In the program "Historically yours", on Europe 1, the journalist David Castello-Lopes looks back on the origin of an object that has become very commonplace for all those who like to drink in bars: straw.

At least 5,000 years old, it was revolutionized at the end of the 1930s by an American inventor.

>> Every day in Historically yours, David Castello-Lopes looks back on the origins of an object or a concept.

Thursday, he looks at the straws, very practical when it comes to drinking cocktails, even if for several years, their use has been criticized. 

>> Find the shows of Matthieu Noël and Stéphane Bern in replay and podcast here

"I'm going to come back to the origins of an object of absolute simplicity: the straw! A very practical object for drinking, and which has a sub-category: the bent straw. But first: where does it come from? normal straws? They've been around for a very, very long time. The earliest human representation of a straw dates back to 3000 BC on a Sumerian tomb. Between this date and the 19th century, the history of straw is fairly quiet and there are very few innovations.

A first revolution in 1887

We use glass or metal straws, but also real straws: stalks of cereals, generally rye, which have the double advantage of being both empty inside and very waterproof everywhere.

But these straws tended to fall apart inside the drinks, which was not very convenient.

Fortunately, in the 1880s, in 1887 to be precise, the American Marvin Stone had a revolutionary idea.

He offers to wrap a strip of paper on itself, waterproof it with paraffin and sell it.

This is the birth of disposable artificial straw, close to what we know today.

The bent straw arrives in 1937

Fifty years later, inventor Joseph Friedman reinvents straw.

In 1937, while he was with his daughter in a cafe in San Francisco, the latter was at the counter and noticed that she was having difficulty drinking her milkshake through a straight straw.

Joseph Friedman therefore had the idea of ​​putting a screw inside his straw and winding dental floss around the thread of this screw to create a sort of mini accordion: the bent straw was born.

The success was immediate not in bars, but in hospitals, where people have difficulty getting up to drink. 

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Plastic straws then began to be marketed and entered our daily lives, to come out in recent years, as more and more campaigns are set up by NGOs to denounce the consequences of plastic waste on marine animals .

So we're coming back more and more to the use of paper straws from Marvin Stone.

Back in 1887. "