This is how drinking straws were invented 

All of us have used straws while sipping our favourite beverages, right? Well, we have a question for you here. Do you know how drinking straws that you use while slurping was born? Well, that’s quite a story.  

Meet Marvin Stone, the inventor of drinking straws 
Marvin Stone was the son of Chester Stone, the person who invented washing machine and cheese press. So, he was greatly interested in the field of instrumentation and innovation. However, when he was in college around 1861, the American Civil War broke out and he was forced to join the army. Unfortunately, he was wounded and removed from active duty in 1863. Returning from war, he decided to focus all his attention into war journalism and even got himself a degree in the same. However, as fate would have it, his inventive genes got quite a kick when he himself found it difficult to hold his extra cigarettes. This was in the 1870s.  

Guess what he did? He decided to help himself and his fellow smokers. Thus, he ended up inventing a machine that could produce paper cigarette holders in bulk. He called it Cameo and even applied for a patent. Soon, he found himself supplying a major cigarette holder brand named W. Duke Sons and Company and earned both name, fame and money.  

Now, one day while smoking with his friends in a local pub in Ohio, Stone Jr. identified a problem. He saw people using raw materials such as rye glass and hollow reeds to consume beverages. While these did do the job, they had a problem – that of bringing additional taste and odour to the drink. To add to the problem, these materials often broke or grew musty. This issue immediately piqued Stone’s inventive mind and soon he came up with a prototype straw created by spiral winding strips of paper around a pencil and gluing it together.  

But again, a problem arose. He realised that the straws made of normal paper became soggy easily. This is when he experimented with paraffin-coated manila paper and it was an instant success. The first batch of straws made for public use were 8.5 inches long with a diameter just wide enough for chocolate chips to pass, but not so wide that lemon seeds would get lodged.  

From hand-made straws to machine-made straws 
In 1888, Stone applied for a patent for his invention and called it Paper Julep Straws. Interestingly, Julep was the name of his only daughter. By 1890, Stone even established the Stone Straw Company with the help of his two brothers-in-law. While his business was growing in full swing, it didn’t take long for Stone to realise that making straws manually was both time consuming and expensive. This is when he ended up launching a machine that could make artificial straws out of paper, making the production process both time and cost effective. By 1899, the machine was widely in circulation and gave way to machine-wound straws made from spiral-wound paper and later even non-paper materials.  

What’s interesting is that Stone’s technique of spiral wounding around tubes were later adopted by many industries such as radio-making, electric motors, aerospace, textile, fuses and batteries, medical packaging and many more.