ES Lifestyle newsletter The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive trends and interviews from fashion, lifestyle to travel every week, by email Update newsletter preferences

Blame Charles Dickens. The great novelist of Victorian London was also a great drinker. Quite aside from Bleak House and David Copperfield, he wrote one of the best flaming punch recipes I know. And when he made his famous trip to the US in 1842, he delighted in all the new-fangled beverages he found there, a bit like your annoying friend Instagramming pictures of poorly lit cocktails from their holiday in New York.

Two American innovations particularly impressed Dickens. Ice, which the Americans harvested from the great northern lakes (a bit like they do at the beginning of Disney’s Frozen) and stored in ice houses throughout the summer. And straws, then literally pieces of straw, because when your drink was rammed full of frozen pond, it wasn’t so easy to sip.

Both found their way into the famous (to cocktail geeks) Sherry Cobbler scene in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44). Martin’s friend Mark Tapley presents the hero with “a very large tumbler, piled up to the brim with little blocks of clear transparent ice, through which one or two thin slices of lemon, and a golden liquid of delicious appearance, appealed from the still depths below, to the loving eye of the spectator” (Thirsty yet?) “Martin took the glass with an astonished look; applied his lips to the reed; and cast up his eyes once in ecstasy. He paused no more until the goblet was drained to the last drop.”

The Sherry Cobbler (sherry — amontillado is best! — sugar, fruit, ice) was the drink of 19th-century America, according to bartender Harry Johnson. “It is a very refreshing drink for young and old,” he enthused in his Bartender’s Manual of 1888. And it caught on like billy-oh in Britain. Queen Victoria served Sherry Cobblers at her garden parties, with ice shipped all the way from Massachusetts.

A key part of the novelty was the “reed” or “straw” — typically a hollow blade of rye grass, cut when still green, then dried and cut obliquely to show it was handmade. These became a profitable sideline for farmers.

But because grass could be a bit flimsy, an American named Marvin C Stone, who made paper cigarette- holders, spied an opportunity. Sipping a Mint Julep in Washington DC one day, he noticed that bits of fibrous residue kept coming off in his mouth. And so he conceived of the paper straw — “an artificial sipper” — which he made by spiralling paper into a tube and sealing it with wax to prevent it dissolving on contact with bourbon.

He patented the wax paper straw in 1888 and began manufacture in 1906, decreeing that the ideal straw was 8.5 inches long and wide enough so that pips didn’t get stuck in it (if you opted for a Gin Rickey or Tom Collins). At his height, he was making two million each day.

But it was at the American soda fountains (which blossomed during Prohibition) that the straw really caught on, spurred not only by novelty but paranoia, notes food historian Anne Cooper Funderburg in Sundae Best, her history of American soda fountains.

Flu and polio epidemics lead to an increasing public concern about cleanliness — and the soda fountains’ unsanitary image wasn’t helped by concerns that their product contained cocaine and caffeine. Customers considered an “artificial sipper” preferable to putting their mouth to a glass that had been used by someone else. Glass straw dispensers soon followed.

The next innovation came in the 1930s, when an inventor named Joseph Friedman was watching his daughter Judith struggle to reach the top of her ice cream float at a soda fountain in San Francisco. He realised that if the straw only bent downwards, she’d be in business. At home, he inserted a screw into a paper straw, traced the ridges with dental floss, and thus created the bendy (“articulated”) straw, first paper, then plastic.

He launched the Flex-Straw company in 1939, selling his first batch to a hospital (they’re good for invalids) and became a rich man. Weird fact: Michael Fabricant MP is a relative of Friedman’s.

The plastic straw reached ubiquity in the 1960s. They’re much easier to produce than the paper straw, and much less liable to go all pappy and mushy in your mouth too. Now Americans use 500 million of them a day, each for an average of about 20 minutes.

The very quality that makes them useful — permanence, cheapness — also makes them dreadful for the environment. They are among the top 10 items of litter found on beaches by International Coastal Cleanup. Their small size and weight makes them difficult to clean up. And in most instances, there’s hardly any point in using a straw. You’re not five years old, after all.

And it’s not as if there aren’t easy alternatives. Having fallen out of manufacture for decades, there are now numerous designs of proper spiral paper straws. I kind of like the giraffe print ones sold at cheekytiki.com.

Ecostrawz Ltd, based in Berkshire, distributes a whole range of straws made from anything but plastic: bamboo, stainless steel and glass are popular (it also sells straw cleaners, reassuringly). A number of companies are even producing the “natural wheat” straws that so impressed Dickens. Which probably calls for a Sherry Cobbler.