A History of Coffee Cup Lids

Nicola Twilley, writing at The Atlantic, provides a brief design history of the plastic lid that aggravates so many of us when we’re trying to ingest our precious, precious caffeinated beverages. There have been at least 40 different individually patented drink-through plastic cup lids created since 1934, and we know this in part because someone, of course, collected them. It really is interesting to see the various ways different minds approached the problem, and the many ways they’ve found to solve the various nose/lip protrusion problems.