It was too brittle and tended to break down after a year

 NASA forgot about it. The success of plastic, with uses limited only by the imagination, became one of the most important legacies of the 19th and 20th Centuries.Mr. It was very expensive at first, but soon other companies caught wind of memory foam's potential, and now there are dozens and dozens of companies producing more and more memory foam products for demanding consumers every day. Prices continue to decline. Realizing the ability of this new material to both cushion and support, NASA intended to use it in the space shuttle, as a way to take the edge off the G-force impact on astronauts? bodies during lift-off. McGuire would have two new words for Benjamin: memory foam.Benjamin: Yes, sir. McGuire: Are you listening?Benjamin: Yes, I am.To Brooke's sincere astonishment, ?plastics? took the stock market by storm the very next year. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. If the Oscar-winning director Mike Nichols were ever to update his movie for a modern audience, Mr.Tempur-Pedic, now a widely known company, started marketing the material to hospitals for mattress pads to decrease bedsore cases. 

It was too brittle and tended to break down after a year or two.Memory foam is a truly space age material.What would you make with memory foam?". Patients reported that these mattress pads markedly reduced pressure on joints while lying down, while at the same time providing all the back support they needed.Mr. McGuire: Plastics. Just one word.A Swedish company closely associated with the NASA memory foam project continued tinkering around with the polyurethane compound on their own and, after ten years of further research, produced a version that wouldn't break down over time.Today, memory foam is most often used in mattresses, mattress toppers, and pillows, but the versatile material is also used in pet beds, footwear, positional sleep aids, office furniture, automobile seat padding, infant cribs and car seats, wheel chair cushions, hip pads and padded sweatpants, computer carrying cases, movie theater seating, pistol gloves, ear plugs, tennis racquet handles, and more. It was a spongy, gel-like plastic, whose composite open cells could deform under pressure, redistribute the air pockets to neighboring cells, and return.

The first generation of memory foam never got off the ground. The 'memory? of your hand was strong at first, and then faded with time. The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration developed the first generation of memory foam in the 1970s.Acting in the 1967 hit rear wiper manufacturers movie The Graduate, Walter Brooke had no idea what he was on to when he forced this nutty piece of advice on Dustin Hoffman:Mr. 

The next generation of memory foam had arrived. Memory foam behaved like a liquid and a solid at the same time. Riding the waves of these rave reviews in the medical world, Tempur-Pedic introduced memory foam to the general populace in the early 1990s. You could press your hand into the surface of the material, and when you lifted it away, you could see your handprint lingering in the material for a short while as the material slowly resumed its original flat state