Dixie Cups and disease

As a kid, our bathroom was always stocked with Dixie Cups. I don't buy them at my own house though -- wasteful, unnecessary expenditure, etc. There is something appealing about Dixie Cups though, as evidenced by how excited my children get when they encounter them in someone else's bathroom. Smithsonian looks at the public health roots of Dixie Cups:

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.

"The Unnatural History of the Dixie Cup"

(above image from Mighty Jabba's Collection)

• [nmcvaugh]

  Ah Dixie Cups. Made by Georgia-Pacific, a Koch brothers company.

  Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

• [jhex]

  Is that a real dixie cup box?  un opened i’m sure its worth more/something.

  to the holder of the box, could you please scan all sides and upload, i’d really like to spray mount that on a box.

• [SedanChair]

  I wonder if Lawrence Luellen ever imagined that his creation would be used to hold children’s daily dose of mind-altering pills.

• [Michael Leddy]

  Nmcvaugh beat me to it. But you can find a list of various Koch products here:

  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/08/24/895947/-Boycott-Koch-Products

  And in list in poster form: 

  http://i313.photobucket.com/albums/ll398/jgm104/crush_koch-01.png

• [penguinchris]

  I’m familiar with the concept of basins of water for communal use, but never made the connection between those (now extinct) and modern water coolers (I mean, it’s not like I ever thought about it). Didn’t realize you’d find communal basins in public places since you don’t really find water coolers there now (water fountain technology presumably advancing to make up the difference).

  I once had a layover in Taiwan and the airport there had a neat electric water cooler (and heater) without a visible tank that dispensed your water into cone-shaped paper cups. I was desperately looking for a water fountain and initially dismissed the water cooler and walked by without investigating because I assumed it would be coin-operated for some reason (the control panel looked really complicated so I figured it wouldn’t be free I guess) and I didn’t have any local currency.

  I couldn’t find a regular water fountain so I went back to look at the water cooler and it was free. Using it brought a smile to my face – largely because of its over-complicated control panel – and I’d guess they have those instead of regular water fountains for sanitary/health reasons. I think a middle-ground solution is probably best though, like those water fountains that are designed to only dispense into bottles which are starting to pop up (often on university campuses). Although I guess most people in an airport wouldn’t have a bottle to use.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  This Lynchian ad was the one that got the plastic cup out of our bathroom.  It’s quite nauseating.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyITOE_ZhZY