The bendy straw began with a daughter’s milkshake

A child tries to drink a milkshake, but the straw’s end is too high. Instead of tilting the glass or changing posture, perhaps the straw could bend. Joseph Friedman addressed that problem after watching his daughter struggle with a straight paper straw.

The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center describes a modest experiment: insert a screw into the straw and wind dental floss around its threads from outside. The resulting corrugations allowed that section to bend while preserving a passage rather than crushing it flat.

Friedman received a flexible-straw patent in 1937 and founded a company in 1939. He developed machinery to make the corrugations consistently in a product, taking the straw from individual experiments with a screw and floss toward repeated production.

The first customer, in 1947, was a hospital. Patients drinking while lying down could bend the straw toward their mouths rather than tilt the cup. It offered an alternative to the glass drinking tubes then in use. The straw prompted by his daughter’s milkshake found a use in hospital rooms.

Instead of tilting the cup far or moving the head, the drinker brings the straw’s end toward the mouth. Its small folds open and close to change the angle. The flexible section devised for a daughter’s milkshake also helped someone drinking water in bed.