Name: The evolution of the coffee cup lid | Small Thing Big Idea, a TED series
Uploaded: 2020-04-06T07:46:07.000Z
Duration: 3 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Transcriber: TED Translators admin Reviewer: Camille Martínez

and there are billions of them out there,

but the amount of design and passion and creativity

that goes into this little disc is remarkable.

The coffee cup lid is a lid for your coffee cup.

You've got lids with a little latch that opens and closes.

You've got ones that are in creative shapes.

Coffee cup lids have their own vocabulary.

People talk about the "peripheral skirts,"

the "press-in dimples," the "fragrance outlets,"

Our society is just more and more mobile.

You can drink coffee anywhere, you don't have the stay in the diner.

It can be in the subway. You can be walking.

The bad part is, it's harder to savor a coffee

And in 1950, this guy named James Reifsnyder

But it didn't have an opening for drinking.

In the '60s there was this huge cultural shift,

where people started drinking coffee on the move.

And 7-Eleven was the first to sell coffee to go.

you could peel back a tab and attach it to the lid itself.

So, more and more people started drinking coffee on the go.

In 1984, a watershed moment in the history of coffee cup lids:

And it is iconic -- you've seen it a million times.

It's designed so that you don't splash your face,

because it's higher than any of the other ones.

so it slightly cools the coffee before it hits your lips.

It's got a small depression in the center for your nose,

so you can really get in there and get maximum aroma.

It's got this tiny air hole that lets the steam out

This is one of those objects where you just don't notice it

So I think the coffee cup lid will just continue to evolve,

and you're going to see a move away from single-use plastic lids

to lids that are a little more sustainable.

And I think that's what these coffee lid engineers are trying to do,

is to make it so that the experience of taking it on the road

is as good as sitting in a restaurant, drinking from a ceramic cup.

Because, you know, coffee is serious business.