Artificial Straw

Use a water bath and keep the wax well below smoking point. Molten paraffin is flammable and burns skin badly. Never heat it in a pan directly on a hob.

Stone coats the tube to make the paper nonabsorbent AND to seal the spiral seam. One dip does two jobs — waterproofing and closing the joint.

Roll a plain paper tube and drink water through it. Time how long until it goes soft and collapses. Record that number — it is the problem being solved.

Cut a paper strip about 20 mm wide and 250 mm long, bevelling both short ends. The bevels let the finished tube start and finish flush instead of with a step.

Wrap the strip at a constant shallow angle around a 6 mm dowel, each turn overlapping the last by a few millimetres. Keep the angle even or the bore will vary.

Run adhesive along the final outer edge and press it down. Stone secures only that edge — the rest holds by the wrap itself.

Withdraw the dowel and dry the tube fully. A damp tube will take wax unevenly and end up blotchy and weak.

Drink through it. It lasts a little longer than step 3 because of the spiral, but it still softens. Winding alone is not the invention.

Warm the wax to just fluid and dip the tube fully, then withdraw slowly. Slow withdrawal gives an even film; a fast one leaves runs.

Hang it to set so wax does not pool at one end and block the bore. Check you can still see light through it.

Drink through the waxed straw and time it against steps 3 and 8. It should outlast both by a wide margin and stay rigid.

Seal one end, fill with water, and watch the seam. A properly dipped straw does not weep — the wax closed the joint as well as coating the surface.

Drink water through a natural stem and then through your straw. The paper tube tastes of nothing, and that neutrality was as much the selling point as the durability.

Bend the straw sharply. It kinks and closes. Note that failure — someone fixed it fifty years later, and that is the last step's story.

The patent. US 375,962, "Artificial Straw", filed 11 May 1887 and granted 3 January 1888 to Marvin Chester Stone of Washington, D.C.

He was already in the business of winding paper into tubes. Stone manufactured paper cigarette holders, which are made exactly this way — a strip wound spirally on a mandrel and pasted. The story that he wound a strip of paper round a pencil to replace an unsatisfactory rye straw in a mint julep is entirely consistent with what his factory already did every day. This is a common and under-appreciated shape for invention: not a flash of insight but the recognition that a process you already own solves a problem in a different domain. The paraffin dip is the only genuinely new step, and it is the one that matters.

Why wax does two jobs at once. Paper fails in liquid for two separate reasons — the fibres absorb water and lose stiffness, and any seam wicks. A surface coating that is hydrophobic and continuous fixes both simultaneously, which is why steps 11 and 12 are separate tests. Stone's patent is explicit that the coating renders the paper nonabsorbent and seals the spiral seams, producing what he calls a hermetically sealed tube. It is a materials patent wearing the clothes of a household object.

The bend came much later. Step 14's kink was solved in 1937 by Joseph B. Friedman, who inserted a screw into a straight paper straw, wrapped floss around the outside along the thread, and withdrew the screw — leaving corrugations that let the tube bend without collapsing. He was reportedly watching his daughter struggle to drink from a tall glass at a soda fountain. The bendy straw's first real market was hospitals, for patients who could not sit up.

And it went round in a circle. Paper straws dominated until the 1960s, when cheaper extruded plastic displaced them almost completely. Plastic straws then became one of the most visible symbols of single-use waste, and by the 2010s bans and voluntary phase-outs pushed the industry back to — a spirally wound, coated paper tube. Modern versions use food-safe coatings rather than paraffin and are engineered to survive longer in liquid, but the object in a café today is Stone's object. It is a rare case of a technology being replaced and then reinstated on grounds that had nothing to do with how well it worked.