June 13, 2012
The Unnatural History of the Dixie Cup
The Dixie Cup, the Kleenex of paper cups, the ubiquitous, single-serving, individual drinking vessel, was never meant to be shared. The paper cups were not built to last. Drink. Toss. Repeat.
Their story starts with a Boston inventor named Lawrence Luellen, who crafted a two-piece cup made out of a blank of paper. He joined the American Water Supply Company, the brainchild of a Kansas-born Harvard dropout named Hugh Moore. The two began dispensing individual servings of water for a penny—one cent for a five-ounce cup from a tall, clumsy porcelain water cooler.
Soon they were the Individual Drinking Cup Company of New York and had renamed their sole product the Health Kup, a life-saving drinking technology that could help prevent the transmission of communicable disease and aid the campaign to do away with free water offered at communal cups, “tin dippers,” found in public buildings and railway stations. Make no mistake, because of this scourge, one biologist reported in a 1908 article, there was “Death in School Drinking Cups.”
Yet it wasn’t health that ultimately paved the way for the disposable paper cup’s ubiquity and commercial immortality. One day, Moore stopped in at the Dixie Doll Company and asked the dollmaker if he could borrow their name for his cup, because, apparently, the vessels were now as reliable as old ten-dollar bills (dixies, from the French dix) issued by Louisiana prior to the Civil War, according to Anne Cooper Funderburg’s account in Sundae Best. The cup’s reputation was further cemented when soda fountains introduced an automatic machine to that could fill a cup with two flavors of ice cream at the same time, ushering in paper-wrapped wooden scoops and disposable cups known as Ice Cream Dixies.
Dixie cups offer something at once refreshing and profoundly sobering, a pioneering product that ushered in the wave of single-use items—razors, aerosolized cans, pens, bottles of water and the paper cups you can find at doctor’s offices, backyard barbecues and, of course, the office water cooler.
Drawing: Lawrence W. Luellen, 1912. Drinking Cup. Us Patent 1032557.
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It’s also a reminder that this throwaway culture has its origins in real public-health concerns, just as the gastronomic and environmental scourge of processed comestibles can trace its origin in part to laws & methods designed to insure a healthy food supply in a time of real dangers from malnutrition and food-borne illness.
Many thanks for a fantastic article, it is very interesting to find out how a product is started and how it evolves.
Although as the article states the paper cup was for water, a comercial purpose was found for this, one of the ealiest forms of packaging.
Ray Croc a salesman for a paper cup company, realsied that a soda shop was limited to the number of seats, as with glasses customers cound not take a drink away, he pushed for plastic lids to be manufactuered that then allowed the soda shop to sell drinks for takeaway, thereby expanding there business.
Ugh! So, people have been substituting K for C in Korporate America for over one hundred years?
Excuse me my ignorance, and for being off-topic, but is this origin of the word ‘Dixie’ also the base for the word Dixieland (jazz) ?
Mr Mulder,I believe you are correct,very observent of you to put the two together,and even if it isn’t quite fact,let’s make it so,sounds good to me.
Why was pre-Civil War Louisiana paper money considered “reliable” in 1919?
Healthy motives? Possibly, but I suspect that the “free”aspect of publicly-available water was a great motivator, too, turning free into profitable.
Hum, I don’t think we know what the meaning of Dixie. Frank McCourt used it to describe a dance in his home country of Sligo.
So, is it a dance, a $10 bill, or perhaps Dixie’s land in NY state where free and escaped slaves were welcomed?
Common to this time were sputum cups, disposable containers for TB patients so they did not spit in public and propagate the disease. In a time prior to antibiotics, it is natural such a disease reducing invention would be readily acceptable by society at large
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