John Houghtaling
John Joseph Houghtaling was an American entrepreneur and inventor who in 1958 invented the Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed, a common feature in mid-priced hotels and motels from the 1960s to the early 1980s.
Early life
Houghtaling was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on November 14, 1916. His father worked for a telegraph company as a lineman, which led Houghtaling and his two sisters to move around the Midwestern United States with their family several times. He served as a gunnery instructor in the United States Army and was sent to England in April 1942 during World War II, where he flew 20 missions on Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers with the 452d Bombardment Squadron of the United States Army Air Forces.He worked in a series of jobs following the completion of his military service, including as a hotel bellman, cookware salesman and a salesman of a remote-control lawnmower.
Magic Fingers
In the 1950s, Houghtaling was still working as a salesman, this time selling vibrating beds in which the vibrating motor and bed were sold as a single unit that was clumsy, expensive, and prone to failure. At a service call for a broken unit, Houghtaling realized that the vibrating motor was the essential component, not the bed, and that a unit could be developed that would attach to any bed, not just the combination vibrating bed units he was selling. Houghtaling worked in the basement of his home in Glen Rock, New Jersey, and tested hundreds of motors before finding one that weighed relatively little, could be attached to the box springs of an existing bed, and would provide the right level of vibration. Once a quarter was inserted into the attached coin meter, the motor would vibrate the bed for 15 minutes. The coin mechanisms were modeled on similar devices that had been attached to radios and televisions in hotels. The devices were sold through franchisees who installed the units in hotels based on an arrangement in which revenues would be split, with $1 million in annual sales of the units. There were 250,000 Magic Fingers units installed nationwide at their peak of popularity in the 1960s, with each unit averaging eight quarters per week, bringing in $2 million in monthly gross revenue.By the last half of the 1970s, more than a million Magic Fingers units had been installed in American and European hotels and houses. The devices started to seem out of date and somewhat sleazy, because of the bed's association with seedy motels, and their popularity declined starting in the 1980s as other in-room entertainment options became available and theft of money from the coin boxes started to become more common. Houghtaling sold the rights to the Magic Fingers name after he retired in the 1980s, with the new owner manufacturing units for home use at the time of his death in 2009. Though the devices are rarely seen in the 21st century, they were still available in motels in the Western United States at the time of his death.