1. Amazing Designs In My Commute

    1. The disposable cup lid

    The genius of my daily morning commute can be pinpointed to the vent hole of this cup lid:

    Have you ever noticed this hole on your coffee cup lid? This surreptitious vent hole looks almost like an accident; like someone punctured your cup by mistake with a pen. It’s so simple you wouldn’t really think of it as a piece of design. It’s a HOLE.

    However without this pin-sized hole, my daily coffee drink wouldn’t happen. Without that vent hole, it would be nearly impossible to suck any coffee out of the drink opening. Why? Because Nature abhors a vacuum. Consumed coffee in the sealed cup needs to be replaced by air coming in through the vent hole, or you will not be able to drink your coffee easily and there will be, gasp, NO TAKEAWAY COFFEE.

    Maybe I’m the kind of person who is easily impressed but I do think this is amazing. So I do a bit of research to try to find out more about this vented disposable cup lid. Like many great designs of the modern world, this lid wasn’t something borne of a eureka moment by one individual. There were actually many patents for the design of the sealed drink lid since the late 1970s. Often great design - and by this, I mean those durable and efficient ideas that affect the quality of life - is the end result of many attempts to add a little extra to previous work.

    The earliest U.S patent for a disposable drinking cup lid I could find was filed in 1978 by three New Yorkers, Robert Schram, Alfred Alfrunti Jr., and Angela Alfrunti. You will recognize it:

    And some years later in 1986, a Jack Clements from Oklahoma came up with this:

    And you can just about see the amazing vent hole, labelled No.26. I imagine Jack Clements as the same sort of klutz like me, who still manages to spill coffee with the 1978 lid design through the larger drinking opening. The drinking opening had to be small enough for minimum spillage but big enough for sipping coffee. The report of Patent 4589569 says:

    [a] feature of this present invention… is to facilitate drinking while walking or traveling in a moving vehicle without spillage…a vent opening may be formed in the top wall to enable air flow into the cup to facilitate the flow of liquid through the drinking opening (U.S. Patents, 1986: 3).

    Soooo he shrunk the drinking opening to the smallest possible configuration - in order for this to work, it required a small hole piercing the opposite end of the lid: thereby introducing the world to the wonderful No.26 - the design solution that changed the quality of morning commutes all over, including mine.