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)
