But who drinks soda or water from wax-paper tubes these days? Approximately nobody. The man who invented the bendy straw -- the straw you know with the flexible elbow that bends like a tiny accordion -- wasn't born until about two decades years after Stone's seminal blow-up over grass getting into his mint julep. But before we move forward a few decades, let's go back a few millennia.

5,000 YEARS OF STRAWS



Here is a short history of the drinking straw in 30 seconds. Historians don't know what civilization first came up with the idea of sticking tubes into cups and slurpling, but the earliest evidence of straws comes from a seal found in a Sumerian tomb dated 3,000 B.C. It shows two men using what appear to be straws taking beer from a jar. In the same tomb, archeologists also found history's first known straw -- a tube made from gold and the precious blue stone lapis lazuli.



It's unlikely that Sumerians created the ur-straw all by themselves. The metal straw Argentinians use to drink mate (sometimes called a bombilla) is known be centuries old, at least. In the 1800s, when the rye grass straw came into vogue, its virtues -- cheapness and softness -- were also its vices, as it had a tendency to come apart in liquid. There have been two major straw innovations in the last 150 years. First, Stone made the straw dependable.



Second, someone else made the straw bendable.



HOW THE STRAW BENT



The city of San Francisco has 3,500 restaurants today, more per-person than any metro in the U.S. If we assume that almost all of them buy, stock, and serve some of the billions of plastic bendy straws produced in the U.S. every year, San Francisco could be America's per-capita bendy straw capital. This would only be appropriate, considering that the bendy straw was born at a milkshake counter of a Bay-area restaurant.



Half a century after Marvin Chester Stone found grass in his julep, Joseph B. Friedman was sitting at his brother's fountain parlor, the Varsity Sweet Shop, in the 1930s, watching his little daughter Judith fuss over a milkshake. She was drinking out of a paper straw, so we can be assured that the milkshake did not taste like grass. But since Stone's paper straw was designed to be straight, little Judith was struggling to drink it up.



Friedman had an idea. As the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center explains, he brought a straw to his home, where he liked to tinker with inventions like "lighted pencils" and other newfangled writing equipment. The straw would be a simple tinker. A screw and some string would do.

Friedman inserted a screw into the straw toward the top (see image). Then he wrapped dental floss around the paper, tracing grooves made by the inserted screw. Finally, he removed the screw, leaving a accordion-like ridge in the middle of the once-straight straw. Voila! he had created a straw that could bend around its grooves to reach a child's face over the edge of a glass.

