Murphy Bed Mechanism Examples
Vertical Mount Bed Hardware
Horizontal Mount Bed Hardware
What's become known as the Murphy Bed was originally invented by William L. Murphy, around 1900. It was patented a number of years later.
Interestingly, the bed was created to solve a dating problem.
The time was 1900, in San Francisco. The Victorian social rules of the time forbade a single woman from entering a single man's bedroom.
But there was a Mr. Murphy living there at that time, in a one-room apartment, so it was his living room and bedroom both, which was a problem.
Not to mention that his bed took up most of the floor space in the tiny room.
Mr. Murphy was quite enamored of the woman who would later become his wife, and the social restrictions of the day made entertaining her at his place very awkward.
So to solve his problem, he invented a bed that replaced the door of his closet and pivoted on the hinges as the original door had done. It could be swung into the closet, or swung out and then pivoted down onto the floor for use as a bed.
With the bed stowed in his closet his room was no longer a bedroom, and he could entertain women in his apartment. It had the secondary advantage of giving him much more useable room in his tiny place.
He patented it some years later. But he never trademarked the name "Murphy Bed" so the name has come to mean any bed of the general type that folds down from a vertical position -- usually attached to a wall -- onto the floor for use as a bed.
The early designs were spring-loaded affairs that were prone to either crashing down on their owners, or springing upwards if the bedding was removed. The situation was used in gags in old-time movies for many years.
These days the mechanisms are much more refined, with smoothly damped motion while being raised or lowered. Today Murphy beds are usually built into another piece of furniture -- bookshelves, free-standing closets, etc., to blend in with a room's decor.
But their benefits of freeing up more floor space, and allowing dual-use of even a small room, remain just as useful today as in the early 1900s.