A Father Watched His Daughter Struggle With a Straw at a Soda Fountain and Went Home and Fixed It

US2094268 was filed by Joseph Bernard Friedman on November 7, 1936, and granted the following year. The Patent Office called it a Drinking Tube. Everyone else calls it the bendy straw, and the reason it exists is a small girl at a counter who could not reach her milkshake.

The soda fountain

Friedman was sitting in his brother's soda fountain in San Francisco with his young daughter Judith. She had a milkshake in front of her and a straight paper straw in it, and the straw was taller than she could comfortably manage. She had to stand up or crane over the glass to get to the top of it, and the straw kept tipping.

The straight paper straw was already a patented product. Marvin Stone had patented one in 1888, made by winding paper around a pencil and gluing it, specifically to replace the rye grass straws people had been using, which went soggy and lent a grassy taste to the drink.

Stone's straw solved the taste problem. It did not solve the geometry problem, which is that a rigid tube pointing straight up is inconvenient for anyone whose mouth is not directly above the glass.

The screw and the floss

What Friedman did that evening is the part worth understanding, because the method is the patent.

He took a paper straw and inserted a screw into it, pushing it down to about where he wanted the bend. Then he wound dental floss tightly around the outside of the straw, following the screw's thread, and cinched it down. The floss pressed the paper into the spiral groove of the screw beneath it.

When he removed the floss and the screw, the straw had a short section of corrugated ridges running around it, like a tiny accordion.

That corrugated section is the whole thing. A tube of uniform paper kinks and closes when you bend it. A tube with concentric ridges bends by letting the ridges compress on the inside of the curve and open on the outside, so the passage stays open. The straw holds whatever angle you put it at, and liquid still moves through.

He built it out of a screw and floss on a countertop, and the mechanism was correct enough that it is essentially still how they are made.

Nobody wanted it

Friedman tried to sell the idea to the existing straw manufacturers. He approached the companies that would have been the obvious buyers and was turned down repeatedly over several years. The straight straw worked, it was cheap, and the case for changing it was not obvious to anyone but him.

So he manufactured it himself, eventually founding the Flexible Straw Corporation and getting production running in the late 1940s, more than a decade after the patent.

The customer he did not expect

His first substantial buyer was not a soda fountain. It was hospitals.

The problem the bendy straw solves for a child at a counter is the same problem it solves for a patient who cannot sit up. A person lying in a hospital bed cannot drink from a glass or from a rigid straight straw without being raised, which may be painful, unsafe, or impossible. A straw that bends to the patient means a nurse can hold a glass at the bedside and the patient can drink lying down.

Hospitals bought them, and that is where the flexible straw first found a real market.

It is a fair summary of the object. A father solved a small inconvenience for his daughter, industry told him for years that it was not worth solving, and it turned out to be medical equipment.

See the original

The full text and figures of US2094268 are on Google Patents.