At a soda shop in San Francisco in 1937, John Friedman was watching his daughter drink a milkshake & noticed that she had trouble getting to the straw because she was so short. Friedman had an idea & took a few of the straws home. He dropped a screw into the straw & wrapped a piece of dental floss around it, which made impressions in the straw around the thread of the screw. The ridges in the straw made it flexible. By 1939, he was a millionaire from selling his one of a kind invention; the bendy straw.
