'Murphy bed' had become a generic term — like aspirin or escalator. The word now belongs to the language, not the company. William Murphy's solution to a Victorian propriety problem became a generic piece of furniture, and his name became a common noun.