Drinking Straw - History

History

Historians don't know when the idea of a straw was first invented, though it is believed to be very old. The first known straws were made by the Sumerians, used for drinking beer, probably to avoid the solid byproducts of fermentation that sink to the bottom. The earliest extant drinking straw was found in a Sumerian tomb dated 3,000 B.C., it is a tube made from gold and the precious blue stone lapis lazuli. Argentines and their neighbors used straws a similar metallic device called a bombilla that acts as both a straw and sieve for drinking mate tea for hundreds of years.

In the 1800s the rye grass straw came into fashion because it was cheap and soft, but it had an unfortunate tendency to turn to mush in liquid. To address these shortcomings, the modern drinking straw was patented in 1888 by Marvin C. Stone, made of paper. He came upon the idea while drinking a mint julep on a hot day in Washington, D.C., the taste of the rye was mixing with the drink and giving it a grassy taste which he found unsatisfactory. He wound paper around a pencil to make a thin tube, slid out the pencil from one end, and applied glue between the strips. He later refined it by building a machine that would coat the outside of the paper with wax to hold it together, so that the glue wouldn't melt in bourbon.

Early paper straws had a narrow bore similar to that of the grass stems then in common use. It was common to use two of them, to reduce the effort needed to take each sip. (The cocktail straw, which is sometimes used in pairs, may be derived from such early straws.) Modern plastic straws are made with a larger bore, and only one is needed for ease of drinking.