Coffee Cup Lid

Our society is just more and more mobile. Everything is on the move. I mean, the good part, it's convenient. You can drink coffee anywhere. You don't have the stay in the dinner. It can be in the subway. You can be walking. The bad part is it's harder to savour a coffee when you're taking it on the road. The first patent for a lid on a cup was in 1934, but it was for cold beverages, and in 1950 this guy names James Reifsnyder invented the first snap-on lid, but it didn't have an opening for drinking. In the '60s there was this huge cultural shift where people started drinking coffee on the move, and 7-Eleven was the first to sell coffee to go. And then came this revolution. In 1967, a man named Alan Frank invented a lid that you could peel a tab off, like in the shape of a guitar pick and drink it from there. In 1975, another big advance, you could peel back a tab and attach it to the lid itself. So more and more people started drinking coffee on the go. In 1984, a watershed moment in the history of coffee cup lids, the birth of the traveller lid, and it is iconic. You've seen it a million times, and it solved a whole host of problems. It's designed so that you don't splash your face, because it's higher than any of the other ones. It's got this protruding rim, so it slightly cools the coffee before it hits your lips. It's got a small depression in the centre for your nose, so you can really get in there and get maximum aroma. It's got this tiny air hole that lets the steam out and stops it from creating a vacuum. This is one of those objects where you just don't notice it until it dribbles on your lap, so I think the coffee cup lid will just continue to evolve, and you're gonna see a move away from single-use plastic lids to lids that are a little more sustainable.