The Bendy Straw Began With a Milkshake Too Tall for a Small Girl

Picture a soda fountain in San Francisco in the 1930s: a long counter, tall stools, and a milkshake in a glass that seems to go up for ever. A small girl called Judith is sitting in front of it with a straight paper straw. The top of the straw is somewhere above her nose. She can tip the glass and risk the lot, or she can stand on the stool, and neither plan is popular with the grown-ups.

Her father was watching. The shop, the Varsity Sweet Shop, belonged to his younger brother; he himself sold houses for a living and invented things on the side. According to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which keeps his papers, he took a paper straw, slid a screw inside it and wound dental floss round the outside, so that the paper was pressed into the threads of the screw. When he pulled the screw out, the straw had a little band of ridges. It bent over the rim of the glass, and Judith could reach her drink.

Why a straight straw would not do

Paper straws were old news by then. The kind made of coiled paper dipped in wax goes back to the 1880s. The trouble is what happens when you simply bend one: it folds flat at the crease and the drink stops coming. The patent says plainly that other people had thought of bending a straw before. What was new was a set of ridges running round the tube, which let the mouth end point off at an angle without squeezing the opening shut.

From sweet shop to factory

The patent, for what it called a Drinking Tube, was filed on 7 November 1936 and granted on 28 September 1937. Then came the slow part. The inventor, Joseph Friedman, offered his idea to the companies that already made straws, and none of them wanted it. So in 1939 he set up the Flexible Straw Corporation to make the straws himself. The Second World War interrupted the work, relatives had to help pay for the machine, and his sister Betty ran the sales by letter from Cleveland. The first straw-making machine was finished only in the late 1940s.

1. 1880s The waxed paper straw appears
2. 7 November 1936 The patent for a bending straw is filed
3. 28 September 1937 The patent is granted
4. 24 April 1939 The Flexible Straw Corporation is founded in California
5. 1947 The first sale, to a hospital
6. 20 June 1969 The patents are sold to the Maryland Cup Corporation

The first sale came in 1947, ten years after the patent. In 1950 the family and the company moved to Santa Monica, traded as the Flex-Straw Co., and sales kept growing. In June 1969 the patents and trademarks were sold to the Maryland Cup Corporation, and the little company was closed two months later.

What people often get wrong

It is easy to assume the bendy straw was made as a bit of fun for children's parties and has always been sold that way. The idea did start with a child, but the first buyer was a hospital. Somebody lying in bed cannot lean over a glass any better than a small girl at a tall counter can, and a straw that bends to meet the drinker was exactly what was needed there. Only after the move in 1950 did the company turn more strongly towards homes and children.

Next time a straw nods politely over the edge of your glass, have a look at the ridges. Their ancestors were the print of a screw thread and a length of dental floss, pressed into paper in a sweet shop by a father who could not make the stool any taller.