They were built and designed for astronauts to offset the heavy pressures they experienced during flight into outer space and landing back on Earth.
However, this idea was quickly scraped by NASA and they moved onto other, better ways for their project, abandoning the memory foam mattress along the way.
However, instead of fading away into oblivion, the memory foam mattress initially found its place in hospital beds and later into people's homes and hearts.
And here it has stayed ever since by quickly adjusting and evolving into all sorts of shapes and sizes.
These days you can find all sorts of everyday use items made by the memory foam such as, pillows, seat paddings, hip paddings, baby cribs, car seats, theater seats and even ear plugs.
A lot of different factors played a role and helped the memory foam mattress become a success and a household name.
Some of these factors included heavy marketing to the right audience and turning it into a therapeutic item that you had to possess for better sleep.
The mattress pad also sets itself far above and high from the conventional mattress by its flexibility, quality and comfort.
For example, unlike the conventional mattress, memory foam mattress does not use the spring coil.
So when you get off of the mattress, instead of springing back upward and downward, it will go back in the direction of the pressure.
Conventional foam mattress lack this feature.
Memory foam mattress pads are also heavily different in its structure from the conventional mattress.
Instead of being built by billions of balloon cells tightly squeezed together, the foam contains a lot of space between its cells.
This special feature of a mattress allows the hot air to escape hence letting the mattress cool down and adjust to the surrounding temperature.