10 Ways Families Slept a Century Ago: Sleeping Porches and Beds That Folded Into the Wall

Before air conditioning, a hot night in the city meant moving the bed outside. In 1890, reformer Jacob Riis wrote that on such nights, “every crowded fire-escape, becomes a bedroom”, and the roofs filled up too.

During the 1896 heat wave in New York, historian Edward P. Kohn told NPR, “They took to the rooftops, and they took to the fire escapes, trying to catch a breath of fresh air.” Photos from Coney Island show people asleep on the sand, and in Paris, in July 1912, the rooftops looked much the same.

A 1912 school health textbook put it plainly: “Two single beds or ‘twin beds’ are now preferred to the old time double bed.” For nearly a century, until the 1950s, many married couples chose to sleep in twin beds rather than sharing. Some doctors pushed the idea: in 1861, physician William Whitty Hall called sharing a bed “unnatural and degenerative.”

Historian Hilary Hinds, who wrote a whole book on the subject, found that twin beds were championed as “the sign of a modern and forward-thinking couple.”

In 1917, a popular health book by Dr. W. A. Evans, a former Chicago health commissioner, printed a mother’s question about her baby’s daily nap outdoors in winter. His answer: “Babies six months old are good heat makers and should have lots of exposure to cold.”

Parents of the time could buy sleeping hoods, bed socks and camel-hair sleeping bags for outdoor sleeping, and the same book showed a screened box bed that let a baby sleep under a tree. Today’s safe-sleep advice is very different, but 100 years ago, fresh air was treated as the best nap of all.

In the early 1900s, Americans became obsessed with fresh air, and many homes were built with sleeping porches, screened decks on the second or third floor. By the early 1900s, they were appearing in homes from Minneapolis to Brooklyn, and ads for new homes listed a sleeping porch next to electric lights and sanitary plumbing.

Even healthy people built them, sometimes with electric bed-warming pans. In 1910, President Taft built one on the roof of the White House. Apartment dwellers had their own version: a bed that rolled to an open window, so the sleeper’s head could rest outdoors under an awning.

William L. Murphy of San Francisco filed a patent for a “disappearing bed” in 1911, and it was granted in 1912. According to family legend, he had a strong ulterior motive: he lived in a one-room apartment, and at the turn of the 20th century, a young woman would never enter a man’s bedroom. A bed that folded into the closet turned the room into a parlor.

Through the 1920s, newspaper ads for apartments used the Murphy bed as a selling point, and a court later ruled the name a “synonym for any bed that folds into a closet”.

In parts of Europe, the bed came with its own walls and doors. The box bed was surprisingly popular across Europe from the medieval era to the early 20th century, and in Brittany, it was the main furniture of rural houses until the 20th century.

Some were built in two stories, with the young people sleeping on top. The doors kept the warmth in: in the Dutch version, the small space was warmed by body heat during the winter.

For long trips, families slept in Pullman cars. The first real Pullman car, the Pioneer, appeared in 1865, and it had folding upper berths and seat cushions that could be extended into lower berths. Curtains gave privacy, and by 1925, the fleet had grown to 9,800 cars.

Early passengers had to learn the rules. A conductor recalled the first night in a 1917 history of the Pullman car: “I had to compel the passengers to take their boots off before they got into the berths.”

Bedrooms were cold, and families fought back. Bed warmers were commonly used from the mid-17th to the early 20th century: long-handled brass pans like the one above. “India rubber” hot-water bottles were in use in Britain at least by 1875.

And in the coldest houses, it was standard practice to go to bed wearing a hat, so that only your face was exposed.

Before the Murphy bed, there were folding beds that pretended to be something else. In 1885, Sarah E. Goode of Chicago patented a “cabinet-bed”. Folding beds of the time, her patent explained, were “made generally to resemble some article of furniture when so folded”.

A Chicago furniture catalogue from 1891 shows what that looked like: a tall cabinet with a beveled mirror that stood in the room by day and opened into a full bed at night.

For centuries, many people in Europe slept in two parts. Historian A. Roger Ekirch found more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern: a first sleep that began about two hours after dusk, a waking period of one or two hours, and then a second sleep.

By the 1920s, the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. Not every historian agrees how common it was, and the debate is still going on in medical journals.