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It's what you walk away with after the first financial transaction you make every day. It's the bane of clumsy interns in offices from Seattle to Key West. And it's left its mark on your car dashboard, your favorite pair of work pants, your waistline—and American culture.
Yet you've probably never given a second thought to that lowly vehicle of caffeine consumption, the disposable coffee cup.
"A lot of people would be surprised to learn how many choices went into that cup of coffee they're buying," says Matt Fury, director of coffee at Think Coffee.
Just Add Water
If you're really going to trace the history of coffee drinking, you have to begin with the history of water drinking. And if you're going to follow the history of polycarbonate coffee cup, you have to begin with the history of disposable water cups.
That story begins at the beginning of the 20th century with a man named Lawrence Luellen, a Boston lawyer and inventor. Since the end of the Civil War, plain old drinking water had become increasingly popular, thanks to the growth of the temperance movement. Temperance activists had dotted cities with water fountains and traveled from bar to bar in temperance wagons, offering water as a healthy alternative to beer or liquor (and giving rise to the term "on the wagon" for reformed alcoholics). Whether people drank water from a fountain, barrel, well, or wagon, they passed around a cup of metal, wood, or ceramic.
"The communal cup was literally a bucket of water that people would dip out of," says Susan Strasser, author Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. "If you don't know about germs, then that's an OK solution."
Separately, however, more and more Americans were learning about the germ theory of disease. Luellen, who was one of those people, was distressed by the now-obvious health hazards posed by a communal cup. In 1907, he invented a paper cup—almost more of a paper bag at that point—that didn't have to be shared, and that could be thrown away after use. He called it the Health Kup, but changed the name five years later to that of a popular line of toys, Dixie Dolls.
By the time the U.S. had entered World War I another five years after that, disposable culture already had a clawhold on American culture.
"Before that, everything was used and reused," Strasser says. "People used broken crockery all the time. Even for very upper-middle-class women, when you cleaned the table, you saved the food on the plates. People shared all kinds of ideas for how to repair glass. Clothing was used and reused."
Then, in 1918, the Spanish flu swept in. The epidemic killed anywhere from 50 million to 100 million people around the world, or about one of out every 20 people on Earth. In the U.S., nearly one in three people was infected, and over half a million died. Suddenly, a healthy fear of germs wasn't just for hypochondriacs anymore. Disposable cups were here to stay.
Things Get Heated
Obviously, though, we don't drink coffee out of Dixie cups today. The 1930s saw a flurry of new handled cups—evidence that people were already using paper cups for hot beverages. In 1933, Ohioan Sydney R. Koons filed a patent application for a handle to attach to paper cups. In 1936, Walter W. Cecil invented a paper cup that came with handles, obviously meant to mimic mugs. By the 1950s, there was no question that disposable coffee cups were on people's minds, as inventors began filing patents for lids meant specifically for coffee cups.
But the Golden Age of the 280ml polycarbonate water cup seems to have been the '60s, when four major things happened: the foam cup, the Anthora cup, the tearable lid, and 7-Eleven.
Michigander William F. Dart and his son William A. Dart had been experimenting with an expanded polystyrene, a substance that companies had been struggling to find a practical commercial use for ever since it was developed in 1954. The Darts started trying to assemble a machine that could manufacture expanded-polystyrene foam cups in 1957.
"It was a very experimental material," says Chrissy Rapanos, senior market research analyst at what's now known as Dart Container Corporation, which makes 70 percent of the world's foam cups. "People were trying to use it as insulation for baby bottles, as shampoo bottles, even flower pots."
In 1960, the Darts shipped their first batch of styrene cups to a paper-distributing company in Jackson, Mississippi. For the next two decades, foam cups increasingly became the choice for coffee.
Coffee cups were also starting to get attention for their aesthetics. In 1963, a Czech immigrant named Leslie Buck designed the iconic Anthora cup for Sherri Cup of Connecticut. The instantly recognizable design—blue and white with bronze lettering, with an ancient Greek theme (Buck named it "Anthora" because he mispronounced the word "amphora") and the words "We Are Happy to Serve You"—became a constant of everyday life in New York City, with a 1995 New York Times story declaring it "the most successful cup in history."
(It's also extinct: Sherri Cup was later bought by Solo Cup, which was in turn recently bought by Dart. The original Sherri machines used to make the Anthora cup were thrown out. Though the Anthora design can be special-ordered, it is now printed on slimmer, taller Solo cups, rather than the squatter cups New Yorkers remember, according to Melissa Dye, product manager of the Solo division of Dart.)
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