Q: What do you get when you combine a pencil, a mint julep, and a man dissatisfied with the status quo?

A: The modern-day drinking straw.

Besides being a joke that will never take off, that’s an accurate description of the birth of straws as we know them today. Since then, straws have been downright radicalized.

“There are inventions all the time,” says Lynn Dyer , president of the Food Service Packaging Institute, which represents a number of drinking straw manufacturers. Take the Slurpee straw, a thick straw whose bottom was designed for scooping up the slushy drink: “Somebody was out there thinking, ‘Oh, you know what, I’d like a spoon—no, I want a straw! Hey, let’s make something that’s both.'"

When Straws Were Actually Straw

Decades before the Slurpee was even a twinkle in Omar Knedlik's eye —back in the 1880s, in fact—Marvin Stone , a Washington, D.C., resident, was drinking a mint julep with what was then the standard of straws: a stalk of rye grass. Stone hated the gritty residue the straw left in his drink as it broke down, according to the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. So he made his own drinking device by wrapping strips of paper around a pencil. After removing the writing implement, he glued the paper strips together. And thus was born the modern drinking straw.

Stone subsequently used paraffin-coated manila paper to improve durability, and patented his design in 1888.

The next major improvement to drinking straws took place over 40 years later in San Francisco. Joseph B. Friedman , inspired by watching his young daughter struggle to drink a tall milkshake through a straight drinking straw, inserted a screw into a straight straw, wrapped dental floss around the ridges, and removed the screw, says the Smithsonian, which houses his papers . This straw of the future, the flexible or "bendy"straw, was patented in 1937 .

Paper or Plastic?

Until the early 1960s, paper straws ruled the market. But plastic straws, offering a more durable drinking experience, were hot on their heels.

“The paper straw had a slow death throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s,” says David Rhodes , manager of Aardvark Paper Drinking Straws, a paper-straw manufacturer that traces its roots to Stone’s original product. “By the mid-seventies, [they] were all gone.”

The new plastic-straw era brought with it the possibility of fresh straw innovations—and an American icon: the Krazy Straw.

Pre-Internet records are shady on the exact timeline of the invention, but as far as Fun-Time International, the current manufacturer of Krazy Straws , knows, the straws were first mass-produced by 1961. The original was an accident, a glassblower’s mistake, most likely made in Ohio during or before the 1940s. Kids who got a hold of the balled-up tube of glass saw its potential. “[They] thought it was neat and started drinking out of it,” says Erik Lipson , owner of Fun-Time International. For obvious safety reasons, the company opted to use plastic, not glass, when bringing these to market.

Lipson came to Krazy Straws as a result of his own drinking-straw innovation: Crazy Glasses drinking straws, a sipping system you could wear on your face (“You could probably call them Krazier Straws,” he says). Lipson, a math major at Vassar College, had a vision for a new straw experience, but no engineering background. In the weeks after he graduated in 1984, he experimented in his parent's home with different ways to bend a plastic rod around a handmade jig to create the eyeglasses shape. He ultimately got it to work using a slow siphon of boiling water.

His straw glasses were a huge hit. But Lipson, who now owns the company, didn't stop. He estimates that he has filed over 100 patents for drinking-straw designs over the past three decades. Not all of his straw-based ideas took off. The "mixinator," which involves a shot glass attached to the Krazy Straw, and a wine-aeration straw are among those that didn't suck in consumers.

“My patent lawyer has told me I have the third highest amount of patents in the U.S. issued to an individual—behind Thomas Edison ,” he says.

Today, Lipson is most excited by the customized name straws his company offers. The biggest challenge are letters with points, like the letters "m," "w," and "i."

“Once you can do name straws, you can do any straws,” he says. “[They're] a testament to our bending skills.”

It's What's Inside That Counts

Other straw innovators have focused not on the shape of the straw but what goes inside it. The Magic Straw , launched in 2010, contains "flavor beads" that dissolve as liquid passes through, creating a chocolate, strawberry, or even banana-cream-flavored drink (milk is the suggested liquid). It's actually a modern spin on one of the earlier novelty straws, the Flav-R Straw, which was sold in the 1950s and contained a filter that flavored milk as it passed through.

"They just really weren't able to get the product to work very well," says Paul Henson , the CEO of Diversified Flavor, which oversees the manufacturing of Got Milk?-branded flavored Milk Straws (the original Magic Straw lineup is currently splitting into the Got Milk? straws and a separate line of Milk Magic flavored straws). "But everybody loved the concept. So starting back in the 1950s, somebody knew that if you could put flavor in a straw, kids would probably enjoy it."

Next up, according to Henson, is a focus on making the straws more functional and appealing to parents, with the addition of things like multivitamins.

But why change the liquid when you can change the straw? Kellogg’s introduced a line of cereal straws in 2007. The idea was to drink milk through one large, tubular Froot Loop , Apple Jack , or Cocoa Krispie . Reviews were unkind, and the products no longer appear to be available.

“Sadly, the cereal straws live in a paradoxical existence; humans cannot eat and drink at the same time,” notes The Impulsive Buy , a website that reviews consumer goods.

The Paper Straw's Comeback

Paper straws, on the other hand, aren't ready to enter the straw graveyard yet. Eight years ago, Aardvark Paper Drinking Straws decided to design a “modern-age” paper straw superior to its predecessors. ("This is NOT your grandfather's paper straw" the website says .) Aardvark spent over a year working with materials scientists, suppliers, and even a paper chemist to improve the combination of paper and glue to increase the straw's durability in liquid—but still allow the straw to break down in a landfill. This modern paper straw bears little resemblance to its predecessors of the mid-20th century.

"These paper and glues didn't even exist back then," Rhodes says. "They really came about in the late '90s."

The resurgent national interest in eco-friendliness paved the way for a paper-straw revival, but it was one technological development in particular that returned paper straws to the limelight, Rhodes says.

“The catalyst that really took it off was when we found the ability to print on to the paper straw—to make it a fun, vibrant item," he says.

The journey was not an easy one: Inks that don’t bleed aren’t easy to come by—and neither is FDA approval. But paper straws finally had an advantage over their plastic successors: “It’s very difficult to print onto a plastic straw,” Rhodes says.

They still have a way to go before achieving dominance in the $3 billion global drinking-straw market. Plastic straws are 99 percent of that market, Rhodes says, with paper, glass, and metal making up the other one percent. Paper straws have grown from nearly zero percent of the market to nearly one percent over the past five years.

Price remains an obstacle to market domination by anything other than plastic straws, though. Americans go through 500 million drinking straws each day , and the cost of supplying that adds up.

"Any time you've got a high-volume item like that, it tends to be very price-sensitive," Rhodes says. "So one of the challenges that paper straws have is paper will always be more expensive than plastic."

A diner like Blueplate Lunch Counter & Soda Fountain , a small, weekday-only lunch spot in Portland, Ore., is responsible for 100 of those straws each day, Jeffery Reiter , the chef and owner, estimates. That's $10 worth of straws. Reiter has considered upgrading from the basic eight-inch, cherry-red food-service fat straw to the more retro-looking—and more expensive—striped waxed-paper straws, but says in an email that keeping the cost of drinks down is the priority for now.

Straws aren’t all fun and games these days; they’re being used to address pressing global problems, too. Vestergaard Frandsen, a Swiss company, introduced the pollutant-filtering LifeStraw in 2005 with the intention of providing a means to safe drinking water all over the world. And sometimes they're used to try to solve issues closer to home: Boston-based DrinkSavvy launched a crowdfunding campaign in 2012 to fund the creation of a drinking straw that would change color to indicate the presence of date-rape drugs in a drink.

What’s next for the humble straw?

“I don’t see the world that I live in ever being without straws,” Diversified Flavor’s Henson says. “If we can continue to do things fun with straws, that’s great. And I think somebody will always come up with an idea."